Xarth and The Post-NaNo Blues

2 December, 2016. 511 words.

Last night I welcomed on old friend back into my life: The post-NaNoWriMo blues. I’ve written about this before. Here’s me from December 2011:

“The act of creation is so thrilling and stimulating and awesome that when it’s over, there’s nothing left inside but a black empty void of nothingness. For me, it generally manifests as a fervent desire to stare at the walls and feel useless all day.”

I remember writing much more colorful language about it, though. Ah, here it is, from 2012:

“That’s pretty much what writing a novel is like. You never “finish” per se, because there is always an infinite number of things you can do to improve it. In order to move on, you have to make a conscious decision to abandon it. I imagine it’s something like having a baby, except that instead of nature performing the normal birthing process, you have to do it yourself by tearing the child from your flesh, leaving behind a massive, bloody cavity of organs, meat, and bone fragments. Hrm. Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Anyway. This time the blues isn’t so much because I’m “finished” as much as from knowing that I’m not finished, and it’ll probably never be finished, and even if I do finish it, it’ll never be edited, and it’ll never be sold, and it’ll never be published, and I’ll never make any money from it, and I’ll never be able to quit my day job, and I’ll probably die before I get to retire just like my father did. You know, the usual.

So I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Then I played some Rift. I had this one quest where I had to escort dragon whelplings across practically the entire Xarth Mire zone and it felt like it took about ten years to get through that. But in the end I got some new shoulder pads so I guess it was worth it?

By the way I’m firmly into level 68 mob territory now, and I’m still level 67, even with Patron status. My Harbinger/Chloro build is holding up, though. Hotfix #4 even buffed the Harbinger a little bit, so I’m doing about 5k more dps. I also remembered to enable that one ability that uses charge to increase your damage, you know, that ability that looks like a blue electrified sword, which I’ve bound to Shift-Y. Right? It makes that sizzling sound when you activate it? I’m sure everyone knows the one I’m talking about.

To end on sort of a high note, I wrote another 1000 words on my novel before bed, and completely out of the blue, I figured out what the story arc for the novel should be. So the day after NaNoWriMo ended, I figured out what to write for my NaNoWriMo novel! But on the negative side, it means scrapping a lot of what I wrote last month. Oh well. They say you have to write a million words before you can be good at writing, so I’ll tack another 50,000 words onto my total.

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