How I Spent My Summer Non-Vacation and How I Plan to Spend National Novel Writing Month #Nanowrimo

Summer Vacation

 

Vacation? What the hell is that? Oh yeah, it’s something people do if they have more than five cents left over after paying their bills. Must be nice.

I’ve never taken one of these as an adult as I’ve never had the money. A couple times my parents convinced me to take trips with them to visit relatives, but those ended up being things I needed a vacation from because family.

So what did I do this summer? Well, I watched my friends take vacations through the window of Facebook. One cousin went to Israel and another went to Italy. Yeah, I watched other people post pictures from Europe.

Italy has really blue water.

Italy looks awesome, by the way. They apparently have some seriously nice beaches there. And a Ferrari museum.

Not that I’m jealous or anything.

When I wasn’t watching other people’s trips to exotic places on Facebook, I did some freelance work, which was going well until the end of August. I was getting about 30 hours a week, and I could work whenever I wanted, which was great for a night owl like me. (Back when I had a job, I could never understand how people did the whole 8-5 thing. How do people fall asleep before 3 AM?)

But at the end of August, the client lost their funding for the project, which meant I lost my more-or-less steady paycheck that almost allowed me to pay all my bills. (I also sell stuff online, sometimes more successfully than others.)

So much for that.

So I mostly spent my summer working for very little pay, and watching other people enjoy their vacations on Facebook. In my spare time, I started watching Criminal Minds on Netflix, where I learned that due to all the financial stress in my life, I’m seriously overdue to snap and go on a killing spree. (Seriously, that is an explanation for half the serial killers on that show. “There must have been a stressor that set the unsub off, like loss of a job or financial difficulties….”) Don’t worry, I’ve also watched Orange is the New Black and prison is not the place for me, so I’ll limit my meltdowns to binge-watching Netflix and writing stories in which the people who annoy me get abducted by aliens or publicly humiliated in some awful way.

I did get some writing done this summer, when I wasn’t watching Netflix or throwing an epic pity party for myself. I wrote a couple stories on the theme of artificial intelligence, worked on my current novel-length WIP (work-in-progress), and kicked around other book ideas in my head.

Eventually I decided since I never get to go anywhere, I should go somewhere in my head, so I decided to do #Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, again in November. The first time I did Nanowrimo was 2012, when I decided to write my first book, Stupid Humans, in November…

Which I did—I started in November of 2012 and finished in November of 2014.

In my defense, the first draft was 176,000 words, way over the 50K required for Nano. (Also something I won’t be doing again, ever. That’s a lot of fucking words to edit.) So this November I’m going to write a sequel to Stupid Humans, and the word count is going to be a lot lower.

Since my summer “vacation” sucked, tell me about yours. What did you do this summer? Please tell me about something more exciting than what I did.

V. R. Craft is the author of Stupid Humans, the first in a #scifi series that asks the question, “What if all the intelligent humans ran away from Earth—and we’re what’s left?”