I’ve been babysitting, hiking, climbing mountains, and driving, so I haven’t had time to celebrate my win. Today, I finally have a minute and good internet access, so celebration, here we come.
Only, it’s a little less celebratory, and I’m not sure why. Sure, this year marked the half-a-millionth word I’ve written over the past eleven Novembers. Yes, I wrote over 50,000 words. Okay, I brought new characters to life, put them in difficult situations, and watched as they grew into better versions of the characters I started with. Fine, I wrote every day even while driving across the country and being a grandma to the most amazing human on the planet. Yes, I marked my tenth NaNoWriMo win.
All those things are important, meaningful, even, but this year, the writing was bittersweet. That friend I lost. She was a writing partner. I wrote with other friends, attended write-ins, and engaged online a little, but I felt the loss of my friend deeply.
Also, I’ve been a Municipal Liaison for Ohio: Elsewhere for the past five years now, and I’ve relished being able to encourage, motivate, and provide safe writing spaces for other writers. But NaNoWriMo updated its website and made it harder for me to do my job online, and when I was in Ohio I was busy, so I didn’t run any ML events this year. Also, I’m moving in 2020, so it just didn’t seem worth the extra effort to learn the new systems and cultivate write-in spaces. So I was a terrible ML this year. And I don’t think I’ll apply to be one next year in Pennsylvania.
Everything has a season. Friendships end. We decide a job we’re volunteering for no longer suits us. That’s okay. But it’s also okay for that to hurt, to grieve the endings when they come.
So, this year’s win was also full of loss. And, it was the first time my win has not been based on a single project or revision but on five different writing projects. So that made it seem less like a win as well. I’m almost finished with the novella I finally settled on. I have notes and scenes for two other books in the works, but though I wrote 50,000 words, I didn’t finish anything.
Still, I celebrated. I climbed the highest peak in Texas. I’ve been working a little bit on my writing every damn day. I raised a cup of coffee to all the other writers who wrote this year, and I’m doing some reflection and goal setting for next year.
And today, I celebrate putting up this win post, even though it doesn’t sound very cheerful, because that helps me close out my November, too.
We write through the good and the bad, that’s what makes us writers. Maybe we don’t do just what we wanted to do, maybe we had to change course (several times), maybe we didn’t get our 50,000 or even 10,000 words, maybe we’re looking forward and wondering what’s next without a clear answer. But we sit down every damn day, and we write a little or a lot. We keep moving forward, keep putting words on the page (or taking them off when we’re editing), and we celebrate ourselves because we do this work even when no one pays us, even when no one reads our words, even when writing reminds us of what we’ve lost. We’re writers, writing is what we do, even when.
