NaNo Go Bye Bye

It is with mixed blessings that I fell (and that how it literally felt this morning after five hours sleep!) over the finish line of NaNo earlier today. Earlier on in the week Dave had a heart attack scare and spent Monday night in the local hospital under observation. It was enough to set us all back as a family. My problem was that it came a day after some huge realisations about how I worthy myself as a woman and a person ... which unearthed a whole heap of dark and pretty unwelcomed 'stuff'. It also meant that to be with and work through all the subterranean stuff, I have had to begin evaluating and making some tough decisions about how and what I base my self worth on.

With all this going on, I've felt as though I've barely come up for breathe this week. All with 8000 words to go with NaNo. I believe this is probably as bad as it gets for blocking yourself creatively. I stopped sleeping well as I stayed up late, working desperately against and ever increasing block to make it over the winners line. Then my anxiety raised its grim head again, spurred on by the influx of phone calls we received (read: were sent through to the answering machine) as friends were checking in to see how Dave was faring. I stopped eating well and started living again on chocolate and juice. For the last few days I've actually felt horribly nauseous. It all became pretty nasty. Last night with a mere 2553 words to go, I simply couldn't do it. I tapped out a wooden and terrible 1000 words and then fell into the oblivion of a computer game. This only served to further block me.

I was devastated as this was the scene I had been carrying around in my head since before the start of NaNo - this is a pivoutal moment in my novel ... and it was written probably at the lowest point of the whole month. Perhaps it wont be so bad when I go back to re read it and then, *grimace*, go and post it up on the write stuff page for Fiction Friday.

This morning after writing my morning pages - I relented and pull up an old short story that had been part of my exploration of the characters prior to NaNo (and mucho has changed since then) but it was a good spring board .... and I wrote ... and wrote .... and wrote well. Then up came the magic *WINNER* page just after 10am this morning. Phew!

Having written all this I dont quite feel so bad. It's one of those moments where a problem shared is halved - but seeings it shared in cyber space it must have been busted into a million tiny byte sized particules floating about in the ether ....

Now to get the house in order once more (yes it definitely mirrors my static encrusted mental functions) and then sitting down to make some tough decisions. But not only do I think I can ... I know I can.