Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest of my life has picked up the slack. I’ve been preparing to host two of my siblings and two friends of one of those siblings, plus we’ve had a bunch of more solidly cold weather come through, so I spent all of last weekend doing some projects around my apartment to weather-proof my bedroom door so I can keep that space cold and warm up the rest of my apartment for my guests. I mean, I also enjoy a warm apartment, but my tolerance for the cold is much higher and my preferred apartment temperature is much lower than most people I’ve met. I just really enjoy being under blankets and I’m much too warm for that unless my environment is in the low sixties. Which, you know, is much lower than the upper-sixties and low seventies that I know most people prefer, at least in terms of the experience of the temperature. So I cut and put down some carpet remnants to insulate the floor and help protect my downstairs neighbors from the sound of extra feet (I walk incredibly quietly for someone my size, so I was putting this task off until I actually had other people around), put up some weather stripping around my bedroom door, and really just strained the muscles of my lower back. Apparently, I’ve gotten too old to be crawling around on the floor with reckless abandon like I was while cutting the carpet to fit around the support beam for my staircase and tightly to the door frame at my bedroom door (so it could fit under the door in order to block all the air that used to pass through that gap).

All of which meant I barely did any writing this past weekend and wound up essentially erasing all the work I’d done over the week prior to make up for doing almost no writing during the first weekend of November. As of yesterday, I’m back down to only 1800 words behind (thanks to hitting double my word count goal yesterday), which is a fairly closeable gap since I’m currently still counting blog posts as part of my daily word count goals for NaNoWriMo and I finally finished my rewrite and edit pass on what was originally going to be Chapter 26 of Infrared Isolation, but is now Chapters 26 and 27 of Infrared Isolation. It is now much easier to do work on that story project since I’m back to writing new stuff rather than fixing up and expanding on old stuff. Which is only really difficult because it has been about three months since I wrote that stuff and I needed to work hard to get back into that headspace. I have enough notes about the chapters that I haven’t produced that I don’t really need to get my head anywhere other than into the story in general when I’m writing new stuff, but editing old stuff takes a decent amount of work since I need to match wherever I was back then.

As easy as producing new words is, I’m still struggling for time and energy. I’m incredibly burned out from my months of overtime, capped off by the frantic pace of work for the first ten days of this month, and I’m not really letting myself rest yet since I’ve got either some kind of errands or an event of some kind every night this week. Plus, I still have to deep clean my apartment (which needs it badly enough that I’d be doing it to start my vacation even if I wasn’t hosting people), go grocery shopping for my usual stuff for next week AND Thanksgiving, figure out how I’m going to entertain my siblings and two strangers for a few days, and finish working through my list of apartment improvements (which is mostly just getting power strips put in useful places and figuring out where I want to hang the Christmas lights I use for gentle, atmospheric lighting). There’s a lot yet to do and I’m just barely staying on my feet even now. I’m so tired that, every time I do some writing (including right now), I have to fight against the urge to doze off. It doesn’t matter that I can barely fall asleep when I finally go to bed for the evening or that I actually got two decent nights’ worth of sleep over the weekend. I’m just completely exhausted from everything and struggling to get anything done in a timely manner as a result.

I feel pretty precariously balanced right now. I think I’ve figured out how to keep myself from pushing myself too hard, but it is impossible to know that for sure since it’s not like I can predict the things that will knock me off balance. I’ve still got another three days of work (including the day this goes up), during which any number of things could happen to knock me off balance again, before I’ll be taking a break from anything terribly time-sensitive for nine days. Sure, I’ll have people over, but I won’t have much that needs to be done by a specific time. There’ll still be plenty to do, of course, but I’ll be able to sleep more. I’ll be able to focus on doing things I enjoy rather than trying to grind through fifty hours of work a week so I can afford to live at least moderately comfortably. Honestly, if I get nothing out of next week other than a chance to sleep more consistently (and, you know, actually do it) and a removal of work stress from my life, that will probably be enough to keep me from having to stop any of my projects. Plus, all that extra time will be great for trying to catch up to my primary and secondary goals for NaNoWriMo. I’d really love to get a whole bunch of Infrared Isolation chapters done, if only so I can work on making that kind of writing a larger part of my day-to-day life again. Its really frustrating to think that I stopped working on it three months ago to try to get some rest and recover from what has turned into a horribly stressful year and I still haven’t managed to get that rest since stuff keeps happening.

It is still possible that this will all blow up in my face. It is also still possible that I’ll be able to easily sail across the finish line because I’ve been at this writing gig for two decades now and I’m pretty dang good at it. The latter seems much more likely if I could just get some dang sleep for once in my 30s. Which, hopefully, I’ll be doing next week instead of staying up until stupid o’clock in the morning like I seem to be doing every day (the exact time of stupid o’clock depends on when you have to get up the next morning). Honestly, it’s the writing part of all this that has me the least concerned. I’ve got plenty of gas in the ol’ writing tank. I just need enough gas in the “stay awake while writing” tank and the “not so mentally and emotionally worn out from work/the events of my life that I need to just shut my brain down at the end of the day” tank. If I can get those two things, I think I can easily manage the rest of this month…