The NaNo Diaries: "Struggling"

November 10, 2013

Yesterday was the day of marathon writing. Even though I completely failed to reach my goal, I still wrote quite a bit. It wasn't all that difficult, either. I mean, I wrote 6.5K words yesterday just for NaNoWriMo-that's not including the writing I did for all of my other stories. Yet I still feel disappointed in myself. I'm "struggling" without really struggling.

I suppose I should be happy about where I'm at in my writing, however. I have over 20K words at this point and still have many ideas to put together. This is no masterpiece, I'm sure of it, but it has potential. I enjoy writing it, and that's what matters.

The good news is that inspiration is coming from everywhere. Here's an example of that. It seems like all of a sudden my friends are all speaking about ravens and writing desks and their similarities. Of course, I am writing a story where the theme of ravens is a pretty important one. (You don't name a story Raven Song and then not involve any ravens.) I integrated it into my story. I made a whole new scene up. And it worked.

The thing about November is that it's like a massive month of many things. NaNoWriMo was my main focus yesterday, but there's so many other things going on that I'm a bit afraid the rest of my writing is just going to have to suffer because of it. There's the obvious things (aka Thanksgiving and schoolwork) and then there's the not-so-obvious things.

The fact of the matter is, I started an exercise program at the beginning of this month. It's a six week long thing, which means I will be recreating my body throughout the month of November. I've been getting progress even though it's only a been a bit over a week. That makes me happy.

But then there's also auditions for my musical coming up at school. Of course, I am petrified. I have no clue how this is going to go. I'm going to try my best as always...but sometimes your best just isn't enough. I've gone through that enough to realize that much at least.

-Rain