Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (which, coincidentally, is the day I wrote this post). I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but not as long as I usually do. Normally, there’s little else on my mind as summer finally begins to fade into fall, but this past year (since it has actually been a year of this life stress and chaos now, despite my desperate attempts to avoid it) has driven most things beyond the immediate day and sometimes week I’m experiencing so far from my mind that I’m beginning to forget what it is like to live any other way. So when my friend asked if I was planning to do NaNoWriMo, it caught me off guard since I did not have an answer prepared and I almost dismissed the question as being hardly relevant right then, despite it being the twenty-first of October, because I’d forgotten how soon the beginning of November was. Still, it’s not like I had to do much to prepare. I’m fairly adept at coming up with writing projects and while I expect to struggle with finding the time I need to do my daily writing since my schedule is already so full, I expect I’ll be able to find enough to write about to fill any words left over should I finish the last twenty-ish chapters of Infrared Isolation before I hit the required fifty thousand words for the month. I mean, the first twenty chapters are over seventy-five thousand words, so I’m really not worried, even if I wind up being a few chapters short of forty-six.

Part of the reason it took me so long to commit, though, is because I’m still trying to rest and relax. I am trying to avoid overexerting myself and, with how busy work has been, I am rarely in a position where I’ve got time and energy left for other things when I finally leave work for the day. I’ve been struggling to keep up with some of the basics (dishes, taking out the trash instead of just compressing it all so I can maximize the amount of trash per bag, remembering to take dishes and coffee mugs down to the kitchen from my office, etc) because I’m just so tired by the time I get home that I tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow. Work will likely continue to be just as demanding as the past few weeks have been (or even more demanding, as this week has become due to some long-scheduled events I’d forgotten about until they popped up on my calendar), so I’m really not sure I could even keep up with the basics of NaNoWriMo, let alone NaNoWriMo and my blog besides. That said, there’s no cost for failing to write enough to satisfying the NaNoWriMo challenge, so I might as well give it a try. Who knows, maybe I’ll succeed and find a way to reduce my mental strain as I go. Anything’s possible.

It will also be helpful with blogging, at least in terms of coming up with post topics. While I don’t plan to do daily digests like I’ve done in the past, I think occasional updates about how things are going will be fine. Maybe every Wednesday, to match today’s post, or maybe more itermittent than that. I don’t really have any kind of firm plans in place. I mean, today was supposed to be a poem but I replaced that post with this one, written only a day ahead of posting instead of my typical week (since it is, after all, difficult to write about a day-to-day challenge type thing if you’re posting everything a week after writing it). Plus, my editor is slammed at present so I’m moving the poem out until I’ve got the time I need to get enough distance to work on it myself or for her to be able to tackle it when she’s feeling up to it. I’ll probably do at least weekly updates and maybe a couple more here or there, depending on how things or going or what’s coming up. It would be optimal if I could separate the posts that aren’t weekly updates from the calendar enough that I could insert them into the regular flow of my posting schedule since I’ve already got a week of posts I’m going to have to juggle around to fit the changes I’m making as a result of writing this.

Regardless, I’m hopeful that a bit of structure and some reasonable goals will help me push through the funk I’ve been in outside of work. I know everything would run a bit more smoothly if I slept more and got myself out of bed more quickly each morning, but it’s been difficult to push myself to sleep at a reasonable time when I wind up feeling like I’ve barely done anything by the time I’m supposed to be going to bed. A reasonable 1,667 words a day seems like a decent enough accomplishment that I can fit into most evenings after work. Sure, my writing pace has slowed a bit since I last measured it (especially given how tired I am and hows easily I can be distracted as a result), but I should still be able to do that in about an hour and a half to two hours. Maybe a bit less if I can get into a decent flow or actually get some decent sleep for once. The only real challenge will be to give this whole thing up if I realize that pushing myself is only having a negative effect on my life because the benefits of focused effort I expected to see never materialized. I genuinely hope I do not have to give up on NaNoWriMo, but I also need to be realistic given that I’m having a difficult time staying focused on writing this as I have to jump back and forth between tasks at work. There’s no point in pushing myself to exhaustion when I’m already as tired as I am. It will only ever make things worse.