No NaNoWriMo

It feels strange not to be doing NaNo this year, but I know it's the right decision.

I did (and "won") NaNo every year from 2004 through 2007, then took a few years' break, and picked it up again in 2012, which turned out to be a disaster of an attempt at an original novel (50k words, but no actual story).

Then in 2013, fresh off finishing my 100-story, 220k-word Clint/Coulson fanfiction series Tangents and Intersections, I wrote Your Faith Around My Neck.

In 2014 I followed up with another novel-length C/C fic, Urgent Care.

In 2015 I wrote an original M/M romance that I am still struggling to get feedback on.

In the spring of 2016, I realized that I was badly burned out, writing-wise. I'd been pushing myself to transition from fanfiction to original fiction, and I had tried to set what I thought were "working writer" goals.

But I was having a particularly bad time with my social anxiety, which made it very hard for me to move beyond the first draft of my stories, because I needed other people to alpha and beta read. I sent out my original M/M novel out to nine people who offered to read it, heard back from three of them, and got useful comments from only one. That kinda broke the camel's back, and I gave up. What was the point of busting my ass to write these stories if they were just going to sit on my hard drive?

After a 3-month break where I didn't write a single word, I started to slowly, gradually write a little bit again in August. I made another effort to find beta-readers for the stuff that had been languishing on my hard drive, and @ralkana offered to beta Snapshots on the Long Road Home for me (Snapshots is my 112k C/C epic slow burn story that has been in the works for 3 years) and @infiniteeight volunteered to beta a Person of Interest Finch/Reese fic.

I'm 6k into a fluffy fic about Clint having the flu and Phil taking care of him.

I signed up for the Clint/Coulson Holiday Exchange. I have a premise, and a first line, but no words yet.

Husband signed up for NaNo yesterday. NaNo is how Husband and I met, in 2004.

So it feels really, really strange not to be doing NaNo this year, but I know I can't. It's too much. It would break me.

Instead, I'm going to paint our kitchen yellow, something I've been wanting to do since we bought this house eight years ago. I'm going to keep working with Ralkana on the beta of Snapshots, and hopefully start posting it in December.

And I'm going to write at least 100 words every day for the month of November.