It's That Time of the Year Again

This is not a drill! I repeat: this is not a drill!

In less than twenty-four hours, it will officially be November 1. You know what that means?

NaNoWriMo will be upon us once more.

I have done zero preparation for it so far. I was hoping to sketch out the plot of at least one story, but I never got around to it. The only thing I’ve done is revisited their website and logged into my account, checking things out from when I visited last year.

Like every year, I’m staring at the upcoming NaNoWriMo season with a feeling of trepidation. As in, why do I keep putting myself through this stress once a month every year? Will I have time to win, let alone write for 2-2.5 hours/day?

But then I remind myself how I managed to win two years ago when I was also a full-time student. Not only did I have a writing class, but I also had an internship to deal with on top of NaNoWriMo. Yet somehow, I still won. Of course, I also remember all those times I sat in my university’s library and cranked out words during the free time I had in-between classes.

I also pushed through two months of writing continuously every day for my Spring Writing Project (SWP), so if I can do that, I can do one month again. Except I usually tried to write at least 1400 words/day, whereas with NaNoWriMo, I have to write at least 1667 words/day.

Speaking of my SWP, I haven’t written any sort of fictional story since then. And I finished that project five and a half month ago already! Time certainly flies.

Therefore, my only plan for NaNoWriMo so far is to employ my usual tactic: Write a bunch of short stories and hope that something eventually sticks. It’s been so long since I wrote something creatively, and I definitely feel like I need a warm-up.

No idea what I’m going to write tomorrow, but nothing works your creative muscles more than improvising on the spot! (At least, that’s what I’m saying to myself to make me feel better.)

Still trying to figure out how to fit in a large chunk of writing every day into my schedule. In years past, I tend to write in the evenings. That worked well for me, except for the fact that I sometimes felt like I was racing against the clock to get those words in before midnight. So now a part of me is thinking about getting up early and write at least 834 words in the morning. Except I’m not much of a morning person, so I’m not sure how exactly I can force myself to wake up earlier.

The other option, though, is to write those 834 words after midnight. After all, it still counts for that day, even if it means I go to bed late. I actually did this strategy during my very first year of NaNoWriMo. (Ah, sophomore year of college. It seems so long ago.)

I guess we’ll all see how everything works out when it ends on December 1.

Also! Speaking of December, just like in past years, I plan to be absent from this blog for the entire month of November. All of my free time will be dedicated to marathon writing.

Therefore, see you next month with whatever’s left of my sanity! (And hopefully I’m not too sleep deprived.)



P.S. Happy Halloween!

^I carved this on a pumpkin yesterday. I didn’t mean for the cheetah to look kinda old and grumpy, lol. Spots are tedious to whittle, by the way.

A Long Road of Writing

Sometime last week, I found myself browsing the “stories” folder on my laptop. I originally clicked on this folder because I was recently thinking about an old story of mine, and I wanted to re-read it for fun. I couldn’t remember when I last read this short story, but I wrote it back in 2012, so I wanted to see how it has held up since its creation.

But after reading that story, I began locating other older short stories that I had written. Stories that were at least four years old. And as I was reading them, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cringe.

For the most part, the plots for these stories were still pretty solid. My issue was with the writing itself – mainly, the grammar. I was cringing so hard at all the dialogue punctuation errors. And even though I had moments where I wrote specific details about the characters' surroundings, I could definitely do a better job at creating a more vivid scene. Also, some of the stories felt too rushed and could use some slowing down in order to let the story breathe.

Of course, once I finished my trip down memory lane, I had to read a short story that I wrote last fall. Sort of like a palate cleanser. What a difference my writing has become.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see improvements in my writing (or anything in general) when I compare them to more recent works, but seeing how they stack up to a piece from multiple years ago made me feel strangely proud of myself. Like I actually have come a long way, despite feeling like I still have a long road ahead of me.

I still haven’t re-read my Spring Writing Project, though. I wanted to wait a couple of months to let the story rest, so I could read it with fresh eyes. But now I’m starting to realize how seldom I revisit old manuscripts. I think it’s mainly because I’m afraid of how terrible it might actually be written, and I don’t want to believe that I spent all those hours writing it as wasted time. (Even though I’m aware that no time is actually wasted when I’m writing – practicing a skill eventually leads to masterpieces.)

And to think, in two weeks, I’ll be participating in my eighth year of NaNoWriMo. I refuse to look back at any of my NaNo projects from 2011-2014. Just thinking about them and how awful the writing might be makes me cringe.

But despite all of the wincing, I will never remove these documents from my computer files. I remember how hard I worked on them at that time. I never delete a story, just in case I might mine its plot for a completely new (and better written) story for a later time.

More often than not, though, these stories simply make me smile. No matter how old I was, I was still making time to write.