I promised myself I wouldn't do NaNoWriMo this year. FINISH THE FOURTEEN BOOKS YOU'RE ALREADY WORKING ON! I told myself. EVERY MONTH IS NOVEL WRITING MONTH FOR YOU. YOU--ARE--A--WRITER. DON'T GET SUCKED IN!

But when you're in the midst of rewrites, like I am now, and everything in your current project sounds stupid and asinine and writing seems pointless, the prospect of straying to another idea for a few weeks is unbelievably alluring. Sometimes I forget how fun writing is. Well--I mean, it's fun for, like, the first few days, until I remember that I can't just cobble a bunch of jokes and dialogue together and call it a novel, and then I roll on the floor and shriek for the remaining twenty-seven days of November.

And so, with all those misgivings in mind, I went ahead and started a new project. It's a YA book about a weird girl and a boy with an unusual problem (no, it's not autobiographical, thanks for asking). NaNo is great for YA books, because the standard word count is 55-79,000 words for YA, and the NaNo goal is 50,000. I tend to be wordy (case in point: part of the reason I'm struggling with this other book is because I'm at 71,000 words and still have about a third of a book to write. SO FUN, AND NOT AT ALL FRUSTRATING!), but if everything works out, I'll have a normal-sized book completed on the first day of December.

Not that everything has ever worked out before. But there's gotta be a first time.

Then there's this other project I'm working on. 

Our town has an event called the Candlelight Tour, where every year five historic houses are chosen to be featured on a Christmas walking tour. People come from all over to walk around and admire them. It's a pretty big deal here. Our neighbors, who cook over an open fire and host parties by candlelight and basically live like they're in 1812, are on the tour this year, and they have asked us to help welcome people. They are going to be dressed up in period costumes, and so obviously I was like, MM-HMM, LET'S MAKE OURSELVES 1812 OUTFITS, TOO! Because who cares that I'm still getting over this weird sickness I've had for half the year, or that the holidays are coming up, or that I don't really need another project to stress over, or that I know I tend to procrastinate on things and so I'll probably end up frantically stapling things together the day of the event, the way I do. WHO CARES ABOUT ALL THAT? It's time to make some PANTALOONS.

So here is my basic schedule this month: Wake up. Write. Sew. Edit. Write Sew. Edit. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. 

Apparently I am only eating one meal a day. But THAT'S HOW IT GOES during National Sewing/Writing Month. 

Thirty days. 

Wish me luck.

(Also if anyone else is doing NaNoWriMo, or if you want to start any other month-long project, like the 30 Word Searches in 30 Days Challenge, or that National Hot Dogs-Across-the-Country thing, let me know! We can motivate each other by sending videos of ourselves crying and/or making up songs about how much we hate deadlines and hot dogs. IT'LL BE FUN!)