I probably could have finished NaNoWriMo on Thanksgiving, but instead we went to have dinner with good friends.
There was plenty of leeway, and much of the night before last I spent thinking, dreamily, about what I would write yesterday, and that was plenty of subject matter -- more than enough to reach the requisite 50,000 words. I reached 50,517 last night by the time the Steelers-Dolphins game began. After champagne to celebrate, we watched that mud-wrestling match for a while, then said, "Pfft," and went to bed.
This was my seventh attempt at NaNoWriMo. My daughter talked me into the first one; after that I was hooked. November has become a kind of "retreat" time -- a time to take stock of my hands and my brain and my ability to follow through with a project, and that is just all good, and it feels good to be done, the story (such as it was) told.
That story was garbage with a capital G. I had no beginning, no ending, just started from where last year's NaNovel left off and started rattling, letting the words pour out. Too many of them echoed the tragedy and sadness of this past year; more than once I found myself spilling tears as I wrote, even though the venue of silly fantasy should have been light-hearted and laughable.
It wasn't hard writing this year. I would just ensconce in my favorite comfy chair, open the laptop, and go away, to a different dimension, leaving all else behind -- except for the word counter, of course. When I would reach 2000 words, I'd find an "ending sentence" for a chapter, and then go back and name the chapter I had just written. And then shut down the machine and walk away.
Now done, re-reading what I wrote over the last month, I see how much I still miss my sister, and how her death left me with a well of loss. I also see echoes of my desire to help people, to let them know how precious they are in the scheme of things.
Informed thus, it will be interesting to see how this next year unfurls.
*Still wordy after NaNoWriMo, oh well.*
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