National Novel Writing Month approaches. Well, it technically starts today, but I wrote this a week before you’re reading it, so it both approaches AND is here. I had originally planned to do a bunch of preparation for this month, as part of trying to get my creative energy and focus back, but I’ve fallen a bit short of my goals. I AM writing a blog post almost every day, or at least averaging out to six posts in seven days, but I had hoped to start October by writing an extra five hundred words a day in a book project. Which I haven’t done even once.

There are a lot of reasons for that, namely the small choatic elements of my life interferring with my plans and desires, but I do still feel pretty good as I’m looking ahead to writing an average of 1,667 more words per day. I’ve done more intense things before. Like that time I wrote 100,000 words in a month, between my single book project and the start of my daily blog posts back in 2017. I went from doing no writing to doing that much writing, so I think I can go from six to nine hundred words per day to about two thousand. I might not do as many creative posts here, but I will have an even easier time of writing these posts since I’ll always have something to write about.

I guess this counts as a warning, then, that this blog will turn from being about… my emotional journey, personal reflections, and poetry to being a writing journal. And still probably those other things. Who knows. I won’t until I get there, that’s for sure. Especially since I wrote this a week ago and was not trying to cram all this writing in to my already busy schedule.

I’ve also been working on creating an upbeat, creatively inspiring playlist so I can get my head in the game every day without needing to avoid the occasional emotional landmine in my usual upbeat playlist (I apparently love upbeat, energetic songs that make me feel sad). It should be done in time for NaNoWriMo, but my expectations for what I’d accomplish by the start of November have all been a bit off. I wouldn’t say I’ve failed, but I definitely didn’t achieve my admittedly lofty goals. Still, this is a decent place to be, and I still have a week left to prepare. I should be fine.

I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about this month, most of my friends who used to participate don’t anymore, but it holds a special place in my heart. It taught me how to just get words down on the page and has always helped me flex my creative muscles. I might not have the polish some of my writing friends produce easily, I might not have the wonderfully unique ideas some of my other friends do, but I can buckle down and produce words with the best of them. I may wind up going through my large pile of words and removing half them during editing, but you gotta put the words down at some point, and it’s so much easier to see which ones don’t fit once you’ve started putting them together.

Anyway, I think I’ve psyched myself up enough for now, so I’m going to go continue my preparations and I hope that you, the reader, are having an excellent start to your November, whether or not you’re trying to write fifty thousand words this month. For those of you writing, just remember that “done” is better than “good.” You can always make something that is “done” better, but if you spend all your time making something “good,” you might never be done.