Today is Halloween; a day filled with tricks and treats and scary things.
For some, that might mean ghosts and goblins and a house handing out raisins instead of candy.
For others, that may mean having to go to work all day then soldiering the kids around the neighborhood for trick-or-treating until curfew.
For me, it means my beloved Chicago Cubs hanging onto their World Series run heading into Game 6 in Cleveland tomorrow (#GoCubsGo!).
Oh, and that tomorrow also begins NaNoWriMo and, despite having been abroad for the better part of October, I’ve decided to participate.
I tried to do NaNoWriMo a few years ago, in 2014. I know that it’s never the perfect time to write, but that year was more than not a good time: I had recently moved from the city to the suburbs and started a new, full-time job. I did a few days’ worth of writing before completely falling off the wagon.
That novel I started in 2014? That idea still lingers and, while I have those couple hundred errant words from my NaNo past, I plan to forget they exist and begin anew this November, hopefully writing the prescribed 1667 words a day until my little idea is a shitty first draft.
I’m not totally unprepared. I did an outline earlier this month (with a small push from a writing friend I’ve begun meeting with to check each others’ progress) and so while I won’t be completely pantsing… it sure feels like it.
And that’s scary.
But writing is scary. Life is scary. You win some, you lose some, you come back from being down 3-1 to win it all in some…
But you don’t know until you try. And try as I might, 2016 has been one heck of a year for me so far (I got a new job, got married, traveled abroad twice, moved back to Chicago, cheered my Cubs all the way to the World Series…). Could it also, somehow, be the year I finish the first draft of my long sought after manuscript, too?
It’s the scariest thing of all, embarking on a journey whose ending you’re unsure of… but most things worth doing are scary.
So let’s do this.
Brittany Drehobl 