It’s December. How the time flies. And yet at the same time it moves ever so slowly. I’ll stop trying to be deep, November kind of sucked. I tend to get overworked around this time of the year which is why I’m thinking that this might be my last NaNoWriMo for a while. Let me explain.
In the lead-up to NaNoWriMo and in the month after it I tend to not write a lot. I spend October preparing and I spend December burnt out. Meanwhile, all of November feels like a big challenge that I know I’m capable of, but doesn’t always fit in with the rest of my schedule. I’m thinking of changing the challenge. Write a 70k word first draft of a volume in the last quarter of the year. That way I can get started a bit earlier, set the goal a bit higher and take it easy in between when I feel stuck. I’ll also have December to make up any words I still need to write and I think it will be a healthier way to do things. It also allows me to spend more time on my blog as opposed to completely neglecting it this time of year. I do feel a bit bad about that, but I promise we’ll go back to full force in January.
So how did the challenge go? Well, I started super strong, writing over 4000 words on the first day of the month. That was the tail-end of my fall break, so I had a decent amount of energy. After the first two weeks, I started feeling worse, and exhaustion started to set in. I’ll be honest, I’m definitely overworked, and the past week has been very bad. I’m exhausted, I have a constant headache and I don’t have much energy to really do anything. But the story itself went well. I like the first couple chapters, let’s say the first dozen or so, quite a lot. I think it’s a very solid start to the story and gives enough time to lead everyone into the new big plot points without it feeling too fast. After that you can definitely feel the slump and although the rough outlines of what that story will look like are there, it’ll probably all be scrapped. Then finally, the last two or three chapters I wrote have some really good stuff in them. The writing is pretty bad, but some of the ideas are great. And it sets up the next volume perfectly in a different way from how I’ve done that so far. I’ve also managed to finally settle on my loose magic system, which allows me to work back into the earlier volumes and align everything. There won’t be major shifts from how it was, but there will be subtle differences and more explanations as to why certain things do and don’t work.
I’ll talk more about the Hesitant Hero later this month. I’m a little bit exhausted right now and I’ll take a break from writing. Don’t worry, I have the post for Wednesday ready, and I’ll have time after that to pick writing back up again. Thank you for your patience and I promise that you have some fun content waiting for you in the new year. To give a tiny sneak peek, as we’re headed into the fourth volume, I’ll also recap the first three and highlight the important things that happen in them, as well as note any changes that might have already been taken into account when writing this part four. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 