I've been awkwardly stalled on my Austen and Lawrence reading challenges for the last two months, so I'm gracefully bowing out of them until mid-December when I finish this semester and am not reading for three literature classes.
However, I think I am going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I had to quit ScriptFrenzy, but there are a few stories I've been sketching out that I really need to push myself to bang out into a solid draft. Knowing myself, I need to write to keep myself balanced (mentally and emotionally) and I haven't been doing it lately. I need to make myself do it because I feel the frustration of unexpressed words building up in me which makes me grumpy and, eventually, depressed.
There are several stories I'm between, not sure which one I'll NaNo- I have a story I wrote a while back but basically completely scrapped, over the sumer I made an outline that restructured it completely and even changed out some characters. There's also my short story, "Target Girl"- I think that could be expanded, as well as a few random ideas I've been kicking around in an abstract way.
Reading is incredibly important and I know I'll never have enough time in my life to read all the great books I ought to- there being created much faster than I can read them and so many were created before my birth- but in the end, I want to write a few great books that are worthy of someone else's overly ambitious reading list.
For a while, books were a great majority of my life and I'm at the point where I'm trying to balance out the time I spend reading with that I spend writing and also the time I spend doing. I think in the end this is a much healthier attitude toward books. I shouldn't only live them.
But, I digress, expect many updates about the story I choose as NaNo gears up.