How I Survived Nanowrimo 2013, Part 2

This meant I only had two days left and 15,000 words left to write. I wasn't giving up, though. Thankfully there was no work on Friday either, so I set the alarm for 5:00 a.m. and didn't allow myself to snooze when it went off. I had work to do. I went out into the living room and started typing in the semi-darkness, yawning hugely with each passing minute. Josh was restless in the bedroom and I could hear him tossing and turning. By 7, he had run to the bathroom. By 7:05 it became blatantly obvious that Josh was violently ill and couldn’t go in to work. The worst part was I had been counting on him to take care of Scarlet when he got home from work that day and instead I was responsible for taking care of both of them all day long. It was a grueling day. Scarlet was clingy and whiny because she was in pain from teething. I couldn’t type with her because she kept slamming the keyboard. She’s tall enough to reach it when I sit on the couch so I can’t move it out of her reach anymore. I can’t leave the room either, because she sobs and crawls after me. Plus if she were left alone I just know she’d hurt herself. So I had to wait until her morning nap before I could settle down and start typing. I had been checking on Josh periodically throughout the morning, asking him if I could get him anything and what he needed. Such was the degree of his suffering that he wouldn’t accept my offers and needed to be left alone. That only happens when he’s very, very sick.

When I was typing away during Scarlet’s nap, finally feeling like I had made a breakthrough with my work and was going to get a lot of writing done, Josh staggered out to the living room and asked me to pick him up some medicine. I sighed at the timing and left him with the sleeping baby to run to the store. The whole day was similar agony. I couldn’t seem to find the time when I wasn’t doing something for Scarlet or something for Josh to concentrate on my work. Josh was very apologetic and I couldn’t be mad at him for feeling so rotten. But it took every ounce of dedication I had to write eight thousand words that day.

Saturday. I was exhausted, Josh was still very sick, and I had seven thousand words to go. Josh went to work for a few hours in the morning to make up for missing work on Friday. Scarlet seemed to be doing relatively well so I left her on the floor to play with her toys and starting writing. I was having internal struggle with the quality of writing at this point. It wasn’t very good. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the organization of events that way I had been writing them. I desperately wanted to go back into my already written sections to edit them. But part of the tips for succeeding at Nanowrimo is to ignore the editor within you until you get the words on the page. You can go back in to rework them after the month is over and you’ve won. So I struggled through my temptations and ignored my terrible, awful words. I just kept writing.

Scarlet interrupted me often. She’s very needy right now. Josh came home when he was feeling too sick to stay at work. Scarlet began sobbing inexplicably whenever I turned back to the computer. I took her for a drive until she fell asleep and brought her back to take a nap, but she stayed in her room and cried for forty minutes before I gave up and took her out. The day was falling apart and I was falling behind. With four thousand words to go, I went to the Nanowrimo site to check on my partner-in-crime Megan. She was completing this challenge with me and she too had experienced word-stopping troubles in the middle of the month. By the power of her awesome, she had written the remaining three thousand words necessary to be crowned a winner for Nanowrimo 2013. I was so impressed with her. It felt like a victory for me to see that she had done it.

That was the fire I needed under me to keep slogging through the editor-doubts and slow-typing. In one hour I had dragged out 800 words. In another hour I had another 1200. I was building steam now. I knew I needed to write three more pages—1700 more words—to hit my goal. That’s when I slammed into my wall again. I could not for the life of me write anything else. I didn’t want to. The will to keep going had completely vanished and I just wanted to play with Scarlet in the last hour before her bedtime. What did I care if I finished or not? I was tired, I was stressed, and I had no more ideas in me to put down on paper. I just wanted to quit.

But the thought of having 48,300 words on December 1^st so offended me that I pushed through the wall. No one quits that close to the finish line. After a page of writing I latched onto an idea that carried me rapidly through the next couple pages. I stopped after Josh had put Scarlet to bed to check my word count. I had done it. I had hit my goal: 51,050 proud words were staring up at me from the white screen. Somehow despite the setbacks I had hit my two major November goals of completing my MBA and finishing Nanowrimo by 7:30 p.m. on November 30^th.

That night I went out to the mall to revel in some Black Friday (er, Saturday) shopping to celebrate. I picked up some shoes for me (a Christmas present from Josh—I buy ‘em, he wraps ‘em) and then dumped all my money at Carter’s for clothes for Scarlet. Now, of course the novel is not yet finished. My stories take about 100,000 words to complete, so I'm guessing I'm about halfway there. But that's a goal for December. I had met my goal for November. And it was the perfect ending to an incredible, impossible, triumphant month.