Apparently November is NaNoWriMo…. National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 book by the end of the month. Some have serious qualms and scream, “Impossible!!” Others boast sure…. Easy Peasy. I’ve never set a deadline for myself so I have no idea what category I’d fall into, so I’m going to try.
Yup... kids, house, work, libido... my challenges
And I’m going to cheat. I’m going to count the words I put down in the blogs for the month. Hahaha!! And I’ve got the plots outlined out for almost 3 books to choose from so that might be cheating a bit also. lol I’m hoping to fall into the Easy Peasy category. No guarantee on the QUALITY though!!
So I finally get around to starting all this. I take one of my Wednesday’s off already a week into November and I set aside 3 hours to write. Chores & errands are done, music is on and the computer is humming. And I manage to write over 2500 words in that 3 hours. The scenes just flow out of me, expanding as I go and by the end of the day the only reason I stopped (other than running out of alone time) was due to the need to plot out a little of the alternative world I created in order to set the base for our male main character. And THAT… was going to take a bit of research.
And I was energized! I was motivated. I had the website in my browser for gathering the bits that inspired me from mythology to mesh together into letting my imagination speculate from there into 2,000 years of development to the now. I was ready! And I needed this distraction from my conflicting feelings about my own attractiveness. I’ll admit it I was thrilled to be writing again.
And then I got a call from my brother, that evening, that my 72 year old, very healthy father had a major stroke and was in the hospital. He said I didn’t need to come to the hospital as he’d just been admitted and they were working on him. He’d call if he knew more. Click.
And the muse just kind of sputters in frustration. “Hard to compete with THAT!” she grumbles and settles back to wait. Again. And I try to go to sleep. All the worries about kids, money, work, etc that writing had held at bay now crowd back into my consciousness trying to compete with the knowledge that my seemingly healthy father might be dead when I woke up. Personally I felt very much like Spock. “Thank you for the information, how is this going to effect my future, let me know if he lives please.” This is how my mind handles things it cannot control or fix.
Needless to say I slept very little. But as the days of this went on I forced myself to do the research to continue my story. One day I’ll have time again to try to pick this up and I want to be ready. Maybe December will be MY “NaNoWriMo” this year.
And so none of you are kept in suspense since I’m sometimes months late on a blog’s actual happened date I’ll just say I’ll write up a full blog on my Dad’s stroke & post it later. But he survived the stroke. He spent many stressful days at the local hospital stabilizing before being moved to Kaiser Sunset.