NaNoWriMo & Me & 52,000 words

I finished. I reached 50,000 words. But I'm not done yet.

It was easy to flesh out my coma memories. It was also easy to slip into them. I haven't tried to bring them to the surface since I wrote down my outline after my discharge. The more I wrote the more I remembered.

NaNoWriMo became more of my recovery therapy than I anticipated. I spent my mornings pulling posts from social media during my time in the coma. I split posts up into groups and months. I fleshed out the spaces between. And I fell into my own rabbit hole and wrote down that journey.

All the little shadowed nooks and crannies in my mind got turned upside down and inside out. My coma journey was like my own shamanic-underworld-experience. While I do not endorse the method to anyone I am considering it a gift from this accident and riding it.

As far as the work of writing, I maintained my speed and reached the goal. I will spend the winter finishing the coma experiences and then work on the night terrors over the spring. I am hoping to add in the recovery posts and weed the important ones out of them over the summer. By fall I mean to have a read-worthy draft ready.

NaNoWriMo & Me

This year for National Novel Writing Month I am writing out a manuscript of my coma experiences and subsequent night terrors from my accident.

I am just on track. It is day 15 and I am at 25,600 words. But I am just on track. I need two good days of nothing but writing this week to get a jump ahead.

Writing in recovery is hard. And it's been hard to keep up with it when I keep falling asleep with my hand on the mouse. The want is there but the physical ability is not.

I'm not upset about it. I expected it. The goal is not 50,000 words. It's working on it every day. It's chasing the finish line. But I'm not where I thought I'd be, even after cutting myself some slack.

I feel worse off than last year.

And my wife reminds me that I have been undergoing surgeries this year, which is different from last year.

So there's that.

But I am on the track and plugging along. I hope that by putting these stories to paper, so to speak, they will release some of the hold they have on my every day. I appreciate the tool nanowrimo has been for me in my recovery.

NaNoWriMo: Daughter of Margaret

It's National Novel Writing Month and if you are doing it then you are also feverishly pounding words into the keyboard, praying that at the end of fifty thousand words some of them make sense. I started participating years ago for the discipline of it, to train myself to do distance running, rather than a series of sprints.

I've tried a different genre of fiction each year, from science fiction to classic fantasy to urban fantasy to literary fiction to supernatural horror. And this year I went a different route. This year I'm working on non-fiction.

I'm writing out the story of the worlds I crossed while comatose. I'm drawing the ways I was able to maintain a positive outlook after I woke up. I'm being vulnerable and sharing a deep truth I would be a fool to ignore. Why waste a good life-defining experience with denial?

I'm writing a lot. The more I flesh out the more my brain remembers. I think if I wrote out every detail of my coma memories, it would tell a year-long tale, far longer than the three weeks I was under. That's disturbing, but also true. I accept it and move on. And it's why I'm writing it.

Maybe after giving it breath, some of it will fall away.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, you can find me as Daughter of Margaret. I allowed myself a moment to write this out because I'm totally including it in today's word count. But now it's back to my non-fiction. The title is still a work in progress. It doesn't have a name yet.