I'm not feeling it.

The usual Nano win euphoria is MIA.  It feels a bit like the win is a scoop of ice-cream atop a Mud Pie, rendering the ice cream as inedible as the pie.

In spite of this having been the second worst week in the grieving journey since the end of September and in spite of having begun the week with a deficit that required a 3K a day pace I managed to cross the 50K finish 24 hours early.  Yet I don't feel like a winner. 

I just feel muddy.

This is partly due to having wallowed in the mud emotionally all month and then using that mud as the raw material for a story that is supposed to be fictional.  The other part is feeling like a fraud for having essentially abandoned all pretense of following a plot about ten days out and taken up residence inside one character's stream of consciousness as she cleans up her dead husband's trashed trailer home and ranges over the 45 year history of their relationship going back to high school.

Since it ranges in and out of the waking, sleeping, hallucinogenic and reverie mind states it is surrealistic even without the element of personal memoir mixed in.  It is most definitely a muddy first draft.

But I do believe that unlike many NaNo novels before, I will continue to work with this one beyond the end of November because it has become an indispensable element of my grief process.

 Backstory highlights and high and low notes:

2013 Together We Are Amazing

2015 My Heart is the Lake of Fire

2020 Who Am I Without You?

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sorting My Stuff

2020 Of Truth and Words and Rude Epiphanies.

2020 Sunday Serenity - Sads & Hugs - LOLcat Therapy - ROW80 Check-in

2020 In Memorium: Go Forth Ed and Be in Peace

2020 Sunday Serenity - Wallowing - ROW80 & NaNoWriMo Goals

2020  A Sad So Big- ROW80 - Preptober

2020 Say Me Else I Shall Not Be

2020 My Words Paid a Visit - ROW80 - Preptober

2020 Shadows of Our Former Us

2020 Just Look At This Mess!

2020 Do I Have Samantha Stevens' Twitchy Nose, Or What?

2020 Folding Up