Nano Day 16: 28,678 words and a comment on making it past the half way mark

When I went into NanoWriMo this year, I expected it to be hard. I thought that I might get behind in writing, that it would be a struggle to find time to write everyday, or that I would run out of ideas, or suddenly get a block that I just couldn't get by.  There were so many things about writing 50,000 words in a month that seemed tenuous and easily broken. My first novel, which amounted to a little over double the nano month goal, took four years to write and another year of editing to finish properly. I am STILL editing it now. I wasn't sure how writing the sequel, or at least the first 50,000 words, in so little time would go, but I was willing to try. I needed to prove that just because I graduated from school didn't mean I would stop writing. I wasn't going to give up my dreams.

I don't know why but I didn't expect it to go well, and as it turns out I was proved both wrong and right at the same time.

Against all my own odds and expectations, the writing has gone fabulously for setting down such lofty goals for a relatively slow writer. However, life in and of itself completely exceeded any premonition of how much can go wrong in a two week period. It was less a few bad days and more like all of them ganged up on me and mugged me in a dark alley before leaving me for dead.

There is always a lot to be said on "leaving it all at the door" to write. For most of my life I have made a myriad of excuses about why I couldn't write: school, illness, stress, this that and the other thing. There was always something. I have written a lot over the years, and I've been far from idle, but my productivity always depended on a time where there wasn't something else demanding my attention. I've known of Nano for about three years now, and yet never attempted it because I was so sure my college classes were more important. 

Now half way through with my first Nano attempt and I've realized the most important lesson from it I could have. It's the one thing every writer and writing instructor try to tell other writers, and yet for some reason we don't listen. JUST WRITE. It is never that easy, but life never is going to stop. I was an English major with an emphasis in creative writing, what could have been more important than pursuing the passion that led me to that degree in the first place!? 

In these last few weeks I have gone through just as much time consuming stress as I did while at school, but I've still managed to write. I went into Nano determined to win, refusing to allow myself the excuses. I learned that despite it all I could in fact generate large amounts of fiction that, though flawed and in desperate need of eventual editing, is still written out and now there to work with. I have been postponing the sequel to my first book for over a year, and now in two weeks time I have almost 85 pages of a story. 

Life doesn't stop. The tension that permeates my home has not evaporated. My loans from school did not go away. Graduating and getting my diploma was less the easy process it could have been and more a tooth and nail fight to get what I had rightly earned. The stress of having sick animals and taking care of them did not get easier but much much harder. Living across the world from the one I love is as heartbreaking and difficult as you would expect. I am strung out and worn down, sleep deprived, stressed. I miss my best friends and yearn to live on my own. I enjoy being at the library where I am an Assistant Librarian more than I enjoy being home lately. Life is not getting easier. 

But I wrote. Everyday I sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote. Sometimes I worked back to back hours, working until 9pm write my goal and then got up by 7 the next morning to work the day shift the next day. I wrote anyway. I slogged through the shit and I wrote. 

The struggle is still there and is not going away. But now I know. I could lose everything. Life could hit me in every possible way over and over. And I would still always have my writing. Life can't take this story away from me. Even if I lose the words, which with the fickleness of technology is always a possibility, I'd still know I could do it, that I did do it, and if it came down to it I could do it again. 

I am a storyteller, and no matter what I do in life, where I go, what I lose or gain, I have the stories and the words to use them. And that counts for more than I can ever say. 

Keep nano'ing on my friends. I hope the fight to write is going alright for you