NaShoWriMo in Peril?
Well, I think I can safely say that day one of my crazy story plan was a bust. I have two paragraphs written on a story. I first conceived of this plan over a month ago, before I finished my novel even. I figured it would be a good way to keep my writing production up while I’m taking a break from novel writing.
What I didn’t count on was a major depressive episode (I suffer from clinical/unipolar depression) which has meant, among other things, that I’m not sleeping. For the last three weeks I’ve been getting an average of 1-2 hours of sleep a night, with some 24-36 hour periods without any sleep at all in there. Some nights I take sleeping meds to get 4-5 hours of sleep in, but they zombify me the day after and leave me mentally and physically useless, so I try to limit how often I use them. This, sadly, effects my ability to write. The less sleep I get, the harder it is to focus on things or retain anything in my brain.
It’s very frustrating, because I know that as a writer I’m fully capable of completing this challenge. I have notes galore on stories I’d like to write, and my novel writing output is generally 2-5k words a day. But with my brain addled from lack of sleep (plus the other fun side-effects of depression), I’m finding it very hard to run at full capacity on this.
I’m not giving up, however. I might just revise the goal down to 12-20 stories. I think with effort and focus and hopefully my antidepressants kicking in soon (they take a couple weeks to really start working, alas), that I can still manage to get a lot done. So, back to work. Since I’m not sleeping, I might as well be writing. Slowly.
