{"id":3918,"date":"2012-11-13T09:57:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T16:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=3918"},"modified":"2025-11-02T17:22:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T00:22:56","slug":"national-novel-writing-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=3918","title":{"rendered":"National Novel Writing Month"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently November is NaNoWriMo&#8230;. National Novel Writing Month.\u00a0 The goal is to write a 50,000 book by the end of the month.\u00a0 Some have serious qualms and scream, &#8220;Impossible!!&#8221;\u00a0 Others boast sure&#8230;. Easy Peasy.\u00a0\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never set a deadline for myself so I have no idea what category I&#8217;d fall into, so I&#8217;m going to try.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3934\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?attachment_id=3934\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-3934\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3934\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3934\" title=\"four-obstacles-to-writing\" src=\"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/four-obstacles-to-writing.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"306\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/four-obstacles-to-writing.jpg 510w, http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/four-obstacles-to-writing-150x90.jpg 150w, http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/four-obstacles-to-writing-300x180.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-3934\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yup... kids, house, work, libido... my challenges<\/p><\/div>\n<p>And I&#8217;m going to cheat.\u00a0 I&#8217;m going to count the words I put down in the blogs for the month. \u00a0 Hahaha!!\u00a0\u00a0 And I&#8217;ve got the plots outlined out for almost 3 books to choose from so that might be cheating a bit also. lol\u00a0 I&#8217;m hoping to fall\u00a0 into the Easy Peasy category.\u00a0 No guarantee on the QUALITY though!!<\/p>\n<p>So I finally get around to starting all this.\u00a0 I take one of my Wednesday&#8217;s off already a week into November and I set aside 3 hours to write.\u00a0 Chores &amp; errands are done, music is on and the computer is humming.\u00a0 And I manage to write over 2500 words in that 3 hours.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And THAT&#8230; was going to take a bit of research.<\/p>\n<p>And I was energized!\u00a0 I was motivated.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was ready!\u00a0 And I needed this distraction from my conflicting feelings about my own attractiveness.\u00a0\u00a0 I&#8217;ll admit it I was thrilled to be writing again.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 He said I didn&#8217;t need to come to the hospital as he&#8217;d just been admitted and they were working on him.\u00a0 He&#8217;d call if he knew more.\u00a0\u00a0 Click.<\/p>\n<p>And the muse just kind of sputters in frustration.\u00a0\u00a0 &#8220;Hard to compete with THAT!&#8221; she grumbles and settles back to wait.\u00a0\u00a0 Again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I try to go to sleep.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Personally I felt very much like Spock.\u00a0\u00a0 &#8220;Thank you for the information, how is this going to effect my future, let me know if he lives please.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 This is how my mind handles things it cannot control or fix.<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say I slept very little.\u00a0 But as the days of this went on I forced myself to do the research to continue my story.\u00a0 One day I&#8217;ll have time again to try to pick this up and I want to be ready.\u00a0 Maybe December will be MY &#8220;NaNoWriMo&#8221; this year.<\/p>\n<p><em>And so none of you are kept in suspense since I&#8217;m sometimes months late on a blog&#8217;s actual happened date I&#8217;ll just say I&#8217;ll write up a full blog on my Dad&#8217;s stroke &amp; post it later.\u00a0 But he survived the stroke.\u00a0 He spent many stressful days at the local hospital stabilizing before being moved to Kaiser Sunset.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently November is NaNoWriMo&#8230;. National Novel Writing Month.\u00a0 The goal is to write a 50,000 book by the end of the month.\u00a0 Some have serious qualms and scream, &#8220;Impossible!!&#8221;\u00a0 Others boast sure&#8230;. Easy Peasy.\u00a0\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never set a deadline for &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=3918\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3936,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918\/revisions\/3936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}