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NaNoWriMo 2017 – Day 20

Wrote late, again.  What else is new?  I think I’d like to break this habit soon and write around 5:30 one of these days before the end of the month.  But I’m almost 3 weeks in, so this habit might already be set and to get out of it, I’d have to start from day 1 with another habit.  Or so, I hear.
Today’s output: 2569 words.  That brings me to 41874 words total.  Average words per day: 2094.  8126 words to go.  Average words per day needed to reach 50000: 813.  I’m staring down the finish line.
What helped today:
 
Writing about a familiar subject, poetry.  How I came to poetry, how it became part of my life.  I didn’t get to the part where poetry lost its place in my life and, to be sure, I lost my poetry, but I may work on that tomorrow or next month.  The words came pretty quickly.  And I remembered some really good people and times.

What I discovered today:

No matter what, that 12 year old, 15 year old, 18 year old, inside of me, will always be a poet, even if right now, I just can’t be.

What else was good:

Thinking about being in the teenage version of my bedroom, spending my nights writing poems.  I was happy.  I was listening to the Commonplace podcast recently and the host, professor Rachel Zucker, was talking about encouraging her students to think of their poem writing practice as play as much as work.  When I was writing poems back then, it was play for me.  It did a lot for me and it was great to remember.