They did warn us, all those nice writers who fill out the web, that signing up for NaNoWriMo could make for a stressful November.
I really didn’t expect to land up in the stroke assessment unit at the local hospital in the first week of NaNo, though. Not without some warning symptom in advance, like high blood pressure or obesity or throbbing arteries or, y’know, anything at all really. And definitely not before I’m out of my 40s.
Still, there it is. A few days of dodgy vision in an eye that’s always worked–I now know–better than most eyes ever do, turned out to be a mini-stroke (actually two mini-strokes in quick succession, judging by the much-more-frightening dead hand syndrome that I put down to anxiety.) Bleh.
So here’s me, this person who never takes pills, eats & drinks whatever & whenever she likes, only gets one cold per annum, goes hillwalking on a regular basis and hasn’t bothered a doctor in the last 25 years, and I’m suddenly forced into contemplating the evils of lard, salt, whisky and–you guessed it–cigarettes as I munch my way through enough aspirin to make any willow weep. I have to say, this is definitely not the month I’d have chosen for giving up smoking! I’d planned on doing it before next Spring, though, so it’s not a major adjustment in the way it would’ve been, say, at any other time in the last couple of decades. Just a bit inconvenient for the little things we normally take for granted, like thinking.
I’m still writing my NaNoWriMo novel, albeit not as fast as I should be writing it. I had to take a couple of days out for sanity’s sake when the hospital got their hands on me, but I’ve no excuses now. The one good side-effect of all that aspirin is that all those middle-aged aches and pains we all learn to live with as we get older are completely gone from my life. Also, I can see out of both eyes this week, which is a definite plus!
The local Municipal Liaisons have been great, pouring useful info into my inbox like the nearest “meets” every week (unfortunately these are always timed to clash with my only evening class!) and pep talks that say things like “I only had 2000 words by November 7th last year but I still made it past the winning post, and so can you!” That particular email was a real boost for me, I have to say; I really thought I’d already blown it until then.
I can see myself giving up on the novel I started to write, though, because obviously I’m obsessing about other things right now and they keep bubbling up into the story. Thankfully, the remit I gave myself at the start wasn’t necessarily to come up with a novel (certainly not a saleable novel); it was simply to get into the habit of writing 2000 words a day, give or take. This being something that used to come easily to me a decade ago, but which no longer does. If I only start meeting that target by the final week I’ll be more than happy because I’ll have achieved what I set out to achieve, but in the meantime–of course it would be nice to be a NaNo winner. And at this stage of the game, that’s still possible.
