Everyone has their own process.

I do it every year, NanoWriMo, and have since 2012, and every year I wind up with a good start on something. Right now, I'm at that point where I have about 20-25K words and I realize I probably am not getting to 50K in the next nine days.  And that's OK. 

As usual, November has been a busy month and it seems to pick up speed once my birthday passes at the mid-point. The last two years my Novembers have been full of travel and family time, as they should be.  Three of the four women in my nuclear family have birthdays in November. And we all have to get in gear if our creative projects for Christmas are going to get finished. Then there are days where D's clinic is closed. The general feeling this time of year is one of slowing down and contemplation.  Fall is often when I start thinking about starting a daily yoga practice, for instance.  And some years I approach it with the same fervor that I start Nano with.

One of the best outcomes for any NanoWriMo participant is that they begin to find their own rhythm and process. For instance, this year I started the process still nursing a book hangover. While I took October off from my fourth novel, in reality I've still been working on marketing and following sales and reviews. So, while the battles with the cover and formatting for the paperback were over, I was still neck deep in watching how the book did and is doing. I did a birthday sale, for instance, and recouped the cost of the ad for said sale. And I am participating in another sale next month, so that requires some attention.

In the meantime, I discovered that I tend to do best when I have multiple projects going; if that were not true, I would not have been able to get the first drafts of those four books I have out done. After all, all of those were completed while I had a day job.  Only the last was given most of my attention in 2018 as I revised and rewrote the draft. 

Last week I found a call for essays that I decided I had to work on; in addition I have multiple reviews I'm working on so I have a heavy reading load. And, I've started thinking about things like how to create an archive on my own site, how to revamp and make available my dissertation, and how to start work on my Octave Thanet project. I know that one of the biggest Nano "mistakes" listed in various essays about how to fail is to lose focus on the one project. The problem is that my brain keeps working on that book while I'm doing other things. If I don't look directly at it all the time, I figure things out about it. My reading informs it, as do my other projects.

So, I am not giving up, but I'm also not freaking out about the fact that once this blog entry is up that I'm more likely to work on that essay that's due mid-December or that I'm likely to spend the late afternoon reading one of the review books in my stack.