NaNoUhOh
By: Nicole Willson
Tags: NaNoWriMo, Writing Life, Nanowrimo Meta, Nanowrimo 2017, Writing

Yeah, things didn’t exactly work out the way I’d planned this month. Source.

So I had great intentions this month. Really, I did. I thought I’d rack up my seventh consecutive NaNoWriMo win with few problems. After all this time, I had a pretty good system going.

And for the first few days of NaNo, I managed to keep pace with the daily word count, even if I wasn’t exactly shattering it.

But then something happened, the one thing I didn’t think about: I got sick. Really, really sick. I took a nap on Saturday afternoon on November 4th, and when I woke up I was chilled to the bone and running a high fever. The illness started off as a really bad upper respiratory infection and turned into severe bronchitis.

I kept running high fevers every night. (Haven’t done that since my appendix ruptured several years ago.) I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep for long because I’d wake myself up with the hard-enough-to-throw-up kind of coughing. Even sitting upright exhausted me. I managed to haul myself to my computer long enough to send out my Pitch Wars agent requests because only actual death would have kept me from those, but even that was horribly trying, what with my brain barely capable of thinking anything other than “I can haz death now?”

And the illness wouldn’t. go. away. I finished all the medicine the doctor prescribed on the first visit. A little over a week later, I was back in the office again, where I learned that the sickness had morphed into severe bronchitis. You probably don’t know me well enough to know that getting me to visit a doctor even once is like dragging a large, terrified dog to the vet. That I willingly went twice in quick succession should tell you just how awful I was really feeling.

I finally got some badly-needed sleep and fresh air over Thanksgiving break and for now I’m feeling sufficiently human again.

But it’s the 25th and I haven’t even broken 10K on my NaNo novel yet, and at this point I’m pretty sure that isn’t happening. It’s been hard enough to scrape together 50 words for my micro-horror stories. I don’t see myself clearing 10K words per day for the rest of the month to get myself over the line.

And that makes me sad. I’ve been watching other NaNoers racking up their wins and remembering how much fun it always was when I’d cross that line.

But sometimes life happens.

What next? I was having trouble getting into this particular novel idea anyhow, so I’m going to table it for now and try to write a new idea. I might try making December into my makeup NaNo month, even though it’ll be weird not to have everyone around me doing it too. I could wait for Camp NaNoWriMo in April, but I think it’s important to be working on another project while I see how last year’s NaNo novel is faring with agents. (So far, I’ve got two rejections, but I also still have several full and partials out with other agents. I didn’t make it into the first wave of Pitch Wars agent offers, dang it, but I’m still hopeful.)

So: Congratulations to everyone who’s kept up with NaNoWriMo this year, no matter how far along you are in the process. I’m hoping that next year, I’ll be right there running alongside you again.