It could be likened to Ahab giving up his chase for the whale, except that I probably wouldn’t have a reason to write this if I were as crazy as Ahab. Or maybe this is how Ahab would have felt if he’d had to announce to the world that he’d given up the chase. To dispense with the metaphor, my NaNoWriMo efforts died in the water. The event is over and I, for one, fell well short of the goal.

For anyone who’s curious about the gory details of my abject failure, I won’t go into a long excuse-ridden tirade, but I will give you this much. During the second week, my productivity took a major tumble after a deluge of school-related projects that sapped my creativity and my motivation to work. This stumbling block, I doubt I could have ever recovered from, but I could have set a more reasonable writing goal in light of the lost time. My larger reason for retreating from the challenge is finding early on that I strongly dislike the kind of “kamikaze output” that the NaNoWriMo experiment requires. For reasons I haven’t fully examined myself, my writing process involves a lot of touch-ups and changes on the fly, which NaNoWriMo’s prodigious requirements simply don’t permit. Without being able to do this, I find that my work gets away from my intentions, providing me with little more than of scrap for the heap. It makes me feel shackled and it makes me not want to write.

So that’s where I’m at on that front. At best, there’s some good material in there that can be culled for my ongoing novel writing efforts, or even a fistful of short stories. It hasn’t been a huge loss, and I’ve found that I am quite capable of sitting down and writing for hours–so long as I’m not already burned out from having done it for several nights in a row already. I do plan to continue working on the novel as a hobby project, and I’ll have a much more fulfilling and fun time seeing where it goes on my leisure.

Onward and upward. Despite conceding defeat to NaNoWriMo, I am looking forward to getting into other projects. Fortunately for both me and you, reader, the end of NaNoWriMo and the impending end of the fall college semester will leave me with much more time to spend on I Evolved Into This!?, during which time I’m sure to thrill you with many of the delights I’ve proposed in previous postings.

P.S. I know that most of you revere me as an infallible god who stands on his pedestal as an example to aspire towards, but really, I’m as capable as error of anybody else. Actually, I calculate my errors to avoid damaging your collective self-esteem, which I realize is increasingly fragile in this day and age of unscored Little League games and guitars that tune themselves. In other words, sorry for letting you down, guys. I promise never to not do it again.

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