Novel #20!

So you wanna know something? I'm tired. It was a rough semester and I spent the better part of my last week off sleeping. Well, that and being stuck in Christmas traffic. I'm never shopping on Christmas Eve eve again. This is a lesson I'm sure everyone else learned ages ago, but I guess that is what your early twenties are for.

I promised you chicken popovers today for the amazing City of Thieves book. This is still coming soon, but I wanted to share a bit of news today instead. One reason I've been so busy recently is that I did NaNoWriMo.

This isn't the first time I've done it. In fact, this was the fourth time I've done it, but only the third time I've won (A term I'm not sure I feel fully qualified to use. How about finished?). Last year I lost (A term I DO feel qualified to use.) for the first time in NaNoWriMo. It was my freshman year in college and I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with stuffz. I started a novel that was a disaster and quit at around 30,000 (which, from experience, is about when I hit a wall anyway).

This year, I tried again. I was a little wary. I'm still in college and probably busier than ever but if there is one thing that bugs me, it's when someone says they don't have time to do NaNoWriMo. And we've all heard it. "Yeah, I really, really want to do it, but I just don't think I have time this year."

You don't really want to do it. Time is an excuse, not a reason. Last year, I didn't lose because I didn't have time. I could have made time, despite working and having an internship and being a full time student and living in an undergrad dorm. I could have done it. But it wasn't the right novel, I was having other life issues that made it hard for me to get motivated to write. There were reasons that I chose not to finish, not reasons that prevented me from finishing.

So this year, I decided that I would do it again because I haven't finished a novel since I started college and I wanted to prove to myself that I still could, and that I still wanted to. One great thing about NaNoWriMo, to me, is what it encourages me to do. It encourages me to cut down on the amount of trashy TV I watch (One Tree Hill, anyone?) and the amount of time I spend studying for class and forces me to increase the amount of time I spend doing something I love -- writing. Because writing isn't a chore for me, or something I feel like I have to do to get a good grade and prepare for my future. Writing is something I do because I love it. It's a self preserving activity, something that has become increasingly obvious to me since I did NaNoWriMo in college. I love college, but it can make me crazy. And writing makes me sane.

I finished NaNoWriMo this year, reaching 51,000 words during the course of November on my new novel, Jacked. I'm pleased to say that today, the day after Christmas, I finished the novel in full. It is my 20th novel. I'm going to relax for the rest of the day, drink some hot chocolate and eat Christmas leftovers. In a few weeks, I'll start editing and I'll make sure to carve out time when I go back to school to edit and write because if I don't give myself time to do what I love, what am I doing?