On the first day of November, I started to write my third novel. It was an ambitious and very different project for me, both in scope and in content/tone. If you’ve read my last entry, Feeding the darkness, you’ll know that mid way through the month I started to have doubts about myself as a result of the stuff that was coming out of my writing.

It’s now 2 December and NaNoWriMo is officially over. My total wordcount for the month was just under 55,000 words, which is a fantastic effort I think for my third year running of the challenge. Disappointingly I haven’t finished the story, the characters are just heading towards the climax now. I expect it will need another few thousand words, I might even make it to 70k, which would be a personal best for me. The problem is that since Saturday I haven’t felt any motivation at all to write. I have used up a lot of my energy for writing by binging for NaNoWriMo and I’m starting to worry that I won’t finish the project. I look at other NaNoWriMoers and some of them have done truly ridiculous (and impressive) word counts, up to 200k words, and I think that I should be able to just push through to the finish. I’m sure I will because the completionist in me won’t let it rest, but it’s hard to remember to be nice to myself – it was a big effort, at times it felt like an insurmountable obstacle to churn out my words every day, but I reached the goal and learned a lot about myself and my writing in the process.

I finished my last university assignment for the year on 3 November, so over the last month I’ve also been applying for jobs. So many jobs. All the jobs. I’ve been using a scatter technique in which I apply for just about anything and hope for the best, I figure if I get offered a job and it sounds like it would suck, I’ll turn it down. As anyone who’s been a jobseeker will know, it’s a hard slog. I find it difficult mentally, because each time I get an interview, I spend quite a lot of brain time fitting in the potential position into the stuff I’ve got going on at the moment and working out whether I’ll have to squeeze or move things, and when I don’t get the job, or don’t hear back, it takes a toll. It’s exhausting. Soon, all things going well, I’ll be able to stop doing the mental gymnastics that are involved with job hunting and settle into something for which I get paid!

For the rest of the summer, I hope to get more out of this blog. I’ve had it for three years now – the anniversary slipped past a couple of weeks ago – and I feel like it’s been a fantastic source of inspiration for me. It’s been a space to explore different media, styles, and challenges, and it’s been a space for me to develop my own unique voice. I hope to spend some more time working on my photography, particularly I’m going to take my camera to a few more gigs around the place so I plan to put up some thoughts here on that too.

The weather is beautiful today, as it has been in Melbourne for the last week or so. I’m sure it’s just the city’s way of lulling us into a false sense of security and hopefulness but that’s one of the joys of living here. I’m heading off to the markets shortly to get vegetables and other stuff to make into home made preserves for Christmas gifts so I’m feeling good. It’s a bit annoying that the job situation is still up in the air, but overall I think summer is going to kick butt and I’m really looking forward to getting out and about, meeting new people and generally being awesome!

forward to getting out and about, meeting new people and generally being awesome!