I did NaNoWriMo last year. That’s right. From November 1st through November 30th, 2016, I wrote every day and finished 50,000 words by the end of the month. It was a real accomplishment. Mostly because that Draft Zero is now at Draft Three and I am editing and posting it, chapter by chapter, on Wattpad as we speak.
November 2017, is a mere one hour and fifty minutes away, and I am still undecided whether to push for the next 50,000 words.
On the one hand –I want to. Badly. It is profoundly fulfilling to put pen to paper every, single day and come out with, well, maybe not a finished product, but a start to something. And this year, that start will be a third novel for Dōjini. My enthusiasm for what is next is endless.
But there is that other hand. It takes time. 3 hours a day, to be somewhat exact. To complete my 1,667 words per day last year, I woke at 5:30 almost every morning to get at least 30 -60 minutes of writing in before the kids woke up. I wrote for another 30 -45 minutes on my lunch hour as often as I could. I tried to finish the remaining word count at night after the kids were asleep. Ultimately, I caught up, or tried to get ahead, every weekend.
With one hundred and three minutes left to decide, the time commitment feels more daunting this year. My personal life –as in my kids, my husbands’ new job, our pending move out of state, and work –feels like an insurmountable obstacle to that three hours a day. What if I fail? I don’t get there? I come out with nothing?
I guess it won’t matter much. I would feel more upset by the idea of not moving forward on this next story.
“The time has come. The time is now.” – Who said that?! Anyways, the time will come. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours I will be putting pen to paper. NaNoWriMo – here I come.