Friday Forays in Fiction: NaNo Finish

Joy Renee
author of
Occupy Hope

When I finish gagging I might find something worth saying about this.....

I'm afraid to add anything to the image as I'm still feeling so conflicted.  Mostly negative.

I suppose it is fatigue for the most part.  But it my aversion to the mess and now I have nine of them.

Will that stop me from doing NaNo again next year?

I very much doubt it.

Positives:

A)  I finished in spite of this being the first time I had to fit it into a regular life where others were counting on me as I spent most of the month at my Mom's in Longview helping my sister who is her caregiver.  And Thanksgiving week I lost 4 full days (re writing) to travel and cleaning and repair chores at my house that my sister was helping me with.

All previous years since 2004 I was able to hole up in my room at my in-law's home where I was usually holed up anyway and spend any of the hours of the day except 5-7pm which was dinner and kitchen cleanup on anything I wanted.  My tendency was to fiddle at NaNo until mid month and end up still needing 30K or better with 10 days left.

I knew that would not work under the circumstances I was faced with this year so I set my mind to doing the steady plod instead of a series of sprints.  I credit the work I've been doing with ROW80 since April for preparing me for this endeavor and this success.

B) Also because of ROW80 I've got a protocol in place to prevent this 9th NaNo mess from sinking into the quagmire of my electronic files.

C) Um I thought there was a C point when I started but can't think what it was now.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that somewhere in that mess that makes me want to gag right now are some things I'm going to be grateful for when I go back in to clean up the file.

But that won't be until after the new year.


The next three weeks are going to be all about that Secret Santa crochet project--the crafter's tote--that has to be done before Christmas and which is so woefully behind I will now have to treat it like a full time job giving it 6 to 10 hour days until finished.  Starting tonight.

Lucky for my fiction endeavors tho--and also thanks to ROW80--crocheting has become intricately tied in to dreaming the story world with note taking materials near by so it will be a lot like NaNo with less word count and less focus on one story.  I will be dedicating one to two hours each day to my fiction and the rest to fiction fixes on Netflix and audio books both of which I gave up for NaNo.