About Failure (and Giving Up)

Hello, everyone! I'm back, 100%.

First: Camp NaNoWriMo results. Unfortunately, I did not win; my goal was to write 27,000 words (over the course of 9 different short stories), and by the end of Wednesday I only had about 17,100 words (and 4 different short stories) finished.

Have you ever reached the point of a project--be it for school or work or anything else--where the harsh reality of the situation sinks in and it dawns on you that it is physically impossible to finish in time? It's a weird feeling; like a mix of disappointment, utter relief, and that weird sensation that you should be working frantically on something when you have nothing urgent to work on.

It's not giving up, per say. It's more like realizing that you only have four hours left to turn 10,000 unwritten words into five different short stories. It's realizing that, in order to finish on time, you would have to write 2,500 words every half hour--which means writing constantly, nonstop, for four hours and hoping that you finish slightly before midnight so you can validate your word count (and also praying that your hands don't fall off in the process). And this isn't even taking into consideration the fact that you haven't even begun to think of how the plots will work for two of your 5 remaining stories.

So yeah. Didn't give up. Simply just realized my inevitable failure and decided to play Sims for the final few hours, instead.

In all seriousness, though, I don't consider this a true failure. I accomplished quite a bit this month--I finished 4 different stories (3 of which I absolutely loved working on, by the way), and more words between them than I originally anticipated. Sure, I don't get to print off another fancy certificate to put on the wall beside my desk, but I am closer to the end of this project than I was this time last month.

Bright side, people. Always look on the bright side.

There was more I wanted to cover, this week, but after writing most of it down, I realized that it made the blog post stretch out a fair bit more than I wanted it to. So, I shall save it for next week.


Until later,

- Justyne