NaNo No Chance…

It was an unlikely goal even before November came. 50,000 words in a month of starting a new job, Christmas shopping and worrying sick over a terribly ill cat. It was an unlikely goal, to say the least. At the end of October I was still editing book two, right up to the wire on Halloween. I reached the end, sure, goal achieved, but it was a total rush and I know that both the quality of the story and my involvement with the characters suffered as a result.

November came, but the story did not. Once I had written the prologue, which was clear in my mind, there was nothing else clear in my mind to write. I knew where the characters all were, and I knew where they were going, but I couldn’t quite see how and when to get them there. I still can’t.

It is not writer’s block. It is a thinking block. I have always done the key parts of my writing by thinking.

My life now has a commute where before it had a few minutes walk to and from work each day. My home now is a houseful of people where before it was nothing but the quiet hum of trains and the call of birds in the sky. My life had lie-ins where now it has a constant wake up call.

My life now has noise where before it had that special kind of quiet in which stories are made. My lifestyle has changed, and the things I love doing, and the stories I write, have suffered for it.

So writing 50,000 words in November did not happen. It was never really going to – psyching myself up to do it was my way of clinging to something normal, something that is familiar and something that has before been so natural and so easy. I did not write, and much as I tried to find the story, I did not. It has never worked that way for me; it has never been forced.

I definitely need a rest. My mind is exhausted from the lack of opportunity to put my thoughts and feelings in order and my body is exhausted from lack of good, peaceful sleep and from lugging around my disordered mind. I wish for calm, and quiet. I wish for time and space. I wish for that moment when I glance out of a window or up at the sky and find the perfect clarity that is the next part of the story.

So I tell myself, in those moments when I hate the lack of word count, that two books out of three is not at all bad, and the third will be all the better for the rest. Sometimes life gets in the way. That is just the way it is.

Elloise Hopkins.