It’s November 30 and we have crossed the official NaNoWriMo 2023 finish line!

Huzzah!

30 days of writing. And I am a winner! (And yes, I bought the tee because I earned it!)

Nearly 77,000 words in 30 days. I have a complete manuscript (albeit a rough draft that still needs work) that right now would be a little over a 300 page paperback.

While I have “won” NaNoWriMo 3 other times in the last 15 years (that’s per NaNo, but I think I won it at least one other time that apparently didn’t get logged correctly in NaNo), this is the first time I have a finished story. An entire story start to finish, prologue to epilogue. My other 3 NaNo “win” stories hit 50,000 words but I never wrote an ending.

Which reminds me, I should totally add “THE END” to the last page just for giggles.

Regardless, right now I’m feeling pretty darn good about what I accomplished this month.

And it has been a rather crazy month! I started off thinking I was going to write about one thing and ended up writing in a completely different story in a completely different genre. I suffered quite a few times from NaNosomnia. I somehow hit 50,000 words on Day 12. I wrote an entire book, and I’m still a bit in shock, not sure how that happened.

What I love about NaNoWriMo is that it gets my creative juices flowing. The synapses start firing and all sorts of ideas start percolating. I’ve already jotted down at least two ideas for two other stories, including an idea for the original spark I had back in October. I’ve also been keeping a writing/travel journal to help store all my ideas, thoughts, and observations.

Now, the key is to keep this going throughout the year and not get derailed by the day job like I have in past years. We’ll see how that goes.

Since I’ve been looking at and thinking about this story every day (and a lot of nights) for the last 30 days, I’m going to let this story settle for a bit and not look at it for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe until after the New Year. Or maybe I’ll just leave it in my writing file with all the other stories, half-finished stories, and other various writings. As I mentioned the other day, I sent my friend G a copy, so maybe I’ll wait to see what G says about it before making any decisions.

In the meantime, I am taking a breath and celebrating.

And for you dear readers, who have followed me on this magical journey, and because I teased it a few times, I have included a teeny, tiny snippet from my story below. Again, my ongoing disclaimer is that this is a rough first draft that hasn’t been edited at all. So please ignore any glaring errors.

Chapter 1

Lena Walker had been driving for hours. Earlier she had looked around her house and saw her work computer sitting on her desk beside a pile of notes. Her assistant Bryan had emailed her the daily agenda first thing this morning, which showed a day booked with meetings. Her work phone sat on its stand, the notification on both the email app and phone app both with a red notification bubbles, and on top of that, the calendar app had dinged twice in the last 15 minutes with notifications that she had two meetings to attend, at the same time. How the double booking had slipped by Bryan, she had no idea. If she had to guess, she had accepted both meetings and forgot to run them by Bryan. Stupid perimenopause brain. She had been feeling scattered more and more, another thing Bryan had been nagging her about. But really, it wasn’t that today was any different from any other day. Even if she had only one meeting, inevitablly some junior associate or even one of the other partners would pull her into some meeting or another. It seemed that was the way it always was. Day in and day out.

No matter how hard she worked, no matter what she achieved, it somehow still wasn’t enough. Not that she knew what she wanted. Or what would be enough. Then again, it wasn’t that she even had time to think about what she wanted. Work seemed to dominate her life. She looked around her condo. Beautifully furnished and decorated but somehow still cold and empty. What did she really have to show for all the work she did. Here she was, age 47, divorced workaholic. How did she end up here? This wasn’t how she had dreamed her life was going to be.

She looked out the window at the perfect fall day. A day when the sky was a crisp, clear blue and the sun beat down warm on the autumn colors, Where the daytime temperatures were just enough to go outside in a long sleeve but not need a coat. A day that she would once again not get to enjoy because it was a work day.

UGH! She looked back at her desk, the piles sitting waiting, the notifications dinging.

“Fuck it,” she said to the computer. Slamming the laptop closed, she grabbed her keys and stuffed her journal and a pen in her commuter bag that already held her wallet, an umbrella, a sweater, a water bottle, and tic tacs. She shoved her feet in the nearest pair of shoes, opened the door, walked into the hall, locked her door, then headed down the hall to the stairs that ended at the building’s garage. Her parking space, number thirty, held her sleek luxurious BMW, which she rarely drove because why bother when you lived in the city.

She pushed the ignition button and headed out of the garage. Instead of turning right like she normally would on the rare days she actually drove to the main office, she turned left. Her only thought was to get out of the city. She felt stifled, like the walls were closing in. Too much work, too many meetings, too much traffic, too much noise, too many people, just too everything.

After forty minutes, she was technically out of the city, but she still felt confined as the road was still packed with cars even at this hour. Realizing that beltways and interstates were not what she wanted, she took the first quiet exit, heading down a two-lane highway until she finally found a back road to turn off onto. Lena kept driving.

That had been a couple of hours ago. And yet, she still felt . . . well she didn’t know what she felt other than she just felt wrong. Yes, she thought, I just feel wrong and it’s not just the perimenopause symptoms. Back in the early spring, she had felt like crawling out of her skin, had had a short fuse threatening to stab people, and a terrible case of insomnia. It was her excessive mood swings and mainlining caffeine that had Bryan, mother hen that he was, book a doctor’s appointment for her and finally convinced her that it wasn’t just normal stress. She had learned that it wasn’t just normal stress, although her primary care doctor had warned her that her blood pressure was a bit too high and that she needed to relax and cut back on the caffeine. But it was her gynecologist who informed her that it was likely her hormones and had put her on HRT, hormone replacement therapy.

While all the symptoms hadn’t completely gone away, Lena had been feeling more like her old self. Until this morning. She thought back to her break down this morning and then felt guilty. I really should call Bryan, she thought. Digging in her bag, she sighed. “Damn it,” she said out loud to no one. She had left her phone at home.

Taking a deep breath, she focused on breathing in and out for a few beats. “I’ll worry about Bryan later,” she said to herself. Talking to herself had also become a thing since the divorce. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to unless she was at the office.

Thinking back to this morning, she considered her current life and contrasted it to what she had thought her life would be like. Twenty years ago, when she was just starting out in her law practice, she had thought she would be married to the love of her life, have a home, a husband and partner, someone to travel with and have some adventures.

Instead, here she was divorced from a rat bastard, currently single, and her best friend was her assistant. Oh, she had friends she could call to go get drinks or see a show, even take a long weekend at Napa. But she didn’t have that one person who was her best friend. Even more, she didn’t have a best friend who was also her lover, which is what she used to dream.

With her thoughts circling her younger self, she flashed back to that one summer when she thought she might have met someone really special. Unfotunately, that hadn’t worked out. The guy had stood her up and that same night, she ended up going out with Crest. Ugh, don’t think about him, she scolded herself.

She stopped the car, pulling off on the shoulder. Out the window, she saw acres of green fields and trees. Birds sang, and the sky was a gorgeous blue with soft white clouds floating on a breeze. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now came up on her playlist.

“So many things I would’ve done, but clouds got in my way,” Joni crooned.

Perfect, she thought. If that song coming on right now isn’t just a message from universe. She took a deep breath and yelled, “this was not the way it was supposed to be.”

Closing her eyes, she let the tears come. Lena finally admitted to herself that for so long now, she had been faking it. Outwardly, projecting the same happy life, same happy woman. She felt she had to project the perfect life, that she had achieved her dreams. Great job, fantastic condo, amazing life. Ha! She thought. For too long now, she had felt lost, internally struggling between anger and despair. She kept searching for something, something that seemed attainable if she only knew what it was. “And therein lies the entire problem,” she sighed.

Joni sang, “I really don’t know clouds at all.”

Grabbing her bag again, she pulled out her teal journal and favorite purple uni-ball signo pen. Placing the cap of the pen on its end, she started writing.