It’s been 6 days since NaNo and I really miss the pressure of setting up that 1700-word goal everyday. This is why I’m foregoing sleep now.

Goal is to write about 700/800 words.

I realize it’s not enough to just write.  This is what I tell my own students:  there’s an ebb and flow to creation.  Do what comes naturally -- but forgetting your own work as a writer is not natural.

I have to remind myself to stop and review, peruse my own work, my own writing in my Notebooks, which I have never done, beginning with what I wrote during the month of November.

So, printing tomorrow after my 700 or so.  Go through the draft, see what’s useful, rebuild where I need to.

To defeat...my crippling anxiety about posting anything online. 

I won NaNoWrimo! And it wasn’t by the skin of my teeth, it was a casual romp through. But working on something on something that quite frankly, is a big pile of garbage, is refreshing. Yup, garbage can be refreshing. There was no pressure of publishing (I would like to publish it yes, but I need to get through the first two books first) and at that point, I knew it wouldn’t be good so I just had fun with it. 

But it also made me want to work hard on my actual novel. The one I am actually editing now. I wanted to to return to that oh so frustrating world that I had created. Am I nervous about portraying a black superhero, you betcha! Do I lose sleep over whether I can convincingly write a male’s pov, gosh darn it you know I do. But getting all that nano pep talks and encouragement makes me want to push more. I haven’t gotten dumber since I’ve left college. 

So I am going to write up a plan of editing attack. No more wishy-washy, vaguey-wavey, I’ll-get-to-it-eventually thinking. 

And talk more about it on this thing! I started this Tumblr to call out into the void, to scream at the top of the heavens to say “Hey, I am a writer, dammit!” Yeah, some days that comes out as a question, but I am hear to work on publishing so I can share my work with you good people. 

I feel like every year authors say ‘I’m  going to do #nanowrimo this year’ and they sit down and stare at a blinking cursor or a blank page with a pen, and they start writing....and they’re writing SOMETHING, but a lot of times by the half way point you just don’t know what you’re writing anymore, and you stop. You realize, this isn’t your year. 

I can’t say hwow many times I’ve doe this. Or how many times I just...never wrote anything more than on the first day. BUt this year? This year something happened. I sat down, and I began to write this book again after two years of not touching it and only a few thousand words on hand. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, it had been a while, but slowly my book began to come to life in my mind and fingers. 

This is the year that I did it. I sat down and even though November was the most difficult month of my life with things going on, I got the book amount done. I wrote what I expect to be half or 1/3 f my book and I completed Nanowrimo!!!!!

Here is my first drawing on my graphic tablet ! Enjoy (or not) !