Na na na...

So, I spent most of October writing, and I liked what I was coming out with. I hit a good pattern of write, revise, write, edit, and I was happy. And when November hit, I waffled. I thought, yay, I am all warmed up and ready to launch into a new giant project!

And then I thought, oh no, what is going to happen to what I'm working on, and what is going to happen to my quality level if I drop the revise and edit part out of my work? Will I still be content with what I'm producing? Will I go off on tangents that I should have seen were wrong, if I'd let the work breathe a bit between stints?

Then I got the first encouragement letter from Chris Baty, and I decided that maybe, this year, my goals don't intersect with NaNoWriMo. That whole speech about the geodes that you cut open to see if you have something pretty or if you have crap, and you only know if you go for it? Uh, yeah... being able to say that I persevered to write 50k of crap is not going to make me proud right now. So I decided, no. It wasn't going to make me happy, it wasn't going to produce anything I would be proud of, and it was going to cause me a lot of undue stress.

So far I've kept November rolling like October, and I've been writing either every day or every other day. And yeah, it has (so far) all been stuff for Novitas, which doesn't belong to me and I can't publish anywhere but the internet. But I am happy with it, and I can feel the difference in my lifestyle now that I'm writing regularly again. I wake up with words on the brain. I write during breaks at work. I think about it on my commute. I steal emotions from music and bend them into points of view on the page. It's good, and satisfying, and the thing about the internet is that I get occasional feedback instead of writing in a void.

I have a few things left to wrap up for Novitas, and then I suspect it will shift into the background until we resume regular play in April or May. So I will try to start picking at a new project soon, something just for me, and we'll see how that goes.