I had a great writing night tonight. I finished the day with 2229 words to bring my NaNoWriMo total to 55,025 words. I also finished the first draft of one of my short stories which I am really happy about.
Unfortunately, the night finished with a bit of a sour note.
Without going into any details, I was accused (in jest or not it was still an accusation) of being anti-social because I haven’t attended any meet-ups the past two years. I thought about that trying to understand if the accusations were valid or not.
I thought about my several recurring weekly commitments that essentially eliminate my availability Monday – Thursday. Monday is often a meet up day as, I believe is Wednesday so I can’t help those. This week there is a Saturday meet up from 1PM to 1AM. I have a Children’s Book Fair and Conference I have volunteered to help at from 10AM to 4PM. That kills 3 hours of the 12.
Then I have to pick my daughter up from work and get ready for the office Christmas party that goes from 6:30PM until ???. That pretty much eliminates the rest of the 12 hours. Sure I could TRY to get half an hour or so in between, but the meeting place is almost 20 Km from where I live. Just looking at the time, I don’t see how I can make it.
Am I making excuses? I don’t think so.
So what is the problem? Quite honestly, I have quit taking anything else on because I simply can’t add any more to my schedule. I would love to go and meet all the people I have met virtually, but I just can’t.
Does that make me anti-social? I hope not. I know it has made some of my NaNo friends angry. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything to fix it short of making someone else mad at me.
So I am essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place. So, who do I leave angry? My virtual friends or my family who I live with. If I am forced to make a choice, guess who it will have to be.
I wasn’t able to get writing as soon as I had hoped, because I had the pleasure of interviewing Jaym Gates and Erika Holt for my podcast “Get Published”. They are the editors responsible for the new Zombie Erotica anthology, “Rigor Amortis”.
For those of you who know me, you know that I LOVE to talk about writing. It is one of my favourite things to do and a great benefit of doing the podcast. I have to say, talking to them was awesome. I didn’t want the conversation to end.
Unfortunately, I have short stories to finish so I had to sign off after 90 minutes of discussion and interview. That didn’t leave me much time to work on my writing, but I have made some changes to my one short story. I realized that I didn’t have enough future technology in it. Since the story is set in the near future (approximately 100 years from now) it needs to have some distinct changes to the way things are done and understood. I know the first iteration doesn’t have enough of that.
So I’ve started adding more technology which is adding more flavour to the story and also had the fringe benefit of getting me going to the ending.
I think I know how it needs to end now which is awesome. So, I think I’m back on track.
I was able to write a total of 780 words today. Far below the 1,667 suggested daily but since I’ve already hit 50,000 words, I’m not worrying about that too much. I just hope I have a big writing weekend.
NaNoWriMo total to date: 52,796 words.
If you were watching for my update yesterday evening you are probably wondering what happened. Did I forget?
In actuality, I made a conscious decision not to write yesterday. Over the past several weeks I have been staying up well past my bedtime to write and it was definitely catching up with me. So, instead of writing in the evening after everything was done for the day, I decided to go to bed early.
I don’t think it was a waste of time either. I’ve noticed that my creativity hasn’t quite been as high over the last couple weeks as it has previously. I’m hoping that by having a little extra sleep and a writing break of a day, that will improve. This is an important time right now. I have to come up with two endings and they both need to be good.
So there you have it. Not forgotten. I just took a break.
See you later tonight.
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