Oh Boy. Hello?

Hello, yes let’s start there. It’s been a wild month, and unfortunately not exactly in a good way…

I really wish I could tell you I was keeping up with word count and had faithfully put in my 1,667 words everyday on The Neverland Wars III. I would love to just sort of bluff my way through this, but it wouldn’t take much detective work on your part to find out I’m slinking away from reality, since I have a public NaNoWriMo profile like everyone else (it’s true! just join and you can stalk me / add me as a buddy … if you can find me BWHAHAHAHA… it’s not hard. You know the title of at least one book I’ve written.)

Long story short, I’m not working on The Neverland Wars Trilogy. I’ve never had such a bad case of demotivation in regard to a story, and despite starting at my title page all day November 1st, ultimately I decided that if I forced myself to fling my unwilling self through this book it would be a disservice to the story and the readers who love it. I’m not exactly sure when I’ll write it, but I need to get a handle on my head before I can steer it back to Neverland.

My life has felt distinctly un-Neverlandy this past year. There are few things less whimsical and carefree than launching a career in a field where the vast majority of people (even the ones who get in!) can make a full-time living off it. Book publishing and its associated responsibilities have me feeling more grown-up than ever, and I’m trying to conflate that feeling with the story I need to finish telling.

The root cause of my mental and emotional imbalances, however, looks like it traces back to a medication I’ve been taking that is having an unintended effect on my mood and brain chemistry. I don’t want to TMI here, so suffice to say I’m going to stop taking the medication and going in for a procedure that will fix me up later this month. The only is problem is that the procedure will be kinda painful, and I’m a horrible pansy when it comes to pain. I’ve never met anyone with a lower pain tolerance than I have (although my sample size might be screwy, because the only people I’ve ever seen seriously talk about pain tolerances are folks in the BDSM community.)

Anways, I’m a little nervy, and trying to process my present feelings, future anxieties, and reflections on the past year the best way I know how… by sitting down and cranking out a 50,000 word novel in a month. I’m behind, I’m struggling, and I’m going to pull this off. Instead of any of the projects I should be working on (and I have a LOT of those these days) I’m writing an allegorical novel about a desert metropolis and a hero in search of galapagian bird hiding in that urban jungle.

I hope everyone else’s NaNoWriMos are going well (it never ceases to amaze me how many of my readers are WriMos…I love it!) and that autumn on a whole is treating everybody well. Wish me luck with this crazy month… if I’ve made it halfway, I can make it through… right?

All my love,

Audrey