It's NaNoWriMo Again!

 Hello, all!  

So, I blinked and October was gone.  It's November.  Somewhere before that happened, I had been considering participating in NaNoWriMo again.  NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writer's Month, and it presents the goal of writing 50,000 words in the month of November.  The idea is to get into a habit of writing, stressing quantity over quality for a period of time.  

It's paralyzing, sometimes, to stare at an empty page.  And it's hard when the vision in your head isn't what comes out.  There is a pattern of overanalyzing and simultaneous editing while creating that ultimately slows the whole creative process.  But to put that aside for a time, to create freely and see what happens, even having a side rant on how this particular section didn't actually work today, well, that still adds to the word count.  We can grow a habit, carving a path to make it easier for the words to flow.  At the end, now there's a pile of raw material to refine and edit.  It's a journey and is gloriously freeing.  

It's also a bit exhausting, trying to fit in a few hundred words here and there.  My current count is 15,011.

I've been working on two projects simultaneously, which allows me to move to the other when I get stuck on one.  One of them I'm calling "Ordinary Things" where I pick a random thing and describe it, the feelings around it.  The following is an excerpt from that.

Wish me luck!

"Radio

Driving around town this morning and utterly annoyed at other cars being on the road—because how dare they have the audacity to exist and want to get places, too—there was a point today when a song came on that I had not heard in a long time.  I was back in high school when it was popular.  I remember playing the radio in the shower and hearing it come on in that space in particular, feeling the humidity and warm of that space as I tried to learn the words to the verses this time, hearing it come on once again. 

I felt a small smile.  It had been overplayed to the point I stopped liking it, but now in this moment, it was an old friend whose appearance had been sweetened by a long absence.  I never did learn all of the words, but I do remember trying to sing along with it in the company of friends long gone, persons that were important at that point of my life that will always hold that importance of that particular moment in time and all the warmth that implies, but they don’t have to be a part of my current life to be a part of that snapshot in time.  I appreciate them with distance, grateful for the time we had together and recognizing the places we’ve since drifted apart into different people with a bittersweetness.  It’s okay to let go of those spaces.  It’s okay to let them stay in those places, and be grateful for that time we had without demanding the recreation of the same relationship with my current self.  We’re all different people now, but the song is exactly the same.  Refreshed by time, nostalgic by time, and an old memory of places past.  There has not been enough time to erase any cringeworthy moments of growing up, but there is a prevailing fondness.  And there is genuine joy in hearing the song, before it is time to let it pass from my mind into the next and the mental list of tasks for the morning ahead."