Struggle

I've been having a rough few days working on my Nano novel - I think the creative drain has been showing through in my log posts as well. I have these really interesting questions I want to both pose and answer, fascinating scenes I want to explore, character depth I want to dive into - but no drive to actually get into them. It's been getting ever harder just to put words down on paper.

I'm worried that the story just isn't good. I made a decision early on to split the narrative between the four different characters, but having certain events happen with characters at the same time in different locations I worry has made the plot too scrambled to follow. I also worry that I've made too much repetition of information, thanks to the different characters relating to the events and knowledge. I've never been much of one for having more than one perspective, but I feel like the way the story is told, it's pretty important. Especially later on, when the characters begin to enter each other's dreams - it would be difficult to have only one perspective when there are four characters, each experiencing four vastly different worlds, fears, and actions. Each having to do their own thing to save one each other.

I can't exactly take a break from writing the novel if I want to finish it - which I do. I've failed to complete three Nanos in the seven years that I've been participating, and I can easily tell you that I have never once been happy about not finishing. I always feel like I have failed in one way or another, and I feel as though that failure is not to my story, but to myself. This is what I want to do, after all. I want to write. I want to share my stories with the world.

But I am going to be traveling for roughly a week starting tomorrow, heading out of country, spending almost an entire day each way on a plane. I hope to be able to spend a good chunk of that flying time working on my novel - we'll see how well that actually works out. But because of the combination of being up in the sky, wanting to actually take some time to relax, and knowing that I will be out and about being a tourist most of the time, I've decided I want to take that time as a break from the blog.

I've said before this isn't something I want to do, but with circumstances being as they are, I feel that if there was ever a time to take a break, now is it. Ideally I won't stop writing - I should be working on my novel - but I hope that not feeling the need to find something new every day to write about will help give my brain some much needed space. I've already asked a friend of mine (who I'm pretty sure is the only one who actually reads this crap - hey, how's it going?) to make sure I get back to writing the blog when I get back, so I feel reasonably certain that this won't be the end of the blog for me. Which is good. While it's been stressful and a challenge at time, I feel that this has all been good for me over the last almost two years, and I'd hate to let it go now.