The October through December season has always been weirdly fruitful for me creatively. I’m usually stressed out, busy and following an odd sleep schedule but I’m also lost in my head. I forget people’s names from family members to friends in favor of characters. I leave this world and all it’s nuisances behind in favor of my own little happy bubble where everything is still terrible, but it’s terrible because I wrote it that way. I wake up at odd hours of the morn and night, no longer able to sleep because my mind can’t stop repeating a scene, or a sentence or a line of dialogue. I pace – back and forth until the floor is so worn it wants to cave beneath my feet.

Then November comes; for a month and a half I purge. My soul opens up and empties over the page after page of paper – or now over line after line of text. It’s never a consistent stream. Some days I write 500 words and other days (usually when I’m insanely busy) I write upwards of 5,000. And I sleep.
I eat.
I rinse.
And I repeat.
The world around me falls away, conversations muted as if i were underwater, interactions tucked away into a ‘to be examined in the new year’ folder. In my bubble of solitude,I write until I can no longer write. Until I can no longer stand to sit at a computer and type. Until my fingers cramp and my pen runs dry. Dried out eyes close. Aching hands fold. A grumbling stomach is fed.
By mid-December, I run out of steam. I cap my pen, close my word docs and set aside my laptop. In ten months I’ll enter the creative frenzy again. In ten months I will once again become a writer, instead of an editor and an organizer. In ten months I will no longer be able to remember my own name again. And until those moments – I so desperately yearn for – come again, I trudge through my daily life. I eat (not as often as I’m more prone to forget), I sleep (much more often and without many dreams), I rinse and I repeat.
For the next month and a half, I’ll write as if my life depends upon it. I’ll write away holidays, through weekends and in the bathroom. I’ll write on my phone, on my laptop, in my notebook and on any other surface I can find. I’ll dictate to Siri (poor gal, the only time she gets to hear my voice), sometimes. When I grab a coffee or a meal, another paragraph inscribed upon a napkin; on the rim of my cup; on the wrapper of my sandwich. I’ll down tea by the gallons, keeping my mind sated and happy as I drain it for all it’s worth.
I have a life to live outside of November and December and I wish to live it without being plagued by untold stories. I wish to be able to focus when someone comes to me to talk. I wish to be able to hug someone and pray over them without being sidetracked by whether or not my character can scientifically survive whatever horror I wrote them through or whether I conveyed the changing emotions in the scene well enough for an audience to understand without feeling like they’re being shouted at.
NaNoWriMo happens to line up with my annual purge, and so I construct a novel from the dust that gathered in my mind all year long. Little snippets of conversation I found funny or intriguing. Quirks of friends and family or strangers that I want my characters to exhibit. Cracking knuckles, a hard swallow, lisps, the delicate way a wrist hangs or the gentle breathing of someone sleeping. People are fluid and vibrant. I’ve never met a person who wasn’t a little weird, and that weird is what transfers to beautifully into the written word. All the information I’ve stored away is finally processed into characters, homes, worlds, and worlds of interactions, politics, and strife.
And when January comes ‘round, the novel is moved from an active bin and onto a shelf to wait until I can once again comprehend storylines. Some of them gather dust for years, others are opened up again after only a couple of months. Some will be scrapped, others will be set back up on the shelf. Those that age well are torn apart with a knife and sewn back together again and again until I’m happy and when they heal, they pass from my fingers to the fingers of those I trust. People with paring knives and red pens who reshape the foundation I’ve given them, into something a little more delicate.
So, welcome to my mind. I’m writing another novel with it.

(Featured photo via Unsplash)