Deep Into the Heart of NaNoWriMo

There is one week remaining for the NaNoWriMo project. Both Paul and I are well past the 50,000 words required for the thirty day writing timeline. And neither of us are yet finished. With so much time spent writing, I have had to create several different locations in the house for writing. So far, I have written in my office, in the kitchen as shown here, at the kitchen counter while standing up, at the dining room table, and in the living room in my easy chair while my legs are held up on a stool.

Sometimes I write when the house is in total silence while my wife is at work in a nursing home. Yes, she is one of those heroes during Covid19 that we all hear about. At other times while she is working, I will put on some classical guitar music to banish the silence when it gets too heavy. When she is at home, I usually write in the same room in which she is doing something else. In the past, I rarely wrote while in the same room. Don’t expect a logical reason for this, it was just that way. We both expected that I would write in my library office space, a small room next to the kitchen. And always, the door to that room was left open.

Writing is a solitary activity. In my earlier life, when actively engaged in raising a family and the demands of a full-time working career, writing was put to the side. When I did write back then, it was usually when everyone in the house was asleep, including my wife. As soon as someone woke up, it became an impossibility for me to focus on writing. The truth is, I just didn’t want to miss out on anything. Writing had slipped into last place. Now, even though we are both in our seventies, I still find it difficult to write for long stretches of time whenever she is in the house. There is always something I could be doing with her such as going out for a walk, helping prep a meal, sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine as we talk about her day at the nursing home, or simply sitting together in silence waiting for sunrise with cups of coffee in hand.

All three of us, Paul, Will, and myself, have lives outside of writing naturist fiction, full lives. Yet, in spite of having full lives, we are pulled to carve out bits and pieces of the day to write as if our lives depended upon it. And, in a way, I guess they do. Now, with that said, I have a story waiting for my attention. There are still two more hours to go until she gets home from work, and three more hours before we take one more walk into the winter wonderland of a prairie country road.