Not gonna lie, I was really hoping to start the month on better footing. I’m writing this on November first and pushing a bunch of other posts around so it can go up closer to the day I’m writing it, just so this doesn’t go up a week later and wind up completely detached from the reality in which I wrote it. Dunno how much I’ll be doing this, since I do want to keep things a bit more journal-y while working my way through Nation Novel Writing Month, but I expect I’ll also be tired, slightly overworked, and incredibly bad at editing anything as I write it. So we’ll see. I like to avoid posting error-filled blog entries if I can avoid it.

I slept like shit last night. Not for any particular reason that I can identify, though. I just had a tough time falling asleep and woke up a bunch as I dozed for a couple hours before finally really sleeping for two or three hours. There are probably a few contributing factors, like the fact that I played Valheim for a about five hours instead of two or three, which meant I ate dinner super late, which meant I took my melatonin later than usual. Throw in a few other contributing factors like drinking alcohol for the first time in a long while over the weekend, heightened anxiety from financial stuff/starting NaNoWriMo, not going on my daily walk, disruptions to my sleep schedule over the weekend, the approaching sleep pattern disruption known as Daylight Savings Time ending, and the general on-going miasma of nastiness known as modern life… Well, sometimes it seems like I should count myself lucky that I tend to only have one night of low-quality or low-quantity sleep each week.

Thankfully, it isn’t the kind of tired that has me feeling strung out or incapable. I’m just sleepy enough to start dozing off when I sit down in my chair at work as I shift mental tracks between various work tasks. This usually doesn’t get in the way of working on NaNoWriMo or writing in general, since I’ve found myself perfectly capable of writing as I doze off, even if I’m not always capable of doing so in a sensible, coherent manner. I usually have enough context to figure out whatever weird thing I’ve typed, but I occasionally write something so mystifying that I just have to delete it.

I liked to think that writing in that state meant I was just getting out of my own way, smoothing out the flow of ideas from my head to my hands so that my writing swept along more smoothly. Nowadays, I’m just glad I never tried to purposefully induce that state out of some misguided attempt to reach a higher level of creativity like most creative drug-advocates say their chosen substance does for them. I wouldn’t knock someone else’s process, generally speaking, but I think that making yourself dependent on a specific state of mind is only going to hamper you in the long run. Better to rely on steady discipline than fickle motivation.

So now, instead of taking a nap or resigning myself to a long, sleepy day followed by a short, dozy evening, I’m going to set my discipline to work and get my daily writing done, however much it winds up being. It is a small hiccup in an otherwise ordinary week, and I will not let it stop me from reaching my goals.