Stepping back

Well, I don't think I'm going to make it this year. I have 21,315 words, which leaves more than half the novel to go, and the month is nearly over. Possible? Yes, absolutely. Likely to happen? ...Um.

Here, instead of rewriting my entire thought process about it, this is the thread I had about it on facebook this morning:

Rachel is going to lose.

Alicia: NO YOU ARE NOT. YOU WILL ALWAYS BE A WINNER. ALWAYS.

Andy: Finish it anyway?

Nicole: No you will not. You are always a winner. No matter what. And remember, Just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing, writing, writing. No matter what you do you write, write, write :)


Rachel: It just doesn't seem like I can maintain my sanity and my baby and get enough sleep and write 28,000 words in the next 8 days. Not to mention participating in Thanksgiving, going to the temple, and hosting a bridal shower. I slacked off at the beginning of the month and it's kiling me now. :(

Rachel: It would just be so embarrassing to quit and lose after three wins. One the other hand, it might well be so unpleasant to put forth the effort to win at this point that it cancels that out.

I really want to write this book right now, though.... I'm halfway through. Maybe I really should keep writing next month, and just try to finish it with the year...

Rachel: (Last night I was all like, PSYCH UP, YEAH YEAH YEAH, GONNA WIN, and just as I started to write my computer went TIME TO HAVE A VIRUS, which rather destroyed my motivation to do anything for the evening. But I still stayed up way later than someone with a baby should, because I am a genius.)

Rachel: I know I shouldn't let this make me feel so very, very bad. It's like, dude, you had a baby. That's /supposed/ to slow you down. But I don't care! -_-

Susan: Not reaching a goal is not exactly the same as losing. It just means the goal was set too high for current circumstances and the height of the goal can be reset. That's what goals and goal setting is about. The act of reaching is always... a good side effect when it comes to goals. Some goals are more important than others. Whenever we miss a goal it is because we chose to work on something else that was more important - which had more desirable benefits. We can't juggle more balls than we have ability for nor can we run faster than we are able. Therefore we just keep swimming, and trying and strengthening and progressing. It doesn't change any facts about particular goals (winning or losing) but it does help us gain experience for our following attempts. You are in the 'spread thin' season of your life. That means you're getting a lot of little things done instead of a few monumental things. It's the same amount of work with less 'to show.' it's called 'motherhood' and it's a 24/7/365 full time career and you are accomplishing it in an amazingly effective and inspiring way. That's what I think anyway.

Leighann: I like to remember that Jo Rowling had a baby and wrote a book... and it took her a year just to write the first one. Don't feel bad about not making the original goal. The point of NaNoWriMo is to get people writing, working on that book that they always put off. You Are Writing!

First of all, as you can see, my friends and mom are awesome and supportive no matter what I do.

Secondly... Yeah. To reiterate, I think it would be deeply unpleasant to try and stick to this insane schedule, and it would give me very little more benefit than trying to finish the book in December--namely, it would give me another little purple sticker in my NaNoWriMo profile instead of a blue one. And...that's about it.

I would really like to relax. I've been longing for it all November, and just getting further and further behind. I love the idea of just resting, playing games with Heath again, watching movies and stuff without feeling guilty about the three hours of writing ahead of me. One hour, though, one hour just for fun and without obligation, I think I can do without hurting myself.

I'll try again next year. Maybe the result will be the same as long as I have young children. As long as it gets me working on it, I'll be doing something awesome. Honestly, I think that my actual fiction prose is pretty mediocre (though admittedly I've been on a steady diet of Bujold for like a year, which ought to make anyone feel inferior). But coming up with what happens next is fun, and I like having an excuse for it. Meanwhile, for an even less time-intensive goal, favoring quality over quantity for once, maybe I could actually try editing one of the books I've already written. Spooky new thought.

And with that, Daniel is awake!

Motion

Daniel is so cute. These days, he loves food. I can't eat around him anymore without either sharing or getting him something of his own. This morning we had a lot of fun hanging out in the kitchen, eating our two kinds of oatmeal, taking turns having bites. It was awesome. I love his messy little happy face going "ahhhh" at me.

Also, he's getting so good at moving around!! He can't quite "crawl" in the traditional sense, but it hardly matters. I just watched him belly-flop from the other end of the dining room, past me here at the computer, around the couch, and over into the corner where our video games are without any problems. Then he reached for the basket with our controllers in it, pulled up to his knees, and starting rifling around! Oh my gosh!

Everyone keeps saying "oh no, baby is mobile, you're doomed" but I'm so excited. The more his skills improve, the happier he is, and if I'm chasing him around I'm not having to invent activities to keep him content. Also? It's totally adorable. (Though I have to pay close attention, because he moves fast! <3)

Feeling much better these last few days. I had a really bad night, then tracked down a thing I've been reading that was making me depressed, and getting rid of that thing was a very good move. I might write about that later, if I decide it's a good idea. Anyway, besides that, Heath's coworker who's been sick for two weeks seems to finally be back on duty. I'm glad Heath got a billion hours (money is good!), but I was also super thrilled when he came home at like 2 yesterday. It's so awesome to have him around!

We had a fun day. Video games and laundry-folding and baby play, and Miles reading, and we watched the first act of Into the Woods. Then Heath took a nap while Daniel and I bundled out the door to hit the post office and send off invitations to the bridal shower for Michael's fiancée. It was dim and rainy and blustery and awesome. Then we went on to the consignment shop, where I bought a baby-sized toilet seat and a $2.50 copy of The Great Gatsby. (I go there all the time just to get out of the house, and I always leave with something rad.) I had Daniel with me in the sling, wearing his super warm adorable hat, and my cheapo umbrella broke and it got really dark, but I loved the whole thing and Daniel didn't seem to mind, either.

Later that night, Heath took Daniel out again to go to the local game shop and play Magic for a bit. Usually I love doing this with him, but this time I stayed home and ordered a pizza and got some work done on my novel, which was fabulous. :) We've been getting into this routine lately. The two of them head off, I chill and get some writing done, they come back, Daniel falls asleep two blocks from home, and we just put him to bed at like 8. Around 10 or so he wakes up and we put him in his overnight diaper and nurse him back to sleep; sometimes that doesn't work, so Heath walks him around while I read Miles aloud. Then the two of us get back to work on our novels.

Heath isn't doing NaNoWriMo with the goal of winning--i.e. reaching 50,000 words--but he is enjoying himself and he is helping me out a lot. I think having someone to do races with is the only thing with a chance of saving me from not making it this year. We did race after race after race last night, and I ended up with 3,400 words by the time we went to bed. (I was also forced to stay up for a while because I had to move the diaper laundry through, so that was a useful tactic as well.)

Anyway, the novel is moving along! As usual, I suspect that individual scenes are boring, but the overall plot development is making me happy. I'm still quite a good bit behind--17,343 words, when I should be at 30,000--but it's not irretrievable. In fact, if I keep writing 3,000 words a night, I'll catch up next week and be able to take the last few days at a leisurely pace. Either that or I'll end up skipping Thanksgiving and panicking out 10,000 words over the last weekend like I did last year. :)

So yup! That's how things are going now.

OH OH OH, but I forgot to mention: I am getting my hair hacked today! Finally! I'm so excited to not be so shaggy, and to not be so easily baby-yanked (which was really starting to make me cantankerous). My plan is to have it just a little past my shoulders, but I trust these stylists a lot and if they think it would look better shorter, I might be persuadable. Scary but awesome! I can't wait~

Okay. Fussy baby = naptime. Hey, maybe I can take one, too...

Stressalicious

I totally can't get the motivation going on this year's NaNoWriMo event. ;_; I'm like 8,000 words behind. It's my worst record ever. The words themselves are awesome so far, too, so it would make me very sad to just give up. I keep blaming my distractedness on the baby (even when he has nothing to do with it) and it totally flies. Agh. No! Bad Rachel! Also I pretty much need to ban myself from a) Minecraft and b) talking about feminism all day on facebook.

I have had kind of a depressing/depressed week. It's always so hard for me to write about that. I want to have good news to report every time I come up for air.

A lot of it was mothering related stuff. I'm starting to realize just how impossible this job is to prepare for, and how some of the best advice I picked up and embraced early on has actually damaged me. It's still good advice! It's just that I created an ideal for myself that I can never, ever measure up to, not because no one's perfect, but because the world doesn't work the way I thought.

Specifically, all babies don't actually need your undivided attention at every moment. Daniel doesn't. And I know that, so I'll often plop him down and let him crawl around while I do other things. The problem is, I accept this mentally, but not emotionally, so when Daniel starts crying from the floor, if he's not easily consoled I feel devastated and guilty, like maybe if I'd been actively playing with him he wouldn't have gotten lonely or bored or whatever it is.

There's another version of this, which is that sometimes Daniel (and other babies, I hear) will cry temporarily-inconsolably for no apparent reason. After exhausting all my efforts to try and comfort him, I can end up feeling pretty fried and unhappy and, frankly, bored, so I often end up sitting at the computer holding a crying baby and reading stuff while I nuzzle him. But I feel awful when I do that--even though I'm still trying to help him get happy, and talking to him, and trying different things in a sort of distracted way. I feel like I'm breaking the rules, like I'm supposed to be suffering with him and that would fix it, but I also think I would completely lose my mind. So in the end I give my brain a vent and feel guilty about it, both.

I think the hardest part of being a mom for me so far is the way everything comes in little tiny increments of time. Nurse for five minutes, play on the floor for ten minutes, ride on my hip for ten minutes, play on the floor, poop, get a new diaper, cry about that for a while, nurse again, play in my lap, play on the floor, play in my lap, cry for no obvious reason, get over it for no obvious reason... (The only exception is that he loves being worn around in the sling and would probably be thrilled to go on walks all day. This would be awesome except that I run out of places to go and things to do really, really fast.)

I've been a married adult for nearly five years now, and I'm kind of a homebody, so I'm really, really used to my time being my own, and accustomed to having it come in multi-hour chunks. Sleep for eight hours. Read for two. School. Read. Heath time. Video games. Big expanses of time I can stretch out and be languid in.

Nowadays, those stretches primarily happen late at night (even later than usual, with Daniel going to bed at 10 all this week). I can't stand to waste my only long, empty hours--the only hours that feels familiar and normal!--on something as boring as sleep! Unfortunately, Daniel is still waking up at the same time as usual, 8ish. So I've been staying up into the wee hours and operating while exhausted a lot, which leads us back to the part where I said I've been super depressed.

Problems:
* Lack of sleep
* Frustration with Daniel fussing, staying up late
* Guilt about my mothering
* Guilt about NaNoWriMo
* Plural instances of random people being insane/rude/scary
* My house is horrifyingly messy
* We're so behind on the comic
* Wayyyy too much candy
* Not nearly enough healthy food
* Still working on keeping the thrush away
* Still haven't figured out how to not be bored lonely all day on weekdays
* There are a lot of really, really important things I keep not doing.

Sometimes it is really hard to have feelings that aren't just "Blah. I am terrible."