November Got By Me

Just like the title says, November got by me.

Ordinarily, I'd complain profusely about the myriad reasons, both known and unknown, as to why a whole month went by without so much as a one word post.

Fear not, I'll not complain. I have a reason. One to which I can attribute all of my blogging failures during the month of November. That reason is something that I discovered sometime in October, and is called National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind the title is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words during the 30 days of November. Now, I've been in the process of something that I now realize to be a novel--or, at the very least, novel-esque--for the last year and a half or so (and reaching approximately 110,000 words).

When I heard about this challenge, I realized that I just about couldn't pass it up. It seemed like it would be quite an achievement to actually accomplish, but it served a couple of other purposes for me, as well. First and foremost, it served as a distraction from my sole fictional focus over the past 18 months. Something new to think about. Maybe it's a mistake to take that kind of a break from a project that epic, but I thought, and continue to think, that it was the right decision.

The second reason that I thought the project would be so worthwhile, was the fact that my writing habits aren't particularly regular. For a while I had been averaging 2 or 3 times a week, but never with much consistency over time (obviously 110,00 words over 18 months is not equal to 50,000 in 1). I thought that the challenge could potentially serve as a kind of training--get in the habit of writing at least something every day. To reach that many words in 30 days, you have to average 1,667 words per day. I was silly enough to keep track of my word count in a spreadsheet, so I know how many words I wrote each day. I'll tell you plainly that I missed only one day. It was the day that I had to go straight from work to the family Thanksgiving (celebrated, not actual), and from there to a party, then back home to be in bed and ready for the next day, bright and early in the darkness of 4:30 a.m.

Other than that singular day, I wrote anywhere from my low of 300 or so, to my high of over 5,000. The high was the last day I did any writing, which was the 29th. I'd met my quota for the day, but I knew where the story needed to go from there, and something in me just wanted to get it finished. So I did.

And that's why I don't have a problem with having missed writing anything on either of the blogs I have. Is it true that I probably could have found the time to post? Yes, it probably is. That doesn't matter though. Not right now. Not to me.

I'm less than a week into December, and here I am, writing a new post. So there. Take that. I think that after I post this (which will be soon), that I will attempt to continue writing up the trip that I took in September. It's about time I finished up with that. A ridiculous note: I actually had hoped to finish writing that up within a day or two of being home. Ha ha, not so much.

But that's how it is, and how it was is how it's going to be.