NaNo a NoNo?

          NaNo this year has been a crazy roller coaster ride. Most of the month has been filled with frustration, interspersed with a few brilliant flashes of creativity and success. Routine family activities have mushroomed into schedule-crunching emergencies. Small tasks have grown huge and stolen time from the writing. The novel has dug in its heels and refuses to go anywhere. I’m ready to throw in the towel!

          Is it quitting or is it appropriate rearranging of priorities? This is the first NaNoWriMo ever that I have had to make myself want write on my NaNo project. It’s not just that I’ve been extremely busy. I’ve been busy before. In 2005, I won NaNo while working full-time and participating in lots of outside activities. It isn’t busy that is strangling my muse. The few bright sputters of creativity have reignited the fun quotient of writing, but the story just does not want to be written now. The sirens calling my name have nothing to do with fiction and fantasy.

          Every time I sit down to write, several non-fiction projects call out to me. The most insistent is my personal webpage, which I have woefully neglected in recent months. I have been telling myself there is time enough to write on those other projects come November, December or even January. My heart just won’t hear me. To my utter shock, the fun, the consistent flow of ideas, the spurts and sputters and engine explosions of ideas are fueling my non-fiction projects, not any of my story ideas. Fifteen minutes spent on website plans netted two months of blog ideas. Another fifteen the skeleton of the next post. Hours of fingers to keyboard have barely netted 3000 words on the NaNoNovel. The decision is made. My body and mind are leaving this track and transferring to the one where my heart and ideas is racing.

          (I’m thick-headed, but I finally get the message.) NaNo 2009 is not for me. This is not the year I will not write 50,000 or even 35,000 words of brilliant fiction (or rotten fiction). This year, as I’ve said in other posts, I will reclaim the fun of writing. That for me means working on what excites and inspires me at this moment.

          I’m sure the stories will flow from my mind and heart again, but for now it’s time to create compelling and interesting non-fiction. Any one out there feeling the same thing? Feel free to join me. All of us? Go, go, go! Write what you love!