So I missed my November monthly post, which means I missed my unofficial goal of writing one post a month for 2022. It was bad planning on my part — I had a busy month and I went on vacation and I procrastinated. But while those are all valid reasons, the biggest reason I missed the post was actually, well… I did NaNoWriMo!
NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month — a challenge where the goal is to write 50k words all within November. I last did it two years ago, in 2020 when I was stuck at home because of the pandemic and had nothing to do. This time, however, was harder. I had normal life stuff to do in addition to writing, and so the month really didn’t go smoothly at all.
I basically didn’t write at all for the first week, and spent the remainder of the month playing catch up. In fact, I wrote over 10k words — 1/5th of the goal — in the last two days of November. I also happened to be abroad at the time, and was writing between midnight and 4am due to jet lag. It was rough to say the least.
It definitely was worth it though. I like that these challenges are exercises in consistency. Sitting down nightly and forcing out words started to become a habit. And even though I had to write more and more towards the end of the month so that I could meet the goal, doing so got easier. At the start, I would struggle to get even a thousand words out, and by the end, I could write around 3k words with relative ease. It was neat to see my brain rewire itself to be able to do that.
To be clear, most of the 50k words I wrote were not the best words. But NaNoWriMo isn’t about perfection for me. It’s about writing and making the time to do something that I normally don’t prioritize. It’s about exercising a part of my brain that I don’t typically get to use. I do these blog posts for the same reason. I don’t write much as part of my day job, so this blog is my way of making sure I’m writing a bit every month, even if it isn’t anything incredible. It’s more important to me that I do something, rather than nothing. Which is why I’m also not too bothered that NaNoWriMo caused me to miss writing my November post. It’s okay that I missed my goal of a post every month. After all, I’ve already written far more this year than in 2021, when I only wrote one quick end of year post. So I’ll disregard where I fell short and choose instead to be proud of myself and celebrate my wins — both my increased blog activity and, of course, NaNoWriMo.
