NaNoWriMo: You can do hard things

I hit 25,000 words today for National Novel Writing Month. Though I didn’t hit this milestone on day 15 of this 30-day challenge, I’m still damn proud of myself. Finding time to write these last five and a half years has been a struggle between working full-time, having a kiddo and being a wife, and committing to NaNoWriMo this year almost wasn’t a thing. 

I soft committed with my writing group, especially after one of our members asked if we could do write-ins this month. Thankfully we have weekly writing group sessions, so it was easy to say yes! It was also easy to say yes after one of my big work things was cancelled.  

Committing to a lofty goal like NaNoWriMo where you aim to write 50,000 words in 30 days is just that, a commitment. It isn’t easy. It isn’t for the faint of heart. Some days you won’t get anything done toward your writing goal. Some days you’ll write enough to make up for not getting words on the page every day.

But you can do hard things.

I’m at 25,000 words, and I know they aren’t great. I know there’s too much dialogue and not enough description. But NaNoWriMo is meant to help you get that first draft nearly completed, not for you to write a polished draft of content.

That draft will need to be fleshed out. It’ll need more development. It’ll need an editor, but probably not until version three or four. At least that’s what will happen with me. It may not even see the light of day. That’s what happened to my last “successful” NaNoWriMo project.

I say successful in quotation marks because I’m still too afraid to edit that novel. I think that’s one of the things people don’t really talk about as a writer, that fear of going back to a project and revising it, working through all the difficult parts to make it worthy of people’s time. For me, I was pregnant when I wrote that project. I had trigger topics in it, and even I don’t want to go back and finish it.

Will I ever go back to it? Maybe. Or I’ll just start over, which is also an option.

Will I let this story turn into that one? Not a chance.

Why?

I never really expected to write the story I wrote in 2017, I had been working on my sequel to my elemental story before switching gears. However, I planned to write The In-Between. I planned on using NaNoWriMo to work a first draft. I also planned a sequel to it. I planned on making these two stories weave into a greater plot for my elemental series.

Do I plan on making this character one of my Furies? No. Do I plan on making her vital to the future plot? Maybe.

She can do some bad ass things, but not right now.

Right now, she needs to learn about who she is.

She needs to solve the murder.

And she needs to get out of the In-Between before she can figure out how to create it.

It’s her destiny.