The more I think about doing NaNoWriMo, the more I think this is going to turn into “well, I’ll give it the good old college try, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to churn out 1,666 words a day on the topics that I want to write about,” since they’re non-fiction and everyone knows that I do my best work on things that are not fiction, “let alone reach 50,000 words on these matters in thirty days,” but I’m continuing to think about it and will see where things go as it gets closer to November. Sometime in my life I would like to reach 50,000 words in at least one manuscript, and I’ll probably keep those on my computer or backed up on my USB stick, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do it over the course of one NaNoWriMo. Still, though, I don’t see the harm right now in giving it “the old college try”. Worst case, I add more words to one of my manuscripts…

The irony in that statement is that I do have a college degree. I have an associate’s degree in biology obtained from the local two-year college, and I finished it out with a GPA (grade point average) of 3.25 on a scale of 4, which wasn’t too bad given the depth of some of the subject matter explored in the classes that I took. I managed to pass microbiology on the first try, which was practically unheard of given the professor that was there teaching it when I took it, took and passed anatomy on the first try with a C, and managed to get a B in physiology finishing that cluster of classes out. I don’t like classes that instruct you to memorize things for the sole sake of memorizing them, but prefer classes that answer the questions of why and how things do what they do, which seems to be why I got a higher grade in physiology class than I did anatomy.

I would have pursued further studies, but my kids needed me at home shortly after I got my associate’s degree, and my own disabilities made it such that it would have been profoundly more difficult for me to pursue further studies in any of the fields that I would have wanted to go into. Maintenance medications for migraines are known for “slowing down the brain” in ways that would not have been conducive or the friendliest toward studying the material that I would quite likely have needed to study, let alone quickly, and the prednisone that I do need for asthma is well-known for “steroid brain” in some people. That, to me, would have been a disastrous two-hit combination that I did not need to knowingly attempt studies on.

At least writing manuscripts on a computer, I can walk away from them if I don’t feel “up to writing them”.