I had to flip a ways back through my blog (do you "flip" through a blog given that it's not made of paper?) to find my last NaNoWriMo post, and it was back in 2019, because... well... cancer arrived in 2020 and preparing for treatment understandably killed my inclination to do NaNoWriMo.
The month felt a bit odd, not doing it, and in retrospect I probably could have done it anyway given that my chemotherapy didn't start under December and it might have been a good way to keep my mind off things, but in any case, that's water under the bridge at this point.
Last year was 2021. I had a feeding tube in my gut, but I was feeling better, so I decided I would do stealth NaNoWriMo without telling anyone, so if I failed, it would be okay. No one would need to know. (Sometimes my ego can be a little fragile.) I was not happy with the 50k words I put out, as it was the first time my story had morphed so drastically from the start of the novel to the midway point (because 50k is not really a standard novel length anymore) that I realized the beginning of the book no longer supported the ending.
In fact I ended up changing the title, which referred to the two main characters, because one of the pair ended up being a side character who I struggled to work into scenes. It was a mess!
Though I like some scenes and some elements of the story, that draft has been entirely dumpstered (not deleted, but I won't be using any of it) and I'm rewriting it from scratch for this year's NaNoWriMo. There's just too much I'm changing to lift the same scenes without taking in the new context, and I like drafting far more than revision, so this is the best way given my writing style.
I'm actually a little behind as of this writing, but this time I'm okay with saying that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. It's been challenging for me to get back into writing post-cancer and just finding a regular system that works while also trying to figure out a new rhythm to my life, but I'm hoping I'll get there.
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