July is supposed to be for Camp NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is when writers come up with a goal (mine was to write 25 000 words of my novel in July, for example) and set out to reach that goal. Mine hasn’t gone too well. I have written exactly zero words of my big bad book since the beginning of July.

At first it was easy to justify. Canada Day was a holiday, therefore why should I write? On the second, I just ended up particularly busy. On the third I met up with a friend, I’d write my big bad book afterward…

But after hanging out with my friend for a while, an idea popped into my head. A this-has-nothing-to-do-with-my-big-bad-book idea that I knew would derail any of my novel writing plans if I went for it. And it has.

I said “sorry I just had an idea I gotta go” and goodbye to my friend, then proceeded to sit in a local café that had recently moved locations and didn’t have their wifi up yet, and I had food and outlined the first two episodes of a webseries. I finished writing the first episode five days later.

It’s good to have goals. It’s good to meet those goals. But I don’t regret putting my novel off in order to write this web series pilot. My novel’s been ongoing for nearly a decade, and I do want to get it done as soon as I can (lol), but I have other ideas, and if I waited until I was done my novel to write anything else, I’d never write anything else. But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on my book, either. It’s just more of a constant, and a web series pilot script that only takes a week to write isn’t going to be the end of it.

Now I’ve just got to write five more episodes of this web series and I can go back to my novel.

 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.