Missives from the Word Mines – NaNoWriMo Interrupted

Some of you may have noticed that there was no post last week! Sharp eye. I commend you. As it turns out, having a hernia repaired can throw a colossal spanner into the workings of your average week. Basically, I was knocked out with anesthesia right at 7:30 AM last Tuesday, the repair was done less than an hour later, and I was conscious/cognizant/freely urinating by about 11 AM, at which point the folks at the hospital let my dad drive me home.

And home was where I remained for the vast majority of the next week.

You’d think, with all that time just sitting around waiting for my flesh to knit back together, that I’d have gotten some kind of writing done. But nope, not really. Turns out that getting cut on really siphons out the creative juices. Also, painkillers aren’t exactly conducive to snappy, creative thinking. In point of fact, today is the most writing I’ve gotten done in the past week and a half, and it wasn’t even on my novel. It was on some random flash fic I got a false start on last Saturday before I had to take a very serious nap.

I always have at least one false start when I begin a flash fic. It seems to be a requirement.

Instead of writing, I’ve been engaged in a wide variety of bizarre, fiddly, often unnecessary and unproductive activities, such as:

• Reorganizing my Force of Will trading card collection by element and rarity
• Watching the last seven or so episodes of Outlaw Star¹
• Organizing my backlog of unread comic books
• Starting, completely unnecessarily, a new save game for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
• Cataloging said comic book backlog to identify missing issues
• Watching the entire season of Nyarko-san: Another Crawling Chaos W
• Sleeping like a man on a mission
• Wondering where the hell the other episodes of God Eater are at
• Forgetting to crouch instead of bend at the waist
• Listening to/watching the Game Grumps

Any one of these could probably have been replaced with “writing a couple hundred words here and there,” but I was completely unprepared for how creatively bankrupt I’d be during my convalescence. I couldn’t summon a damned word. Even Saturday, when I finally tried, I gave up a couple hundred words in because I was about to fall asleep in the middle of Whataburger, which is probably a really horrible place to fall asleep in. Not that Whataburgers are particularly sketchy, it just seems ill-advised to fall asleep in fast food establishments in general.

So, naturally, I’m drastically behind on NaNoWriMo, and my creative faculties are still slow to spin up despite all the crazy media I ingested last week. But I’m hoping that I can make at least a bit more progress on my novel before the end of the month. Maybe the stuff I spent last week watching/reading will compost into rich, mulchy goodness whence more words for my novel (or the flash fic, I’m not picky) can spring.

How about you lot? How’s NaNoWriMo going? Anybody else run up against a big ol’ hiccup (surgical or otherwise)? Talk about it in the comments!

¹ If you ever want to really, truly, definitively understand me as a creative person, you have to watch Outlaw Star. This is something that I realized in a painkiller-induced haze as I neared the conclusion of the series, which I have watched many, many times.