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The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

There comes a time in everyone’s life – several times, if you’re fortunate – where you’re presented a chance to do something special. Something that is firmly outside your comfort zone, yet directly on the path you’ve wanted to take for years. For some of us, that chance is a once-in-a-lifetime event, one that defines the rest of our lives one way or another, and one that we will continue to look back upon with joy or shame, depending on the path we chose. For others, the chance is something that’s existed for years, comes about on a regular basis, and has taunted us with its brutal, unforgiving simplicity.

Everyone has their obvious examples of the first type. Deciding to turn a relationship into a marriage, choosing your profession, taking certain career paths. The latter is a more nebulous case. I’ve done something in this category before, when I took part in an Exodus 90 exercise. It was… certainly challenging, but the ways in which it pulled me back from the world at large and into myself, my faith, and my family was undoubtedly for the better. Come to think of it, I should do an article on this experience and, perhaps, go through with another round. I think I might be past due for that, given how far I’ve backslid. Something to consider that I hadn’t until this exact moment.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo is another of this latter type of event. Unlike E90, I’ve known about NaNoWriMo for… well, I don’t know. A long time. Every year it begins its laborious orbit into my horizon and I do my best to shield my eyes and look any other direction. Why have I avoided it for so long?

For those of you that haven’t been following along from the beginning, it’s largely because of my longstanding fear of failure. The lovely part of this fear is that it comes in two forms.

One, that I’ll enter this event and not be able to complete it. That’s a real possibility, of course. Fifty thousand words in thirty days is intense. It’s ludicrous, really. At that rate, a person would finish the first draft of most novels in two months. Beyond that, if you average five hundred words an hour – which is a respectable amount – it would take over three hours a day to meet the running average of one thousand, six hundred and sixty seven words per day required to meet the end goal.

On top of that, I’m a completionist. Practically every game I play I keep at until I get the platinum trophy (Unless there’s a set of trophies for multiplayer in a game I got only for single – why is this a thing?), and I generally don’t stop watching a show/movie or reading a novel until I’ve seen it all the way through, whether I like it or not. Why is this a problem, you might ask? Well, what kind of a personal writing competition would this be if it didn’t have it’s own slew of “Writing Badges?” Things such as Update Progress More Than Once In A Day, Update Progress Every Day, Wrote 50,000 Words In November, and certainly worse, Achieve Daily Par Every Day (Which means I can’t load a bunch into one day and allow a coast day). These shouldn’t bother me, but oh Lord do they. I want them. They’re dumb and worthless and I want all of them.

The second form of this fear of failure is that I’ll actually succeed, but after all that time spent I’ll have created a heaping pile of garbage. This has always been the more crippling aspect of this fear for me, and one that is accentuated by NaNoWriMo. There are simply too many words to pump out every day to worry about editing. One quote I saw when looking for this article’s header was: “Whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground.” Fretting over previous plot points, wondering if you’ve already addressed a certain aspect of a particular side character or not, realizing you probably should have added in a bit of foreshadowing before – these are luxuries I simply won’t have. As a result, it’s next to certain the result will be sub-par, if not outright terrible.

Why, then, with all of these issues, have I finally manned up?

In part, because of this site. Because of the reason I made it in the first place. To attack that fear, to realize it’s okay to create work with flaws, that no work is ever without them. To allow others to publicly see those flaws. I’ve said before that it seemed to have worked, and I think this is all the evidence I need to put any debate to rest. I’m past that fear, now. All that’s left is the desire to move forward. To give it my all and, hopefully, pull through in the end.

This post is coming a week earlier than I wanted, but I’m leaving my “End of Hyper Quarter” recap until the actual end. You’ll see there, too, that I’ve developed a new confidence on being able to complete. Suffice it to say, October has been busy.

I don’t know if/how people can follow my progress on the NaNoWriMo site, but if you’re so inclined you can look up TKeaten and find the fantasy novel project Catalyst – the first novel of a yet-untitled series. I’m excited to get started, and even more so to get the finished work into the public’s hands.