Day 112 of 365: One More Week

I am seven days away from finishing NaNoWriMo. At the rate I'm writing, I'll hit 50k total (~37,000 since the beginning of November) just in time. All I need to do is continue my daily goal of 1,000 words -- plus the usual 50 to 100 words I somehow get in just at the last minute -- and I am set. If this were a marathon, I'd be on Mile 22.


However, like a marathon, even though the end is within reach, I genuinely have no clue how I am going to get there.


I've already talked about how exhausting keeping up this blog and competing in NaNoWriMo has been. November has always been a crazy month in terms of finding/buying a new car, finding out that my place of employment is going under, contemplating a move that would be a complete change of how I conduct business, and searching for new places to teach. And, somehow, even though winter is usually a dead time for modeling, I've been put on availability-holds and go-sees for everything from Neiman Marcus (which I didn't get) to Volvo (which I did, somehow. Still don't know how I managed that one).


But, somehow, I've been able to make serious progress in my book. But now, I'm at a spot where I've written everything that I planned out linearly, I have the ideas for the story for about 50 pages later to the end, and I have absolutely nothing to fill in between.


Writer's block is so stupidly common, and I've been able to surprise myself by just writing a scene to see where it will go. I've written scenes that were absolute bullocks and eventually scrapped, and I've written scenes I never intended to write, scenes that made my heart break for my own damn characters. And while it might be the exhaustion talking, I genuinely do not know if I have it in me to write out a scene blindly 1,000 words at a time.


But we'll see. We will definitely see. I'm excited by the idea of finishing this book by the year's end, but I'm also not going to beat myself up over it if I don't. Heavens knows that it's a lot longer of a process than just writing the damn thing.


So I guess, in a way, this isn't like running a marathon. This is like running a marathon, only to cross the finish line and find out you're in a StrongMan competition. And I don't even get a free shirt at the end of this.