December: The Creativity Sink
So, as I mentioned last month, like Siri, I too attempted Nano for the first time in many years. And I did it! It took some finessing (I wrote 7K in the course of a night to catch up at one point), but it got done, and without any fudging on my part. Every year that I am successful at Nano, I swear I’m going to keep going. Sure, not another 50K month in a row, but a significant amount, and the draft will be done in a few months, hooray! Every year it doesn’t happen. (Perhaps the worst offender of this was Shards, actually. I hit 50K at a rather privotal moment and stopped there, not even bothering to wrap up the scene. And every time I tried to go back to it, for months, I couldn’t figure out where to go and it got absolutely nowhere.) (I mean obviously it did eventually, but you’d think I’d learn.) (But apparently I haven’t.) And this is true every winning November. Despite my best intentions, I can’t seem to keep going on my Nano novel, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether things were flowing well during November or not. I’ve come up with some theories: Burnout. Maybe I’m just tried of that particular project. That doesn’t read particularly true, since I often spend several months to a year of consistent work on revisions or rewrites, but maybe! Or maybe I’m burned out on the pace and I need a break…