#NaNoWriMo17

In a strange turn of events, I’m actually participating in NaNo this year. For the uninitiated, that’s National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as November, when people sacrifice their lives to crank out 50,000 words of novel. In 30 days.

I’m doing a modified challenge and talk about the details over at Anxiety Ink.

The last time I participated, years and years ago, I realized NaNo wasn’t for me. Writing for speed made me break my stories in horrible, often irreparable ways. (At least, they weren’t worth the cost to fix.)

But the writing process, for most of us, is a thing constantly in flux. What we need can change from year to year, project to project, or day to day. I don’t know if that word count demand would still leave me with broken stories.

I won’t find out this year. My fundamental goal in participating this year is to figure out how to write productively with an infant. Right now, she’s asleep on my chest as I type around her, and she doesn’t seem to mind. I’d put her down and save myself the discomfort, but then she’d be awake within five minutes and demanding food within ten.

She has no appreciated today’s attempts to put her down, rather than letting her sleep in my arms. And quite honestly, I don’t want to put her down; she’s growing so quickly and I don’t want to miss a single snuggly baby moment.

November has not helped me out, so far. Then again, November usually ends up being a weird, chaotic, overfull sort of month. Today was the first I could even attempt to experiment with setting her down more frequently.

I’d intended daily prompts. How many have I done? Exactly none. (Though blog posts like this count towards the word count I’m tracking on the NaNo site, and I’ve made a fair dent this evening in getting details out of the way so I’ll be able to sit down and work on some prompts.)

Some novel work might make its way in, but I wanted to allow myself to focus on figuring out the routine – my new process, now that I have a tiny human depending on me for everything.

The first week of November is nearly gone. I have written more today in two hours than the last four days combined, and I’m not done yet.

It’s a good feeling, to combat the creeping sense of failure that has been growing.

Wish me luck!