Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

The final week of this year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has been a mixed bag. Overall, I have to say I’m pleased with the experiment. Using NaNoWriMo as a way to simply increase my productivity has proved a much better approach (for me) than setting some unrealistic (for me) word-count goal.

In my circle, most of my friends have had a successful time of it as well. Stories have been written, poems set down, and one person actually met her 50k word-count goal. (I envy her the ability to write so swiftly.) For all of us, though, success was greatly aided by the setting of reasonable expectations.

Personally, my expectations for this final stretch of NNWM2019 are exceptionally low. I merely want to write during this period; no word-count associated with it, no other metrics: just nib on paper.

The first challenge for this week is, of course, Thanksgiving Day, and all the preparations, gatherings, and follow-on activities that come with it. Luckily, I’m not cooking the feast this year. We’re going to spend it with some of our adoptive fam, and the only thing I have to do is make baklava. In addition, this weekend we will also be performing the switchover from November’s holiday to December’s, which means pulling the tree out from storage and decorating various doors, tables, and railings. So, there’s about five days to subtract from writing time.

However, I’ve actually met my goal already, and though I don’t reckon I’ll get a whole lot of writing done during the remainder of the holiday week, I know I will get some writing done, and that’s a definite improvement over my performance for this time last year.

In the main, the result I wanted was to reboot my stalled inner writer, bring him back into the light of day, and put a goddamned pen in his hand. I wanted to be thinking about my novel-in-progress more often than I have, because it is in that low-level background cogitation, that percolation of ideas wherein I meld the memory of what I’ve written with what I want to come next, that I begin to think like a writer.

Moreover, now I know that I will actually finish this book, because for a while there, I really wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure that I could break through the malaise that had infected my writing habits. This book, in this new genre, would have been a challenge for me all on its own, without the additional salvos life has lobbed in over the past few years.

NNWM2019 has reminded me, though, that I don’t have to write fast; I just have to be consistent. Write a page a day, and in a year you have a novel. It really is that simple. And that difficult. But I’m back on the (relatively) straight and narrow, and the progress shall continue.

Onward.

k