I'm not going to be making the 50,000-word count this year at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) contest and it's probably the best thing that's ever happened to me. I should have known after the first week I wasn't going to make it. I was struggling to keep up the pace, but was deluded enough to think that after I caught up by day nine, everything was going to be okay.

Heck, the signs were there for me to read before the contest even started. I wasn't going to make it, but I didn't want to accept that I wasn't physically, emotionally, or mentally up to the challenge this year. Writing may look like a sedentary occupation, but it still requires you to be in good shape physically, or else you will get mentally exhausted from the struggles with your body.

I have talked about my physical problems elsewhere so I won't go into the messy details, save to say that I have a chronic pain condition. In mid-October I had to have some minor surgery, a hernia repair, and had not considered how much that would actually take out of me. I had conveniently forgotten that once you have a pain condition, not only will surgery aggravate the pre-existing problem, healing from the surgery will take far longer then normal.

There is also the radically increased chance of post-operative complications due to pain. Starting from the moment the freezing wore off after the surgery, I was unable to move because of the pain and had to be rushed into emergency. I am unable to spend more then a few hours at a time upright.

Since I have a laptop, I figured I would just prop myself up in bed and write away merrily, and much like last year be well over the 50,000 mark by the end of the third week. Well that time is fast approaching, Tuesday is the 21st of November and I've not yet even topped 30,000 words.

There's still a chance I could come up with over 20,000 words in the next ten days — it's only about 2,000 words a day after all — but if I do it, it will be strictly by accident. I'm no longer shooting for any particular word count on the project I'm working on; instead my goal is to finish the novel.

I was feeling really depressed this past weekend about not being able to produce the numbers of words a day I had last year while taking part in NaNoWriMo. I had even written a long whiney letter to a friend of mine complaining about it. I was afraid that because I couldn't do what I'd done before, I might be losing my ability to write.

At one point in the letter I had written about how aggravating it was that it had taken me four hours to write a simple book review. My friend had very patiently, obviously, read the whole letter and wrote me back to me remind of something that I'd forgotten. It doesn't matter how much you write or how long it takes; what matters is that you write.