Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana ~ variously attributed to Groucho Marx, Spike Milligan or Terry Wogan.
I left this blog for another last year, but have since closed that interloper down. Four days into @NaNoWriMo for this year of 2019, and I realised I might just refresh this old blog, for just in case.
NaNoWriMo Update: 14,000 words in. Not bad considering I couldn’t write much at all over the weekend. I was away at an all weekend softball state tournament, in high heat and humidity. I took the Ipad with the intentions to write, safe away from random softballs under the shade of trees, but even then, the heat sapped the battery up within less than an hour. First world problems, or NaNo excuses ahoy. It just meant I had a lot of word count to make up for over the last two days.
I began NaNoíng in 2009, in Great Britain at the time. I’ve since moved into a pen name email address, and with the complete new site design for NaNoWriMo this year, most of the historical data has gone missing on the many years I’ve completed the challenge, but it’s kind of invigorating to be looking back at it ten years on.
The Sydney municipal group is interesting this year. The new forum designs aren’t easy to navigate, with no connected messages with replies. It’s hard to tell what’s going on. Sydney also has a group on discourse, a page on the NaNo site, and a facebook (and probably twitter I suspect). Different local Sydneysiders are all chatting in different areas. I can’t even find/remember if I published my own introductory post anywhere this time. But what is good is to see that a lot of new people have joined up to write this year.
Because of the new site, there are no real progress badges, wordcounters or even headers to boast with this year. I”m tracking progress on a simple google spreadsheet, and another created in a productivity app, Notion, but everything feels very different this year from the last.
Ten years down the line, I am pleased to find that I can still sit and type for 5000 words per day without soreness, or losing my eyesight. That’s half of what I was capable of ten years ago, where I could add 10,000k wordcounts per day. But it’s still a good effort.
And I’m pleased with what I’ve written so far. It’s actual new words and story. Not the procrastinational aspects of world-building I thought I’d first get into.
Another similarity which is special is my writing companion. This year I have three dogs who accompany my writing, in various forms of relaxation. But one of them is Simon, my sheepdog. He is now twelve, and in great health for an Old English in his last golden years. We are told each year by his vet that this year might be his last, but he’s still here writing with me through NaNo. He was two, and a puppy still when we started all this back in Britain in 2009. There it was high Autumn, here it’s high Spring, but in both cases Simon is stretched out asleep in a sunny patch through the doors, probably wondering at this point when he’s going to get fed.
He’s right. It is time he was fed.