NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. That’s National Novel Writing Month, for the uncultured swine uninitiated. For most of my writerly friends, today is a time of fierce planning and preparation (because procrastination is an almost universal writer trait), excitement, and a little bit of fear.
For me, though, today is just another Thursday. Yes, it also happens to be Halloween, but I’ve got homework to do, and work in the morning. I need sleep.
I’ll be honest– my experience with NaNo has never been pretty. Even the one year I won… Holly Lisle has a nice succinct phrase for what it’s like for me trying to do NaNo, and that is “writing to failure”. That’s essentially writing so much to the point it isn’t fun anymore, it’s just work; grueling, awful, headache-inducing work. I’m not comfortable writing upwards of 1500 words a day, every day, for a freaking month. And that goes doubly for trying to do 2500 words a day just to get weekends off.
This is why I was having long periods of “nope, fuck that” whenever I thought about writing.
But I know there are a lot of people who write more/faster than me, who enjoy the rush, who actually get something possibly useable out of it. People who actually have fun with it. To those people, I say good luck. If you’re thinking about participating, do it. I’m not the kind of guy to shit on someone else’s parade just because I don’t like it.
But NaNo is just not for me. I have accepted this, and I will move on.
Meilo Zaborowski: Author 