NaNoWriMo 2014 - Let's Do This!

I don't blog very much. After you read this post, I hope you understand why.

During the week, my alarm goes off at 5:15 AM. Mornings in my house are a well-oiled machine that involve my 4-year-old daughter out of bed and dressed by 6:30 and my 11-month-old son following by 6:50. The power button is pushed on the coffee maker, the dog's let out, and we're out the door by 7:10 on the nose to allow for the daycare drop to be wrapped up by 7:35 so I can be on time for work at 7:45 (which inevitably never happens, but I aim for 7:50 and do pretty okay with that).

At my day job, I'm one of many serving a pretty intense population of students with multiple learning, behavioral, and emotional needs. I do my best to manage my personal workload while lending a hand to help manage the numerous crises that pop up on a daily basis. It's a busy place until the day ends at 3:45, and then I'm promptly out the door to go back to my other job as mom.

I try to carve time out to work out three times a week after school before it's back to daycare, and then it's dinner time number one (for the little one), playtime, homework time, bath time, and then dinner time number two (for the rest of us). My husband's sort of a VIP in his department and has an admirable work ethic, and is rarely able to get home before 6:30.  I’m on solo duty until that point, but we do try to talk and eat as a family once he gets home. Then there's clean up, lunch to be packed, bottles to be prepped, and coffee to be prepared so that important little power button is all set to be pushed at 6:50 AM the following morning. My daughter has an inordinate amount of energy, and she's literally bouncing and screaming until she finally crashes at 8:30 PM. At that point, I like to at least try to spend a bit of quality time watching mindless TV with my husband before I collapse in a useless pile around 10:00 PM.

And weekends are even busier.

As NaNoWriMo kicks off, and I read the posts from my fab-o fellow Swoon authors and writing buddies alike, I can't help but feel a bit panicked. On Saturday morning, my pallies were up and at 'em, posting about knocking minimum word count out by about 10AM. I mean, I could practically taste my envy (along with the fresh-squeezed orange juice :) of Temple's novel-inspiring mimosa as I prayed for naptime and twenty minutes to myself. It's a terrible feeling to be passionate and inspired...and have so little time within your schedule to BE passionate and inspired.

With my first book, How To Say I Love You Out Loud coming out from Swoon Reads next August, at least I can remind myself that the time I have always somehow found to write is worth it. But, for the record, I've been working on manuscripts since 2005. This means I will have spent an entire decade writing before seeing an actual book come into fruition. And there have been plenty of days, weeks, months, and years when I have questioned, cried about, and concluded that taking this time was in fact not worth it, because I had nothing to prove otherwise. There were plenty of days, weeks, months, and years when I decided I NEEDED to stop writing because I was wasting what little precious time I had, and if there was nothing to show for all these years, I was a fool.

Problem was, every time I decided that, I felt like a little part of myself was curling up and dying, and it made me extremely sad. In the end, I could never bring myself to extinguish it entirely. And somehow...I always found the time to keep writing.

As the first weekend of NaNoWriMo comes to an end, I have to be honest: I don't know if I'll write 50K this month and/or finish a novel. In fact, I doubt I will. And that's okay. I'll have made a dent, I'll have been inspired by others, and hopefully I'll have done a tiny bit of inspiring myself. NaNoWriMo is a wind sprint. It's a tremendous exercise and will develop a certain set of writing muscles. But in the end, finishing a book is more like a marathon of an accomplishment, and there's no deadline for completion.  Any finishing time is commendable, because the finishing is commendable in and of itself.

Some mornings I’ll try to wake up at 4:45 to squeeze in a couple of sprints before the workday starts, some afternoons I’ll swap my physical exercise for creative exercise, some afternoons I’ll break my no-coffee-past-one rule so I can stay up late and squeeze in a few more sprints, and maybe I’ll even use a precious personal day to have an entire 8 hours to devote to writing. My plans will likely change more often than not and someone else’s needs will probably often come before my own desires, but I’ll never regret participating and devoting one month to making a concerted effort to find time to focus on my project.

So if you are a mom in the trenches like me (but a writer at heart), someone who has to work two jobs or third shift to make ends meet (but a writer at heart), a high-powered executive with eighteen hour days (but a writer at heart), someone who has had their own life taken over as you care for a sick/aging/disabled family member (but a writer at heart), a student with a full schedule of classes and exams (but a writer at heart)...never, ever feel guilty, foolish, or stupidly stubborn for always finding the time to write. And don’t even think about feeling badly if you don’t finish by November 30^th – the accomplishment is in the journey, not the polished product. I don't care if you come hobbling over the finish line weeks, months, or years after this round of NaNoWriMo wraps...I'll probably be right there with you, and I’ll be cheering you on at the finish line when you finally type "the end." 

Let’s do work, fellow writers…let’s do work.