Uncertain as I am that anyone even reads this, it comes to my attention that it's a good month and a bit since I last posted here. There is a single main reason for this to be honest, and it comes in the form of Nanowrimo. Yes, I took part in the challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. For me, this was huge for several reasons. Firstly, I have very little (often no) self confidence in my writing ability, but despite this I'm also subconsciously aware that it's one of those things that I'm not just good at - I'm really, really good at. It's my talent, the thing that I just innately have a knack for. Secondly, I'm impatient and terrible at persevering. Projects don't generally get started by me let alone finished, so the idea of producing a novel out of nowhere was a bit terrifying.
I'll be honest; there were a lot of days where I got fed up and angry and frustrated. I started and hated the 5,000 words I'd written so I started again. Most days I made the required 1,667 words - but the weekends, where I was busy with LRP, would go by without a single word being written. However somehow every week I pulled the catching up out of nowhere and kept on track. The most I ever fell behind was 5,000 words and this was always done within a few days of the mark being missed. It became habit to me, sitting down and writing; I'd usually do about half of it when I first got up and then the rest after dinner. I enjoyed it some days, and was hyper critical on others.
Somehow through all that, at the end of the month I had 50,000 words. 50,007 to be exact; and I wasn't even halfway through the plot that had begun spinning around in my head. I haven't touched it since, which is only actually 9 days though it feels like a great deal longer. I know there's a lot of it that's pretty badly written - let's be honest, it's not even a first draft - but despite all my hang ups I've managed to come out of the other side feeling pretty good about what I wrote. When I finished, it didn't quite click with me what I'd done. I sat there slightly stunned. I think it was the next day or maybe the day after that I was telling someone about it and admitted, for the first time, that I was proud of myself. I started crying.
I don't remember ever being proud of myself before.
So much has happened and continues to happen since then, including a series of days where I've felt truly terrible because living on my own is just not something that I can cope with. My loneliness has become not just that but more of an acute, physical ache in the middle of my chest. It actually physically hurts. This, however, is something that I've taken control of and I'm getting out of. I'm absolutely terrified of course, but then who wouldn't be - moving house is a pretty big upheaval. But every time the friends that I'm moving in with do something else that's so incredibly kind and generous, I feel more and more certain that it's where I want to be.
I might have a bitch of a cold, I might be freezing in a small and lonely flat, I might be living off 12p packets of pasta from Tesco - but you know what, underneath all of that, I've never ever been happier.
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