Amygdalia's Blog

Brains

I spent the month of October dutifully prepping for NaNoWriMo, plugging away, doing every exercise, learning so much about my characters, their story, their world, their everything!  November blew past, and I finished my NaNo novel in 17 days, which completely blew my mind. Did I ever imagine I could do that? Not in a million years!  Not if you paid me! I wanted it  . . . I wanted it bad!  But I wasn't sure I had it in me. Now I know. I made myself step away from it for a few weeks, and not look at the work as a whole, though I spent the intervening weeks thinking about it a lot, replotting and reworking it in my brain, so that  by the time I sat down to do the first rewrite I already knew it would be vastly different when I made it through. That was December. January saw the third draft blow through, and brought me some excellent feedback from several sources. Now I know where my weak points are. Unfortunately, my brain is no longer cooperating with me, and the idea of sitting down to compile all of those various comments and suggestions, let along incorporate them into my manuscript, is daunting.

Here's what I've learned ... I thought maybe I was making an excuse, but I'm not so sure. I had started taking a new medication back in October, and I needed to stop taking it in . . . early January? Anyway, I began a new medication later in January which has made me exceedingly sleepy, and I'm honestly concerned about the way it's allowing me to focus/not focus. I did an experiment with sudoku yesterday, after finding myself very frustrated trying to finish some puzzles. I think I'm trying to re-train by brain to focus a little. I hope it works. This really sucks.