But the last three days of fever and sore throat aren’t the reason I’m dropping out of NaNoWriMo a mere 8 days in. No, it’s much more prosaic than that: I have too much work to do. Work + active toddler + more work + housework = no time. Oh sure, I could something out to make time for writing. Let’s see: sleep? Well, I’m already knackered all the time, and despite all my best efforts I seem to prefer sleeping as long as I can rather than dragging myself out of bed while my angelic offspring slumbers. So that leaves either work of housework. We know what happens when I do not clean the house (SPOILER: the cleaning fairy isn’t real, and by the way, neither is the Easter Bunny) so that’s out.

So I could cut out early from work in order to write, quit maybe the part-time freelance gig I added on a couple of months ago during a particularly worrisome point in our financial cycle, but therein lies a funny realization: I’m unwilling to risk insolvency to further my writing career.

Huh. When did that happen?

The depressing part, of course, is that this means I Am Not A Writer. Which in turn means I wasted a crapload of time wearing lots of black and cramming together enough bad metaphors to fill not one not two but THREE mostly-unfinished novels, the latest of which I was really excited about, damn it. Er, plus the one I’m supposed to be writing now, which I’ve been planning for the past two years, which is even more depressing when you think about all the other things I could have been doing when I was scrabbling down notes and marking articles on Wikipedia and generally being way, way too full of myself.

I don’t know. I mean, I know failing at NaNo doesn’t mean I can never write again, but it’s a pretty good indicator of my commitment level. The way I look at it, I can either be willing to make sacrifices in order to be a writer, or I can quit whining about never having enough time to write. And I’m not sacrificing anything, am I?