I should rip off the bandaid right now-I didn't succeed in my quest for 50,000 words. While I am very proud of what I did accomplish, it could have been more, and it should have been more, but I ran into issues that I'll get into in a second with writing a novel in November, and I didn't win. I'm a little embarrassed to say how many words I did accomplish, so I'm not going to do that, but I did cross into the 5-digit margin for the record, and perhaps most winningly, I plan on continuing on the journey of the book.
I realize in hindsight I shouldn't have told people I was doing it, or people I only know casually. Partially I did that the same reason I tell people I am going on a diet-to force myself to live up to those expectations, but when I can't succeed fully, I realize there's nothing helping me to succeed partially. If I didn't hit 50k words, in my mind there were nothing really telling the difference between 30,000 or 10,000 words. A failure is a failure on that front. That started to get into my head, which was a problem because I had several other angry muses battling it out already, I didn't need to invite other people's failed expectations into the equation.
After all, when you're writing a book you've been planning for 15 years, but mostly on the back-burner rather than on actively and with great relish, you run into a lot of self-doubt. "What if this is a terrible idea?" or "what if this feels derivative of some other book?" or "what if I can't write?" are all echoing in the back of my mind. I haven't let anyone read my creative fiction since I was in high school, and while I do write daily (the word count, oddly enough the thing I failed in the most, was never what scared me about NaNoWriMo as I can produce 1500-2000 words a day on this blog if need be), I don't know if what I'm writing is very good. I have had multiple friends either publish novels or produce plays in the past 15 years-people I used to talk with about "we're all going to be writers some day" but in the end that wasn't me. I couldn't get that demon off my back for most of the month, and it took a lot of work to get it off my back with the ticking clock of the calendar staring me in the face.
That being said, I don't entirely blame myself, or at least my anxieties, for failing me in the past month. In part, I blame the calendar. I don't know what drove November as being the best month to write a book for the rest of the country, but they clearly didn't look at my schedule. Last year I abandoned the project pretty quickly after Hillary Clinton lost, but I forgot that even in odd-numbered election years, I will spend days playing through the wake of the election, looking through results I hadn't noticed on election night, tracking recounts, and generally devoting my time to the world of politics for at least a week in November.
I also have been trying to kick into high gear my diet and exercise plan this year, and while that could happen any month, it usually happens pre-holidays for me, as my dieting and exercising are a direct correlation to my loneliness, and that usually peaks when I'm single at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. November is also historically a busy time at work for me (which was no exception this month, with a surprise project plopped on my desk at the last minute I needed to work a few late nights for), and it's almost always the hardest month for the Oscars. I frequently will see, between Election Day and MLK Day, somewhere between 40-50 movies either in theaters or at my apartment. Those opportunities were hard to turn down, particularly with an Oscar season that was backloaded with options (seriously-why was there so much of a late November/December glut this year?!?), and with so many movies only staying in theaters for just a week.
All of this is to say, November is arguably my busiest month personally. A better month for me to do a marathon like this would be March, as movies are scarce, the Oscar season (and 31 Days of Oscar) are over, and there's only a couple of primaries. Yes, work and diet might affect things, but by-and-large my nights would be free at least then. Suffice it to say, if I do "NaNoWriMo" again, it won't be alongside everyone else in November-I'll pick a less stressful month to try and achieve it.
That being said, the month wasn't a complete bust, novel-wise. I did get further in the book than I had in years, forcing myself to write it during lunches and over weekends. I also learned a lot of things about the characters, realizing traits that drove their motivations in select scenes that I hadn't thought of before. I changed, for example, one character's personality entirely from what I'd initially intended as I wanted them to have different goals as the story progressed, and found repetitive narratives within my outline that I hadn't noticed until I started to write the book itself. The idea behind NaNoWriMo, that you force yourself to stop using excuses like "finding your muse" or "writer's block" and just dive in is a good one, and it's one that I'm going to continue to push myself on in the future. I'll be sitting myself with a timer and a closed door at least a couple of times a week in the future to try and get through this and other novels.
I will also say that having my blog off of my back had a lot of other benefits that I hadn't realized. When I concluded it was impossible to just finish the book in one month, I continued to write in the novel but I also took advantage of the spare time I used to devote to my blog. I managed to finish a major awards project (separate of the blog) I'd been hoping to do for years. I have arguably never been so efficient in my Oscar-screening season (it's a miracle, but I think I'll actually be caught up to where I'm supposed to be by the time you read this, when usually I'm randomly catching Monday night movies at this point in the year), and I am starting to find more time to accomplish small projects around my apartment and with my diet. Worrying about writing two articles a day, and then also doing everything in my real life is a lot of work, and something that I hadn't realized was taking up an enormous amount of my time, and not having to worry about coming up with an idea or losing traffic on a day that I really wanted to work on something else was exhilarating. Not having to worry about the blog, which so often was the bottom of John's Hobby Hierarchy of Needs (what needed to be done before I started on anything else), was refreshing because I got to work on the top of my hobby pyramid for a while, and that was a breath of fresh air and a relief from the pressures of TMROJ.
The biggest revelation I had, as a result, is that I need to change the way I structure devotion to my writing here. When I first started writing on the blog, it was to force myself to do the Oscar Viewing Project, and to prove that I could in fact write 1500 words a day (the pace I figured I needed to write novels). That was really the only goal. I had no intentions of it becoming so devoted to politics, or to have written over 2000 articles on it, or to have gotten into more personal chapters like my dating life or my coming out experience. The initial goal was to simply track the movies I was seeing and to track whom I was voting for in each Oscar race, as well as to show that I could in fact write after years of taking breaks from such an endeavor.
By that metric, I succeeded. There are literally hundreds of articles devoted to either film reviews or ballot write-ups on this blog that I have managed to produce since I restarted this place in 2012 (in fact, there will be another major Oscar contender getting reviewed tomorrow). But I also can't pretend that there aren't additional blog goals that I have started to focus upon in the years since, and that I haven't succeeded on those goals.
Despite writing on this blog nearly daily, I don't really have a decent sense of who is reading it. I can see the tracking results, but considering the sharp spikes and almost complete lack of comments, I suspect that 90% of the people who are "visiting" my blog on a given month are probably bots of some sort. Even articles I know people are reading never get comments, or rarely tweets on Twitter, and I can't pretend that isn't discouraging. You can only write so often publicly without feeling like what you're creating is going into a void. Tracked against my initial metric, TMROJ's relaunch exceeded my wildest dreams. Tracked against any metric of the work I put into the blog on a daily, weekly, or annual basis, I have to admit that it feels like a failure. This doesn't feel to me as a blogger as a community since it's only me putting forth any discussion, and that's hard to endure knowing you're sinking energy into something you're largely making for other people and not for yourself, but those other people simply aren't coming to the party. Seeing how much more productive I could be with other items on my "To Do" list in the past month without the stress of the blog created a breaking point for me.
That said, I don't plan on quitting the blog. I will admit that was something I genuinely considered doing. Five years of something is a lot of work to sink into a project with nearly no tangible yields (I don't make any money off of this blog, and I can count on one hand how many legitimate comments I've gotten since January), and so I wouldn't have felt that guilty about quitting. But some of my initial problems, particularly with tracking my OVP thoughts (I'm certainly not abandoning that project's goal) or of having some place to blow off steam about my political nerdiness or complain about my dating life (I don't really have those venues in real life in the same degree this blog provides), would persist and I'd need to find some way to cope in the meantime.
That being said, I'm also not going to go back to the way things were. For starters, I'm going to probably do a similar task to what I've done before in that I'll be writing a lot of articles in advance on the last weekend of each month. I liked having to not worry about writing unless something struck my fancy, and I see enough movies to do this in advance. I'm also probably going to keep a different kind of cadence with the blog. There will be days that I do two articles, some days where I do one, and even some days where I do zero because I'm more focused on a different project that I want to accomplish. The biggest thing I'm going to focus on is that I'm going to stop measuring whether this is a successful community or not, and go back to considering it a writing exercise. I have tried for five years, expanding into different social media platforms and pushing this in different venues across the internet, but I think that I need to give up on that. If you love the blog but never comment, please share below or text me or tweet me, but unless something dramatic changes, this is going to just go back to me trying different things and focusing more on random thoughts about movies and politics, and being more a record of thoughts than me trying to grow a community. You might not notice that much of a difference other than in the frequency or types of posts I write, but it'll be a major attitude adjustment for myself. And it might just mean that I finally finish writing my novel as a result.
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