Slowing Down on NaNo? Same.
Hello everyone! It’s been a very strange week for me. Work’s been super slow, COVID cases are rising (as is my anxiety about them), and we’ve all been debating whether or not to risk Thanksgiving festivities, which is a huge bummer for me since it’s my favorite holiday. Thinking about not being able to see my family and eat all the food makes me sad, but so does thinking about not being able to do so in the future because we risked it this year. Needless to say, it’s been a stressful week!
As you can imagine, all this anxiety and stress has affected my National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNo) progress. The hot start I had the first week of November has slowly dwindled, and now that we’re approaching the third week, I’ve seen my word count line on the website’s graph slowly but surely meet the suggested wordcount the website gives you. Basically, ya girl has had trouble staying ahead!
While I hit the 25,000 word halfway point on Saturday night, I noticed that I had not really progressed my story forward as fast as I thought I would. Luke and the rest of his bandmates haven’t even made it to Los Angeles yet, and I’m halfway through the month! I realized that Luke and Stefan’s story might be longer than the 50,000 wordcount NaNo caps at. I didn’t realize just how huge their story actually would be. It makes sense to me now, since it does take place over eight years…But I was so confident I’d write the entire story in 30 days, no problem!
Knowing that I will be writing beyond November 30th has me both happy and nervous. Happy because I genuinely love Luke’s story, and I know I’ll love Stefan’s once I get to writing from his point of view (if I ever do; Luke’s point of view might be the only POV we get just because it’s been fun to write a quiet character like him). Nervous because I don’t know if I’ll be able to conquer the scale of the story like I want to.
Of course, I want to be able to share this story with everyone, so I think that will motivate me to get the first draft finished! I even set up a Ko-fi so that if people wanted to help me fund the finished book, they could. I’ve been slowly collecting my change from when I work for both my tattoo fund and now my future self-publishing journey. If there’s one thing I want to be able to do, it’s share my work on a physical scale. This blog is one way to get my voice out there, but one of my biggest dreams has been to be published. Why not make it happen myself?
So, I fully plan on getting this story finished. One way to get it done is knowing that I’ll have slow times where it’ll be hard to get the words on the page. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to only write one scene for the day sometimes. Every day can’t be a 10,000 word day!
As for the stressors in my life, I plan on just doing what I usually do: Evaluate the situation and change what I need to in order to get back to having a chill time, the ideal way to live.
If you’re doing NaNoWriMo and you are feeling unmotivated or stressed, it’s okay! Writing a little bit every day counts towards the goal. Even if you only write 100 words today, you still wrote something! You’ll have a passionate day and catch up to the finish line just like we all do, as long as we all take care of ourselves and remember that it’s okay to focus on getting out of the funk before putting words on paper!
Thanks for reading, y’all! This NaNo has been a light in the darkness that has been 2020, and I’m happy to be writing a big story again. I hope that you guys will like it too! Once I’m all done, I’m going to be editing the first draft. Maybe I’ll see if some of you loyal readers would like to help me with the editing process? We’ll see what happens…!
In the meantime, follow me on Twitter to keep up with the day to day life of yours truly (and for future blog updates). I’ll see you here next week!!
