All right, so we’re nineteen days in and here’s the biggest takeaway I’ve learned so far: NaNo is a jealous and vengeful god. If you ever want to have a relationship with something that does not give a damn about the way you feel, I encourage you to participate in NaNoWriMo.
Don’t get me wrong, the people involved are great, and it’s the support and camaraderie that suckers us in year after year and convinces us that we’re having fun in this collective misery. And I think we are having fun, at least most of us are, but I can’t help but wonder if we’re not the best judges of what constitutes a good time.
You know how when you’re really tired even the lamest joke can sound funny?
I think that’s where a lot of us are right now. We’re teetering on the brink of exhaustion, but it’s a shared experience, so that makes it somehow better. I, for one, have only hazy memories of the previous eighteen days. But I also get a general sense of warmth when I try to recall this month, so I’m sure I’ll be on board again when next November rolls around.
Continuing in this same vein, I figured out the true reason I failed last year. I allowed myself to sleep.
That has been corrected, as I’m sure this rambling post and my novel pages indicate. And even though I’m a little behind on word count, I am still confident and within striking distance of getting caught up again.
I will not let NaNo defeat me.
It may take away my (social) life, my freedom, and my concern about whether my children are wearing mismatched clothes to school every day, but I will continue to fight, because deep down I know that my kids are young and they will recover from these emotional scars and I am too old to care about what the mompetitors think.
Ha! It’s not like I see them anyway. That would require leaving my house.
But seriously people, if you’re making this journey with us, keep your chin up and your fingers on the keyboard. The trail doesn’t go on for that much longer, and when we reach the other side, we can share a drink and a meal and swap stories about events we don’t quite remember.
Write on!
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