NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month.

I participated last year. It was difficult to push yourself so hard, but it was good. Why was it good? Because you HAD to push yourself to write 50,000 words in one month.

I like to write. I want to write more. Somehow this blog and my other writing has taken the place of the journal I used to keep, and that's okay. But my more creative side has been put on the wayside for a number of years. That's par for the course when you work full-time, have a child, have a husband, etc. There are tradeoffs in life, and in the end I'm very grateful because I still get the opportunity to pursue much of what I want to pursue. Things would be different if I had a less supportive husband or I had 8 kids.

In the past, when I have attempted to write fiction, I get to a decent 30-50 pages, and I lose momentum so I put it down. For months, for years it just sits. Anyway, when I get enough momentum again, I have to read all the pages I wrote and try to get into that mindset. It's easy to lose that mindset and very difficult to get back into it.

That's why I like NaNoWriMo. You don't put down your writing long enough to forget. You may forget the specific scene you're in the middle of writing, but you don't forget the overall mission you're on.

There are so many entries I want to do here in the next few weeks (since I've been feeling like I've let this blog slide a bit), but at the same time I'm excited for NaNoWriMo. I have been trying to come up with ideas for NaNoWriMo, but most of my ideas centered around one theme & I suppose I felt boxed into a corner because I couldn't fully develop it. Last night, though, I had an unrelated thought path in my brain, and I realized that it could be a very good NaNoWriMo path. It will push me, though, in ways I don't want to be pushed but probably be well-served in being pushed.