All In

I guess you could say that I embarked on this year's NaNoWriMo with an unspoken challenge to myself. It was a notion spawned by an essay written by Benjamin Percy and in it he described writers as conservative, sparing in how they dole out ideas to certain projects, always keeping a stockpile under lock and key, saved for other projects should the time warrant.

I've never been the type of writer who has a such a stockpile, but I've also never tried putting every drop of myself and all of my best material into a story. But with this novel, I thought why not? Thirty days of writing with abandon is just the start to this and writing the first 82,000 words now has left me feeling emptied and that it would take me at least another thirty days to recover. And that's what the past five days of November have felt like, wondering whether or not I could pick this project up again when I haven't even finished it.

But then a glimmer of inspiration came to me yesterday, which indicated to me that my well of ideas have yet to be depleted, that although I felt like I had gone "all in", I still have more to give, and that maybe this is just a brief reprieve before I continue with this project at a more rational pace. So even though the month ended with a bit of a whimper, I am celebrating the process of creating.

And for the wrap-up of the final days of November:

Nov 26-27: I swear after that big push to 80K, I didn't have anything left in me. Took Friday off and even today I don't feel like there's that much fuel left. I may change my mind later tonight, but so far only logged in 1500 words. (81,777 words)

Nov 28: Another Eureka-in-the-bathtub moment… although I doubt I can pull it off, I'm pretty excited to try a little Moliere in Chapter 30, which was feeling rather stale until now. (81,829 words)

Nov 29: Deleted about 2K words and rewrote it so not making the word count progress I hoped, but I'm certainly feeling much better about several weak spots that were troubling me. Still haven't rewritten Chapter 30 because I need to take a detour and read a little Moliere first. (82,009 words)

Nov 30: Without 175,000 writers to draft along side, I'll need to set my own goals so in order to get through the rest of the novel, I'm going to commit to writing at least 1,000 words each day. It's just four new pages but will also give me time to edit as well.

Punchlines
I never knew playing darts was such a dangerous thing.
A hard pointy thing... that you use to score? Oh yeah. Danger.