Resignation

Okay, so National Novel Writing Month isn't technically quite over yet. But I'm with three days (well, two considering how late I'm writing this) left, both of them workdays I'm just not going to be able to hit the 50k mark so I'm officially dropping out now to stop stressing about it. It was a fun experience, and I think I learned a bit about myself and my writing style. I plan on finishing out the novel I started, but I need a break, seriously. Even any day that I didn't write anything wasn't a break because I could feel myself getting further behind and with other things going on that part of it wasn't a pleasant portion of the whole crazy thing.

Thirty-two Thousand, Seven hundred and Ninety-seven.

So what went wrong? A big thing was the weekdays. My current work schedule is sort of annoyingly in between day and night shifts, so I have a few hours before work and a few hours after work. Splitting up my freetime into two chunks didn't help me get much done on days I had to work. I did pretty well on the weekends that I didn't have anything else planned, but there's a fairly recent and entirely too attractive addition to my social life for me to be able to stay at the computer every weekend for a whole month so that didn't work. I also had two nasty illnesses this month, one of them during this final 4-day weekend where I'd hoped to do 5000 words per day. That was essentially the last nail in the coffin. We file these concerns away here for next year, should I decide to be a crazy novelist again.

In the meantime, there are other things I want to write. And movies to watch and video games to play, for that matter. For anyone who hasn't done NaNoWriMo, I do suggest giving it at try.