Did you know it’s National Novel Writing Month? Affectionately (or sometimes very unaffectionately) called NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month is where people all over the world choose to attempt to write 50,000 words in the 30 days that November hath. It’s quite the undertaking. If you’ve never written a novel and always wondered what it’s like, let me be the first to say: it’s awful. Don’t do it. Or do. Because it’s wonderful. All of that is true, all at the same time.
I have chosen to participate in NaNoWriMo this month, but by writing 50,000 words of a collection of short stories instead of an actual novel. I’m already working on (another) novel and I’ve hit a wall with it. So I’m using November to work on something completely different in hopes that when I eventually, hopefully, go back to the other novel it is with a brain that has been scrubbed clean of blocks and writing anxiety.
Well…that last one will probably be sticking around. Anxiety has been my constant companion since I was a very small child. Living as autistic (spoiler alert: did you read my intro post?) in a world made for neurotypicals certainly had never quelled the anxiety. I was a nervous kid. A nervous teen. A nervous young adult. Now I’m a nervous almost-35-year-old. I take a nice little collection of meds and go to therapy to manage it but I am still only human. It gets to me sometimes.
NaNoWriMo is one of those times.*
*side note—I’ve chosen to do NaNoWriMo during a period where: my dog is away from home getting immersive training and my cat is walking around with a shaved back leg after a biopsy of a possible tumor on her leg. I am not doing this during a particularly “chill” time in my life and I’ve just had to accept that*
I don’t know what it is about this writing that is making me anxious. It might not be the writing at all, to be honest. It could just happen to be physically manifesting at times when I’m sat in front of a computer to write. I’m not sure. But hoo buddy, it’s a lot. This has been what I call a “fast” anxiety: I’m jittery as all get out. Can’t sit still. My good leg bouncing (yeah I have a “good” leg and a “bad” leg, but they’re really just normal legs with varying levels of function and I’m trying to talk better about my body) and the constant need to shake my hands about in the air. (People may not believe your autistic, but stimming real hard in front of them usually gets them to shut their mouths.")
Part of it is the looming word count. Fifty thousand words averages out to approximately 1667 words a day. Whether or not that is a lot just depends on the writer, and then just depends on the day. Today that number seems damn near insurmountable, not gonna lie.
I’ve already finished one short story for the collection. It’s not quite 5500 words and I wrote it in three days. It’s…it’s dark. Writing it was half the time like pulling teeth and the other half like I physically couldn’t type fast enough for the words coming out of my brain. But it’s done and I’m already 1667 words into the next story. I usually sit with a story longer than that before I hop into a new one. It’s different. I’m having to swap mindsets out a little faster than normal. This might be cause for some of my anxiety, too. (Let’s be honest: most of it’s cause I miss my dog.)
So I’m writing and jittering and staring at the ceiling waiting for the next concept or scene or sentence or word or feeling to appear behind the ever-blinking cursor on my computer screen. If you need me, that’s where I’ll be.
Sarah