Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.

While I’m not as burned out and exhausted as I was even last weekend (actually having time to rest and do nothing for a few days over the weekend was actually a huge help), I’m still pretty worn down. A single weekend won’t fix anything so much as just leave me capable of handling whatever a new week might throw my way, but that’s still more rest than I’ve had for most of this month. It feels weird to say it, but this is still the same month where I had two intense and demanding weeks of work that pretty much instantly burned me out and where I spent both weekends after that intense period ended doing home improvement or cleaning projects for the entirety of each of them. It has literally only been four weeks since all of this began. I’m just grateful that I was able to get any rest at all, that I was able to work from home for a day afterwards, and that there don’t seem to have been any new crises during the week I was gone [something someone said in a meeting this morning has me questioning this, but it seems to have been resolved already so I’m okay not knowing]. Which makes it the first week to not have SOMETHING come across my plate in I honestly don’t even know how long. I literally paused at the end of that sentence for a few minutes while I tried to think back to the last time there wasn’t at least some kind of crisis at work. While my definition of crisis would exclude a lot of the stuff that has happened at work over the last few months, I’m not the one who gets to determine whether or not we go into crisis mode at my job and I’m beginning to wonder if my boss only uses that as much as he does because its the only way to squeeze anything else out of our drained and fairly overworked team at this point…

Anyway, this has been the most hellish NaNoWriMo I’ve ever done and absolutely none of it is NaNoWriMo’s fault. I had an easier time doing my one hundred thousand word count year since I had nothing else going on at the time other than trying to not think about my grandfather’s poor health (which made writing about 3500 words a day an attractive pastime). This year it has been an absolute slog to get anything done and not because I’ve struggled to motivate myself. I’ve been plenty motivated and disciplined enough in any regard to not need motivation. I’ve just been so drained that I’ve struggled to find the energy to turn my computer on most nights, let alone actually write anything. Outside of a couple outliers, anyway. Turns out that, sometimes, a thing can be so inspiring that it overrides your burnout. Or your burnout can be so emotionally draining that you set aside all the limits you’ve imposed on yourself to avoid making said burnout worse and wind up exhausting yourself by writing and then entirely rewriting a five thousand word essay about a show you really enjoyed watching. Either one, really. Or both. It’s really difficult to tell given that I was in a double-fugue as I did both editing passes on that essay. The first from being up too late writing it and then burning all my energy for the day by spending an entire afternoon rewriting it and the second from the exhaustion of preparing to host people at my apartment and the exhaustion of actually hosting people while still trying to sneak in my daily blog editing and writing goals.

As fulfilling as all this writing and personal project work has been, I’m ready to take a break. To do something else for a little bit. And by “something else,” I mostly mean “do the same thing but don’t write ‘NaNoWriMo’ on my to-do list because I’ve actually found a decent process for writing at least one Infrared Isolation chapter per week.” Because I’ve got four chapters ready to send to my editor/reviewer and enough flash fiction written that I won’t have to start posting Infrared Isolation chapters again until the first Saturday of 2024. Which is the decision I wound up making, as far as my posting goals go. It’s not like I randomly arrived at this number of banked flash fictions pieces, after all. I very specifically aimed for that goal and then met it during my first couple weeks of NaNoWriMo. It’s nice that, despite how burned out, exhausted, and distracted I’ve been, that I’ve managed to at least meet my secondary goals for the month. Sure, my fifty thousand words for the month are mostly blog posts instead of being from chapters of Infrared Isolation like I originally wanted, but I still managed to write a month’s worth of Infrared Isolation posts and two months’ worth of flash fiction while I worked my butt off this month, so I proved I can maintain this kind of pacing indefinitely. Well, as long as my spirit holds up. Which is probably still indefinitely since writing is my main form of mental, personal, and spiritual fulfillment these days.

That’s what this is all about for me. Trying to find sustainable habits. Taking one month to push a little harder than I can normally muster in order to find a pace I can keep up as long as I’m staying focused on the positives I’m getting from it. I mean, sure, I’m basically returning to the pace I had before this past summer pushed me to the point where I had to stop doing something or risk a minor to moderate breakdown, but I’m now confident it wasn’t the writing I needed to step away from. It was all the other stuff I was doing. Which was mostly work stuff and various tabletop games that weren’t fun for me that I’ve replaced with tabletop games that ARE fun for me. So, you know, I’m sure it will all be fine and I’m absolutely not setting myself up for another stressful winter of riding the edge of completely burning out. To be entirely fair to myself, though, I actually do sleep better when I’ve spent more time and energy on stuff like writing. I was really good about going to bed right around midnight every night this month until being on vacation and hosting people threw off my slowly healing sleep schedule again. Which is December’s project. Fixing my messed up sleep schedule enough that I’m not constantly exhausted every day of the week. What an utteraly achievable and nearly impossible goal.