Regular readers and Twitter followers may recall my writing hiatus in February. Since I’ve been writing again for almost a month, let’s revisit that hiatus month.
Thankfully for my sanity and for my memory’s sake, I continued to allow paper journal writing, along with book reviews so I wouldn’t have to squeeze out what little I still remembered from those books a month later.
The writing hiatus worked; I wrote just under 5k overall in February. While this puts me behind in reaching my overall goal for 2016, I need “only” 25,000 words per month for ten months, which takes into account October’s likely lack of writing and November’s megawriting. At first, I found myself standing to the side as everyone else was talking about writing. Dreams of editing some novels, coming up with new ideas for this site (don’t worry, I wrote most of those down), and venturing into new types of writing filled my mind as I kept reminding myself of the writing hiatus. It didn’t help that most of my Twitter community consists of writers. I swear, following a bunch of writers on Twitter when you’re on hiatus is like still going to the bar after you’ve quit drinking just because your friends are there.
As for the guilt, I felt a little guilty at first for not writing, as you might expect. But as the month went on, I occupied myself in different ways. Playing some games. Reading a book a day at some points. Wishing spring would arrive faster. Wondering if I was a real writer since I didn’t miss writing at some points.
The problem is, I’ve barely pursued any of those ideas since then. That’s in part due to this month being about five times busier than a typical March, along with many more life changes than usual. (Most of them good, so don’t worry too much about me.) I’m a little behind on reaching my 25,000 word goal for March, but not so far behind that I’m concerned about reaching that goal.
So now what? My Camp NaNoWriMo project is primarily Wikiwrimo updates; like last year I’ll be counting characters instead of words for my project. Since this worked out well last year and I still have a lot to do on Wikiwrimo, Camp will kickstart my efforts. This seems like a good idea for a yearly Camp project, with the second project consisting of whatever else I feel like writing. Let’s get back to writing all the things.