NaNo On Hold

I don't think I have many readers. That's ok. This is a good place for me to get my feelings and thoughts out anyway. We are 12 days away from the end of NaNo and the likelihood of me "winning" is pretty slim. I am at just under 18,000 words. I haven't written more than 800 words in the past week because my sister was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. She spent the past week at The James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, which is about a two hour drive from her home (about the same for me too). They think they caught it early. She's home for the next 12 days to take a clinical trial pill and then back to The James for four weeks (maybe three if everything goes well) for chemotherapy. Then home to rest and try to stay healthy. If she goes into remission after one round of chemo, she needs a bone marrow transplant in March or April. This is the only way to cure her cancer right now. She has an abnormality or a mutation on her 11th chromosome, which is why she qualifies for the clinical trial. They have seen great success with the trial in the past year, but since they don't have 5-7 year outlooks yet (it's too new of a drug) they have to do the chemo and transplant too.
She's being really tough. She's hanging in there. We are all trying to as well. She will be home for Thanksgiving but not Christmas, which will be unbelievably hard.
So I may have time to write just to take my mind off things, but right now my free time is spent decompressing, working on fundraising efforts, helping my parents with the dogs or whatever else they need as they care for her, support her or take her to the doctor...and of course, just spending time with my sister and the rest of the family. I will take another NaNo challenge some other time, but right now it just has to fall by the wayside.  

World Building to World Crashing

I've been busy world-building this week. It's going ok, but I find myself struggling with my plot (and I had so many great ideas too). But the past week or so I have been a little distracted. My sister has been under the weather for a few weeks. Colds and general malaise. Then sores on her body that turned out to be a staph infection. Then her blood counts were all much too low.
We knew that it was probably something scary. We were just hoping it wasn't the big scary C word.
Unfortunately it is.
Today my mom called me at work to tell me that my sister had been given an initial diagnosis of leukemia. She's already down in Columbus at the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State University. It's one of the best places to seek cancer treatment, so she's in good hands.
It's crazy how fast it all happened. Yesterday I was world building. At 12:30 p.m. my own world felt like it was crumbling. By 5:30 my sister was situated in completely different world in the cancer hospital. Her room has a great view of the campus and the horseshoe (go Bucks). I will go down and see her tomorrow, but it's all a little surreal still.
I want to continue NaNo as an outlet for my stress, fears and anxiety, but it may be hard to reach my 50,000 words now.

A Strange October and the Start of NaNo

So I haven't updated you in a while. That's because on top of being a Harry Potter nerd and a NaNoWriMo nut, I'm also an avid Cleveland Indians fan. I've been pretty confident all season that they would make the playoffs. They did.
They've also won big.
So I spent all of October watching them win. First against Kansas City to clinch homefield in the divisional seasons. Then I watched them sweep Boston. Then I watched them take down Toronto in five games. Now the post season is bleeding into October. I wanted the Indians to win it on Sunday in Chicago. They've won everything else on the road, why not the World Series. Plus Sunday was October 30th, meaning it would give me one last day of prep for NaNo if I was done watching baseball. Nope. Then last night the Indians lost game 6. Which means I got behind on day one of NaNoWriMo. So today while my nephew kind of sort of napped (read: he didn't want to nap) I caught up on my writing. I managed to get 3,669 words down in Scrivener so I am on track to finish the 50,000 on time.
As you know I am also following the Master Plan over at Better Novel Project. That fine site also released some NaNo tips so I'm working on them as well. Today I tackled chapter one, which was supposed to include introducing and describing the hero and introducing the villain. I also introduced the wise one and the herald and I wasn't supposed to do either of those things until chapter 2. I also messed up some of the other elements and have about 300 words with strikethrough already. So rewrites will happen without even really getting started (next month of course).
Overall it was a strange start to a November.
And that's without mentioning the 77 degree weather!
The good news is, tonight is the last night of baseball (I said good news, I meant it's tragic, even if my Tribe wins the trophy). So that means the rest of November is mine to tackle!