Christopher Hamilton

This years NaNoWriMo didn’t go according to plan, in fact it really didn’t go anywhere at all.

I’ve been pretty stressed out for most of this month, (and the one before to be honest), and when it came to sit down and write for it I lost interest after about an hour. That was one of the contributing factors to the scrapping of not one, but two attempts at it.

It didn’t stop me writing in general. It only stopped anything to do with the story from flowing, and when you have a 30 day deadline that becomes a huge disadvantage. There was one bright point from the whole fiasco. I now have several pages of my Moleskine filled with ideas for blog posts, articles, short stories, and the other day a pretty decent idea for a novel popped into my head at the very unfortunate time of 1am. It kept me awake until about 5am, at which point I crashed out only to wake up a couple of hours later for work.

I really like NaNoWriMo, but it was unfortunate that my head wasn’t into it this year. I imagine I’ll take part again next year, and actually write something. Until then I have a decent amount of ideas to develop and see what I can do with them.

I’ve put a few projects on hold recently, and instead I plan to start them in the new year. At this time of year it’s tough to force myself to spend an significant amount of time devoted to any of them. I usually have the attention span of a gold fish about this point of year, making juggling more than a few things a complete nightmare.

My hope is that by making the decision to put these projects on hold, it will make me less stressed in the run up to Christmas. Which should also allow me the time to get a few annoying things out of the way before the New Year. Which really isn’t that far off anymore.

I’m a little bummed that I didn’t manage to finish Nano, since I started it with a pretty good idea of what I wanted to write. It’s not the end of the world I suppose, but it would have been good to have managed it for the second year in a row.