Was it good for you? November, I mean.

I can’t quite believe I’m doing this.

NaNoWriMo-2014-Winner-Certificate

And I’m really pleased. I’m delighted I think is the appropriate phrase.

I am. Seriously. Dead chuffed, as we say here.

But.

It’s been a strange sort of venture.

I started by signing up on a whim. I do that. Whims are my thing. Sometimes. Other times I’m steady as a rock. I flooded my blog the night before the 1st of November with posts that ensured I reached 1000 posts since my blog’s inception. My apologies. Wine (or whiskey) and blogging as no-no’s should be in the guidelines somewhere. Perhaps they are. I don’t read stuff like that. Until later.

Like I never read the Nano guidelines. Until later.

No, really. What the hell was I thinking?

I have just spent 26 days in a place I’m not sure I would voluntarily revisit.

Except….

I’m going to.

For more than three weeks now I have absorbed myself in a world that my mind and imagination has decreed should be so. Make it so. ( Is that Star Trek or something? I’m not sure. TV and me are not on intimate acquaintance. But I think my reading here tells me that it is so.)

And you wonder why word count is not the issue for me.

No. My issue is sewing up the jumper after I have knitted it. I’ve always hated that part. Despite the fact that the patience and resolve necessary are worth it in the final product. One jumper. Hand-crafted. Modelled by moi.

But you have no idea how many jumpers I have ripped out and started again, how many times I’ve unpicked stitches and ‘fucked’ under my breath (sometimes quite loudly) all so that, at the end, I could model my creation.

I feel a bit like that about my book. So much picking and unpicking to be done. So many holes in the plot and sequencing. So much more I want to revisit and work on.

But the guidelines everywhere say….let it be. Leave it alone.

So that’s what I’m doing.

Despite the fact that I still have whatever number of days left in November, I’m letting go. Fallow shall be its name. Until January and February when I shall edit the arse out of it. And request patient readers to be honest and spare my feelings in the name of the best I can give.

In the meantime…..

* my seven year old wants to know if I’ll be writing over Christmas and if I’ve bought any Christmas presents yet. The answers are, of course, yes and no. Why lie?

* my husband thinks he’s a monk. Feel like a nun myself if truth be told. Would it be ok for two such characters to get it on? Frankly, I’m gagging. TMI? Hell, why end the habit of a lifetime?

*I need a break. Seriously. I am sick of eating on the hoof. Over the weekend I subsisted on Corn Flakes and Weetabix and peanut M&M’s (broke a feckin’ filling in the process. Why, god, could it not have been the Weetabix that did it? I could live without them.) Hubby was off in Robin Hood country running for his country while I bought the kids Mcdonalds and made pizza. ( Farmfoods. I never made them. Heated up. Truth.)

*I have lost more weight than I ever have on any diet. Looking good, btw. 😉 Well, once I get rid of the black shadows under my eyes and the haunted look from the same source.

*I’m gonna finish a jumper I started for me. Begin the one I promised Anna. Find out where I stored my kilt during the summer months. I mean how many places can I store things?

* I’m gonna watch mindless TV. I feckin’ am!

*I’m gonna go, on Thursday (tomorrow), to my next political ‘Yes’ meeting. Because I’m still Yes. To life. To purpose. To meaning. To all the shit that isn’t shit that Yes means for me and all who are still in the affirmative.

*I’m making a dental appointment. Well, you know why.

* I’m gonna BLOB! I never really blob. But gonna. For a few days. Then…..

*I’m going to explain to Anna and Louise and Rachel and David. To the kids who don’t live here any more. To Frank who is still trying to get why, (think actions not words), that this is something I have to do.

*I’m going to explain that even while it seems selfish, that….maybe it’s not. That sharing isn’t really selfish. And that that’s kind of what I’ve tried to do in my book. Kind of what I thought and was taught I should always do. How can that be a bad thing? Even while I feel that I’ve locked myself away and absorbed myself in a world that is in my mind. But is also too close to my reality. A reality I fear in many ways. But one I have huge hopes for.

* I’m going to have a second glass of wine tonight. I have been inordinately abstinent in the name of art. I feckin’ have! Just the odd lubricating of wheels.

One for loosening,

Two for slack,

Three for, ‘Fuck it!’, no going back,

Four for, ‘Did I publish?’

Five for, ‘Ach,’

Six for, ‘They’re faceless, what the feck!’

Seven is a charm I’ve yet to uncover

‘Cos usually by then I’m……

* I’m going to rest and chill with my family.

BUT…

I won’t stop writing.

I can’t stop writing.

There are a few days left in November….one of the oddest Novembers I’ve ever experienced. Apart from the one where I lost my mum five years ago. On the 30th November, St. Andrew’s Day when, just a few days prior, she told all the family gathered. ‘ I need to get my kilt ready.’

I don’t believe in coincidences. I used to. Now I believe in connections. And reasons why things happen. And in reading the right things at the right time, in meeting the right people at the opportune moment. In worlds within worlds. And a cosmic connection that says, ‘Make it so.’

I’m going to post in a minute or so a synopsis and bit of my book that I hope gives you a wee insight into what it’s about. But, more importantly, what I think we’re all about.

Make it so.