Blather, rinse, repeat

I had a kind of epiphany this year about mindfulness and my writing time, how much of my life my day job demands of me versus how much of my extra time i need to give to...well, anything. Like, i felt really shitty about how much i wanted to write but how much time i was having to devote to other stuff, and i realized that, frankly, if i have an hour or two a day in which i don't have to either be asleep or at work, i need to guard it fiercely.

So when i'm at work, or otherwise NOT writing but conscious, i'm thinking about how i can best use that time when i CAN write, and if i sit down and my plan or my idea for what i was going to do isn't working for me, i do something else, write something else, because i just can't spend those precious hours writing shit i don't want to write just because i signed up for Nanowrimo or whatever.

I used to be extremely pro-Nano, but the more i've written and the more i've done it (or elected not to do it), the more i'm on the fence about it. There are a lot of great things about it--the encouragement from others, the write-ins and sprints and things like that--but there are also a lot of things about it that make me uncomfortable, like the framing of the achievement as a "win/lose" situation.

I had a woman in my cabin in Camp Nano this past month who "lost," fell 14000 short of her goal because her grandmother had a stroke and she had to drop everything and care for her, and she made a really thoughtful post about how, if that hadn't happened and she'd met her goal, what would she have actually "won"? And since it did happen and she didn't meet her goal, in light of the circumstances she hated having to say she'd "lost" anything, because she still had words of a story that she hadn't had a month ago. And i just thought, god, how many people every time they do this feel similarly jarred by the language of winning and losing? Because it's not a competition.

I digress bigtime. The actual point is: unless a publisher is breathing down you neck because you are contracted to turn in a draft and you aren't done yet? Writing shouldn't be stressful. (Unless it's a difficult section to write because hard stuff happens to your characters, but thats different than a writing challenge stress.) IMO.

But two agents reading, so fuck all that. :D