Currently: 10,484/50,000 words

So, it’s day 8 of Camp NaNoWriMo and even with a two-week headstart, my progress is abysmal 😂 Hitting the 10k mark on PROJECT CLAY means I’ve only put in 6000 words over a fortnight.

Y’know what else I did? I cut my April goal down to just “reaching Act 3” instead of trying to finish the whole 50k manuscript. But life is giving me not just lemons but a whole fruit salad this month, so it’s dicey as to whether I’ll even hit this lower target.

I will, however, make all sorts of fruit-ade instead of hating myself for not making word count. Pandemic effects, stepping back from social media, thinking about all the shit going on in the world, and waking up to the offline not-book-related goals I’d neglected for too long has done weird things to my perspective and sense of priorities. It’s pulling me away from writing, and yet I don’t mind too much.

But is it really pulling me away from writing, though? When I do sit down to write, I start to feel hints of leisure again. I feel the same sense of comfort and craftsmanship and driven optimism like when I first started drafting You and I and Chasing Sisyphus. It’s fun, it’s playful, and while I did feel echoes of it later during O, swear not by the moon and Iteration Eleven, there was a tightness in my head and heart that kept me from expanding into it.

That tightness is less pronounced right now. I don’t mind that at all.