Whatever I may have dreamed my days would look like once both of my kids were in school, it’s safe to say that the reality has not immediately matched that vision. Rather than spending the last several weeks cozied up with my computer, sipping tea and finally finishing this manuscript I started last year, I’ve mostly been scrambling to deal with all the myriad things around the house that have suddenly and inconveniently become urgent. Or with fulfilling the role of nurse to a seemingly endless carousel of kids with sniffly noses and persistent stomach bugs.
But now that I’ve answered all the emails and our immune systems appear to have reached a new, stronger equilibrium, I’m hoping to start making some progress on my writing goals for the year. Or rather, I’d like to actually set some writing goals and then begin trying to achieve them.
I sat down today with my calendar to do that and suddenly came to the realization that there’s only a little over a week left in October. So I added “Decide on kids’ Halloween costumes” to this week’s to-do list and tried to wrap my mind around the fact that another month has somehow slipped by. That’s when I decided to, once again, attempt NaNoWriMo.
I had kind of thought I was done with NaNoWriMo, namely because I’ve accepted that November isn’t usually a great time for me to take on big word count goals. It’s an especially busy month for our family because in addition to Thanksgiving there are birthdays to celebrate, as well as our wedding anniversary. I’ve signed up many times over the years, each time glowing with bright-eyed optimism, but I’ve only ever actually hit the 50K word goal twice, and both times the resulting word salads were…not excellent. (Fun fact, I was working on the same project both of those times, with five years between the two attempts. And now, after many years of beating that dead horse, that project has been shelved.) Last year I thought I actually had a chance because my youngest was in preschool four mornings a week, so maybe I would have time to write that much. But the project I was working on began to fall flat, and then life got complicated, so I closed out that month with a paltry 7600 words.
And yet, despite my dismal track record, I’m signing up again this year for the fifth time. There are several reasons I’m maintaining hope that it will go well. The first is that both of my kids are finally in school full time. I have (in theory) more time to write than I ever have. If I can just get my butt in the chair, I should be able to do it. The second reason is that I won’t be starting from scratch. The project I hope to complete is already clocking in at around 47K words, so with an additional 50K I could actually finish it and it would be another typical-for-me, over-long first draft…provided all those new words move the story forward so it can come to a coherent end.
Finally, and one of the most helpful parts of NaNoWriMo for a recovering perfectionist like me, is that I’m at the point in this project where the remaining unwritten scenes are not so clearly outlined, and I know that writing them is going to be messy as I attempt to unearth what I need from them. I’m hoping that being accountable to a word count goal will give me the push I need to just pinch my nose and get that cringey first draft down on the page. Then I’ll be able to look forward to the real fun of polishing it later.
So here goes nothing. Will I make my goal of 50K new words next month? And if I do, will that translate to a completed draft? Or will this be another in a long string of NaNoWriMo crash-and-burns? Tune back in December 1st to find out.