NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

This was my second WriMo, and my first win. Last year, I was a month into my marriage, and a rather frail but glowing bride. I was taking a class and I had no job, but I managed to preoccupy myself with everything under the sun so that by the end of the month, I had around 5,000 words. What can I say? I was a happy bride.

So this year when the WriMo rolled around, and I found myself back home, my marriage a year old and only 3 months of that year spent with my husband, my world a cacophony of meaningless tasks and soul-sucking people, my environment detrimental to anything remotely linked to creativity, I was sure I would fail. I wasn't even going to bother trying. I had nothing but my self-loathing and the unrecognizable pieces of my former happiness. And then I found out that the winners this year would get a free proof copy of their manuscripts, and a part of me I had left for dead came back to life.

More than anything, I wanted that proof copy with my words and my story written all over the inside of it. I was rabid and practically foaming at the mouth for it, and it became the focal point of my entire disoriented universe. And I did it, somehow, through all the other stuff I should have been doing instead and all the horribly empty days that stood before me, laughing and promising more unhappiness, more misery, and more time away from my husband. Because even if all the circumstances in the world conspired to keep us apart, nothing was going to be able to stop me from getting that proof copy.

And that's why I won.