eddyfate

Here's the short version: I'm dropping out of NaNoWriMo to avoid burnout. Yes, after only five days. But I'm still writing.

The long version is that I'm only dropping out on a technicality, and here's why.

See, I've written one day on NaNoWriMo thus far. Sunday, I was physically exhausted from ICC -- no worries, it happens. Monday, I wrote a really solid 2,500 (and hated most everything I wrote, but that's part of the process, I think). Tuesday, I was out for several hours entertaining guests from Ireland, and got back late. Wednesday, I was mentally exhausted, so I gave myself a pass. Today, I was charged up for writing at work (which I've been doing pretty much every day this week), but I realized that I was dreading going back to my novel.

Now, over the past... uh... lot of years that I've been a writer, I've learned when I can push myself as a writer, and when I can't. Sometimes, I'm just being a whiny asshole, and I really need to just get off my ass and write. In fact, most times I'm being a whiny asshole. The idea of getting together and writing with other writers seemed like a perfect way to shut the whiny asshole up and get to writing. Granted, I was actually enjoying writing so I didn't need to shut the whiny asshole up, but I figured it was only a matter of time before it happened, and I was ready for it with all of NaNoWriMo's social writing and externally-imposed deadlines. But sometimes, they're warning signs of something much worse -- burnout. And everything I've been seeing the past few days was pointing to the latter.

I did some math, and realized that I hit something like 40,000 words last month, between writing for work and writing for me. That's not taking into account editing all of those words, mind you -- and many of those words went through repeated drafts. A conservative estimate of my writing this month outside my novel is around 15,000 words, and it's probably closer to 20,000. Again, that's not counting multiple revisions. Adding another 50,000 on that is a lot, even with no revision, but I've done insane workloads like that before. When I started this, I thought "No sweat, I'll just do what I did before." What I forgot is that I almost quit the industry when I was maintaining a wordcount density like that on a regular basis, because I burned myself out. And burning myself out on writing for fun when my day job is writing for money is what we in the business call a "really fucking stupid idea." To use an analogy, if I were a professional runner, I would need to always work on increasing the number of miles I run in a day, but I can't wreck my body doing it.

So if I were a runner, how would I address this? I'd slow my rate of increase, but always keep working on increasing it. And the same applies here.

Bottom line: I'm still going to work on a novel. (I am considering changing the novel, however, because writing vampires and other supernatural beasties all day and then writing for vampire hunters at night might be part of the problem -- they're more similar than I anticipated). I'm still going to try to complete it in a reasonable timeframe for me. If there are more write-ins, I'll still join in -- fuck, wordcount is wordcount, whether it's for a particular contest or not, and the last write-in was awesome. But I'm going to do it around my current obligations, at a more reasonable pace.

At the end of this, nothing has really changed, except that I'm not holding myself to an artificial expectation. Instead, I'm holding myself to a completely different artificial expectation, one that makes more sense for me.