I’ll admit it.

I’ve been wallowing in self doubts, swimming in the vast ocean of worthlessness for the past couple days.

I thought I got out of this mood yesterday, but it was a temporary respite on the island of Just Fooling Myself.

I wanted to quit. I wanted to throw in the towel, the bathtub, the filthy floor mat, and give up.

I was annoyed by my writing, unable to hear my characters, articulate their thoughts, and get them going anywhere.

I needed to get them unstuck, but I was mired myself.

If I had only made this “50k in 30 days” promise to myself, not involved my family (who live with my every morning estrangement until 7am), and my coworkers (who intermittently ask me how it’s going, bless them!) on November 1st, I would have quit.

It’s so easy to make promises when I’m full of hope. It’s so easy to make these lofty proclamations when the ideas are fresh and prolific.

It’s another to keep my word to myself, when yet another block arises, another mountain erupts in my path, when that voice whispers malignantly in my head, It’s really all useless anyway, why bother?

I also didn’t make it to any NaNo write-ins yesterday, where I could commune with other ‘Wrimos, who I would bestow the power to magically catapult me over my block and get me back in the game.

But I got up this morning, reluctantly heading towards the keyboard. The clock read 7:30, so I had ample reason to skip the day.

But it wasn’t 7:30. It was 6:30, as this clock had escaped falling back. I had a quiet house and couldn’t find a good reason to not write. I switched back to my daughter MC (main character), trying to get her off on an adventure. It was like trying to turn on a car with an almost dead battery. Whine, whine, whine, thump. Turn the key again. Whine, whine, thump.

Checked my daily word count after writing in dead battery mode:
564 > 627 > 1106 > 1266 > 1331 > 1331 > 1331.

I need some help, I thought desperately, looking up at my framed lithograph of Ganesha (Hindu diety; remover of obstacles).

I remembered @NaNoWordSprints, and how sprinting had saved me the other day. I waited the endless 5 minutes before the next sprint.

Forcing myself to wait five minutes created surprising excitement. I didn’t know what my teenage MC was going to do, but she was going to do something!

There is magic in a finite time, I believe, when what you want to do needs to be squeezed into a short duration, and you topple down your excuses, your self-maligning, and say WTF, I’m up early anyway, let’s go!

But the best part? I kept my promise to myself.