No NaNo; November 3 2019

Another week missed! My apologies for not updating my blog last week; it was my partner’s birthday, and therefore, I was busy. That gave me plenty of time to think about life and what my next blog post would be about, though!

And also plenty of time to scrap those ideas because something happened today, and that overrides everything I’ve been thinking about.

If you’re plugged into the writing community, you may know about NaNoWriMo! If you don’t, it stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’ and takes place ever November. You sign up for the site, and it provides you with a handy word-count tracking graph as you attempt to write every day to get a total of 50,000 words down.

Also recently (as in today) was the announcement for PitchWars, which is a mentorship program for aspiring novelists. Hopeful mentees apply to a maximum of four potential mentors with a query letter and sample pages, and if they’re selected, get help polishing their manuscript. The finished novel is taken to an agent showcase at the end of it all.

I applied for PitchWars, and signed on for NaNoWriMo. I wasn’t selected for the former, and I won’t be able to do the latter.

Life is getting in the way when it comes to writing, lately. My partner is in school, which is a full-time commitment that often comes home with her. I’m on toddler duty 24/7, and my kid is going through a hard-hitting separation anxiety phase. She won’t sleep if I’m not in the room, and the glow of a laptop screen isn’t conducive to convincing her to drift off, so I never have the opportunity to sit down and get some work done.

So if I’m a writer who isn’t writing, and no one seems to want what I’ve already written, am I still an author? What even is the point?

I’m at a low point, dwelling on that question.

What am I?

At the very least, I wrote another part of this story that I’ll share with y’all.

The young man – I presumed he was a man, at least, but I didn’t want to assume based on a glance – was in the midst of setting up a small camp. Crouched over a circle of stones, he piled tinder into a heap and breathed a fire spell over the twigs. His hood was down, ebony hair piled atop his head in a practical heap, dark eyes glittering with the reflection of budding flame.

It was curious to see another person so far out from civilization. My brows furrowed, trying to get a glimpse of something that might tell me why he was here, but I didn’t glean much. He clearly wasn’t out here to hunt; he only had a single dead moss-hare with him, freshly caught, that he began to skin now that his fire was made. He wore travelling clothes, so it wasn’t likely he’d wound up here by some freak teleportation accident. Those were extremely common, and incidentally, why I never travelled by temporal displacement. Still, not likely the case, here.