[AE.NiNoBilMa] Kindergarten, Week 4: Just write.
I said on Twitter yesterday that I'd be doing this week's NiNoBilMa stuff today, as my schedule for things on Monday was thrown off by outside factors.
Turns out that those outside factors and the ripple effects through the rhythm of my week and my day didn't stop at midnight.
Having decided to launch something under the guise of "this is open to everyone!" on December, I have endeavored to avoid adding any culturally/religiously-specific theming or scheduling to it, on the grounds that this undermines the intended message of openness.
But messaging aside... this whole very informal project is being run by one person, for whom December includes the busiest holidays of the year, and she is cold and tired, and also finds herself in need of some time and space to reflect on what she's even doing here and how it's going and how to refine the project for next month and carry it forward.
Additionally, while the calendar whose current month and year ends on Friday is also culturally specific, the end of the year is less explicitly religious, so I feel more comfortable deviating from my planned schedule to accommodate year-end malaise.
So I considered not doing any prompts this week, but upon reflection -- by which I mean, while thinking through my thoughts enough to write this post -- I have decided to end the month of "back to the very basics" by scaling back to the very basics.
The motto for this month has been "No rules... just write!"
So my goal for this week, which I'm sharing with you this week, is to write. I'm going to try to write a little bit each day, to write something each day. I have a secondary goal of having a complete story by the end of the week, with a fall-back goal of having progress towards such a story, but I will count myself successful if by the end of the week, I can look back and say, "I have written."
I'm going to take the time and spoons and brain cycles I would have spent coming up with mini-prompts for however many weekdays I would have managed to do it and instead split all that energy between actually writing and preparing for what new shape #NiNoBilMa will take next month.
The next NiNo post will be on Monday, January 3rd, with a subsequent post on each Monday up through and including the 24th. I'll be taking a break from NiNo stuff for the week of January 31st, as I have an important appointment on that Monday, and that will give me most of a week for a similar recalibration before the first Monday in February.
While I think I overdid it (at least given the otherwise busy circumstances) on the mini-prompts and Twitter writing games, I did enjoy doing them and I do think there was value in them, and I intend to keep doing those sorts of things periodically. And as we get away from this busy-for-me season and into the actual 2022 part of what I've been calling "NiNoBilMa 2022", I'll start branching out into the kinds of write-ins and other side experiments I described in the announcement posts.
To sum up: I'm a bit tired, but excited, and not burned out, and I'm counting that as a win.