creative mode

It is just about two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and that means I have fallen behind on all my shows and not picked up a book since Halloween.

Oof. As someone who regularly reads multiple books in a week in addition to listening/watching 4- to 5-hour-long episodes of Critical Role at least once a week… my consumption of media has dropped significantly.

Looking back to last year (to goodreads for confirmation) I only read one book start to finish during NaNo, and that was during the last week when I had admittedly already completed the challenge and was simply coasting along with a couple hundred words a day to try and hit all thirty days.

Earlier this year, when I was on the third draft of HoTP, from around mid April to the end of June, I read pretty consistently…but I remember having a hard time keeping up with my regular reading pace, and being annoyed with myself for not going through a book every few days like I would outside of writing times.

Consuming content is a thing we all do on the regular. It’s just what happens. But my brain space for consumption is severely limited during writing times, even if I’m only devoting one or two hours a day to said writing, because my brain is in creation mode the full 24 hours.

That’s what I like about NaNo, I think. That’s why I have never been able to make a long-standing habit of writing every single day for more than a short period of a few weeks at a time. Even working on the third draft of HoTP this spring and into summer, I was only devoting time during the week to writing while giving myself the weekends to mentally recover and focus on anything other than creation mode.

After spending a number of years getting frustrated with myself because I had these ideas and couldn’t get them out appropriately, because I was constantly getting to a point where I would simply burn out, I think that this is why. Because it does take a lot of brain power and mental energy to write a novel, and you do need to take time to step back and feed your ideas and imagination through consuming other media.

As for NaNo and my current progress on this years project… I’m presently a little over 38,000 words into it and on track to hit the 50k mark sometime this coming week. I’m right around where I was last year at this point in the month, give or take a few thousand words, which to me feels especially impressive considering this year I’m writing entirely from scratch on a first draft while last year I’d been writing a second draft.

Overall, while I do enjoy the challenge of trying to write x number of words every day for a whole month, I’m looking forward to slowing down on the daily word count once I hit that 50k goal and starting to get caught back up on my TBR list and all my shows.