Anticipation

I like how the weekend always completely kills my blog writing schedule. All during the week, I'm making sure that I'm posting every day, being on top of things, and then all of a sudden, Thursday rolls around and I'm like "sweet, tomorrow's Friday," and for some reason, that sends a signal to my brain that it's okay to turn off, even though it's really not, since I still should be doing work on Thursday and Friday. And inevitably, the "brain shutdown state" persists until Sunday night rolls around and I realize that I'm going to fall behind if I don't write something, so I make sure to get back on task and keep up with my consistency, while telling myself not to let it happen in the future, even though it's happened almost every week for the past month.

What can I say, it's a vicious cycle.

At the moment, I'm thinking about the fact that this is the last week in October, which means that it's very nearly November, which means that it's time, once again, for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Basically, the goal is to write an entire novel, 60,000 words (or so, I can't quite remember what the exact number is) in 30 days. It sounds totally crazy, but the idea is that by having such a crazy pace, you can't stop to think about whether or not what you're writing is any good, you just have to keep writing, writing, writing! And at the end of it, you'll have learned a lot about making a good writing schedule and overcoming hangups and other cool things. And you'll have a manuscript completed, albeit of dubious quality.

I think that the entire concept is a really cool idea, but I guess the problem I've had in the past is that November really is a bad month for this kind of project, in my opinion. It's a really busy time for students, who are feeling the crunch as the semester draws ever closer to its conclusion. If you work retail, you're feeling the oncoming burn of holiday hours, as we begin the long crawl into the frenzy that is the holiday shopping season. No matter who you are, November is a busy month.

I really do think that something early or mid-summer would be better for this kind of endeavor, because really, who has things going on in June, unless you're taking a vacation?

Regardless, I'll give it a shot this year; as I said, I think it's a cool idea and I had a really good time with it last year. I actually got pretty far in the story, had something like two solid weeks of working on my project until, rather ironically, I went to a convention to receive an award for a short story I'd written, and spending the whole weekend at the con totally killed my writing schedule, so that by the time I thought about the work again, I was hopelessly behind.

I've got a few ideas kicking around in my head about what I want to write about, although nothing too solid. I found that if I tried to prepare some notes or outlines before I began, I ended up straying too far away from the goal about quantity over quality which slowed me down. So this time around, I'm going to think about what I went to do, ferment some ideas, and hopefully hit the ground running on November 1st. I don't quite know how this'll go since I still have my commitment to this blog; my hope is that by working on a novel again, I'll have more thoughts and insight about writing to reflect on in this space. But no matter how you look at it, this is going to be an ambitious undertaking.

I'm excited, though, if only that it's been a while since I worked on my fiction and I'm very interested to get back to that, given that it's what I'm particularly passionate about.