To save energy, I’m just going to repost what I wrote on the NaNoWriMo forums just now:

Sorry, folks. I won last year, but this time I’m merely a “participant.”

There’s a very nice and intelligent man, my ex-wife’s father and my childrens’ grandfather, who’s laying in a hospital room right now on a morphine drip because the cancer has eaten so much of his spine that he’s in constant and excruciating pain. If that wasn’t enough, I have two significant personal events this month, and work projects of significance are due to land any day now.

In all this, I find that my priorities must be reestablished. I can’t take care of what’s important if I’m tired, stressed and have sore fingers from hours spent typing every day and night.

In a weird sort of way it’s a relief, since I find that my technique for streamlining the generation of wordcount has left me within a few days’ writing of the end of my story. Well, what would I do then? I don’t know, and what’s more I don’t want to have to figure it out. It’s only a contest with myself to produce 50,000 words, and I’ve done that before. I learned some lessons, and that was my main goal this year. Mind you, they weren’t the lessons I thought I’d be learning, but life is often that way.

I shall cheer you all onward to whatever goals you’ve set for yourselves. Will I do this again next year? Maybe not. You see, one of the things I learned this time is that if I want to tell the stories in my head, the printed word may not be my best medium…