I have been in a funk these past couple of weeks. I have been busy. Frankly, I am always busy. I’m one half of a team raising two boys, I’m in my third year teaching and once again I am teaching a brand new curriculum (science!), and all of the things that go along with life. Really, everyone is busy, everyone has about twenty thousand different things going at once – this isn’t some pity party. But, in the past couple of weeks, the business has increased. Report cards, parent teacher interview nights at work, and at home we were remake/remodeling a little bit to get the place ready for an interview my wife had with a day care agency. This has affected my writing output greatly. Now, I signed up for the National Write a Novel Month in October, thinking that this year I will really try to see if I could do it.
And I couldn’t. Wrote 28,000 words in November. Not bad. Not enough though. And for the past few days, I have been in a funk, watching November come to an end, like the last few ounces of bathwater, slowly trickling away. The days passed, and my word count did not increase. And that is when it hit me; NaNoWriMo is not for me.
For many of the people, it is more of a community activity. There are several events that take place during the month, writing sessions, movies, parties, things of that nature. Each and every one of this events was something I could not attend. The timing just wasn’t there. And, while it is interesting to get into conversations on the online forums, they really were not an effective way to make friends and influence people. They were very slow most of the time, and it always felt odd to me, being at the computer, wasting time while pages loaded, time I should have been writing.
And then, the days when I could write, well, there is nothing like a 50,000 word deadline hanging over your head to make 5,000 words in two days seem pitiful. Instead of enjoying watching the word count go up, I despaired. And grew frustrated. Lots of people writing this seem to do it for a lark, just for fun. Although I am not a serious novelist, I hope to be published some day. This just did not help. It was fun, and it pushed me for a while, but, in the end, it was not worth it.
