Guess what I didn’t do…

I won’t make you guess, but it’s awful silly to admit.

After working 30 straight days on my NaNoWriMo novel, after writing over 50,000 words, 152 pages, and with only roughly 5,000-10,000 words left in the book, I completely stopped writing it.

I put it away on November 30th, with pride swelling in my heart at a job well done, and with the promise to myself that I’d pick it up and finish it in the next week, and I proceeded to push it right out of my memory for the entire month of December.

This isn’t because I hate the story, quite the opposite, I love it. I mean, I like it. It’s fine.

And the characters are well thought out and believable…enough.

I don’t know why I did this. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve done such a thing. Leaving a story or a script at the final hour, those last pages, abandoned. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has dozens of corpses lying around. I wonder how it’s justified in other writer’s minds. Is it simply an idea that didn’t work out? Or was the old imposter syndrome too strong that day, week, month?

The thing that people don’t realize is that writing is hard and laborious and soul sucking, all while being our life blood and the only thing that keeps the voices upstairs quiet. After 50,000 words written, I somehow manage to stop myself from completing the book. Am I worried about the edits? Always. Do I not know how to end it? Maybe. Will it haunt me if I give it up? Definitely.

This post isn’t much of anything but a confession and a challenge to myself to stop being a big baby and finish the damn thing. And after that, maybe go back and finish a couple other damn things too.