So, today is the first day of December. That means that Polyglot NaNoWriMo is over for another year, and I suppose you’re wondering how and what I ended up doing. Well, I toyed with the idea of trying to teach myself French through the medium of writing… but in the end, I figured it would be enough of a struggle to try and do it in a language that I knew well, so I thought I’d give it another go in Swedish. And it worked pretty well for the first… thirteen or so days. And then, I made a terrible mistake. I took some time off and went on holiday with a friend.
Now… to call it a holiday would be doing it a disservice. We went to London, which I’m not overly comfortable with in the first place as it’s so big and busy, it really freaks me out. And we’d packed so many activities into our few days there that I felt like I was always rushing to the next thing – I barely had time to think, let alone whack my phone out and start writing in Swedish. I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it, because it was fantastic – we went to the Saatchi Gallery to see an exhibition of things found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, then rounded off the evening by going to see Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre.
The exhibition was fascinating to say the absolute least, and my trigger finger has been getting awfully itchy looking at the copy of ‘Complete Middle Egyptian’ on my Amazon wishlist. I’d seen Wicked twice before, but this was hands down the best experience I’ve had seeing a musical. The next day we got up early again and headed out to Leavesden for the Harry Potter Studio Tour… I’m something of a Potterhead (and the Understatement of the Century Award goes to…) and this was a dream come true. I even got to try butterbeer for the first time, which I have to say – don’t believe the propaganda, it isn’t as disgusting as everyone seems to say it is. All in all it was a great weekend. But there wasn’t a lot of time left over for writing, sadly.
Taking a four day break is like the kiss of death for NaNoWriMo. As soon as you get out of the habit, you just don’t want to get back into it. Or that’s how it is for me, anyway – I can still be motivated and having ideas but the idea of actually sitting down and writing them becomes impossible. I did find a neat app that converts handwriting into copyable text, so I actually wrote another thousand words or so using that – the novelty helped, it would seem. But I still missed the target, so I have to say that I lost NaNoWriMo this year.
This isn’t the first time I’ve lost, but this time feels… different. In previous years, I’ve been proud of the work I’ve done, and I’ve been completely disheartened by ‘losing’. This time… the stuff that I’ve written is honestly crap. It’s grammatically shaky and my vocabulary is that of a seven year old. But I really like the story – so I think with some editing, I could actually have something decent and worth reading. And I’m finding that really motivating. I’ve got just over four thousand words of a decent story, which I fully intend to continue. So I feel pretty good about it! Watch this space, I might be posting part of it here in the near future.
How did you guys get on, whether you were doing NaNoWriMo proper or the Polyglot version? I’d love to hear your stories. Feel free to leave a comment or you can find me on Twitter and Instagram as @sprakskatan. As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all in the new year.
– J.
den språkliga skatan 