The Sweet, Seductive Song of October Productivity

I have spent the last few weeks agreeing to do things, comfortable in the knowledge that time when I would actually have to do said things was comfortably distant in the future. Except now the future is almost here, and this will be my last week where all my writing time is actually devoted to writing-related tasks.

I tend to forget that October is a good writing month. The weather is pleasant and there is a kind of lull in the yearly commitments, a quietness between the festival chaos of September and the beginning of the end-of-year chaos that comes in November. Every year October comes around and I do a whole bunch of work and I think, well, this is nice, it would be great if this was all year round. And then I start making plans, because everything seems so achievable.

Then November reminds me that those plans are foolish, and December derails them entirely.

It doesn’t stop me from making plans.

Two years ago, around this time, I got it into my head to try and write 600,000 words in the space of the year. I largely did it to prove a point to a friend of mine, who believed it wasn’t a sustainable pace for a writer, and I failed rather spectacularly. I ended up falling short by a good 220,000 words, and after finally getting around to editing some of the short fiction drafts I wrote that year, the 380,000 words I did do weren’t terribly good.

Which…I’m okay with, mostly, given that I was either feeling asleep at the keyboard ’cause the sleep apnea hadn’t been diagnosed yet, or basically fighting my own brain twenty-four seven ’cause I hadn’t yet figured out that maybe I was a depressed.

Still, I don’t like leaving things unfinished, and I really don’t like leaving a point unproven. The massive burst of productivity that comes with October has started whispering its siren song to me, pointing out that November is coming…