cool and unusual punishment

she is not throwing away her shot (bang)

So, I have this habit of not getting on bandwagons. It's not that I'm deliberately a contrarian, but rather that I'm almost always writing or feeling guilty about not writing (or I'm at crew) so I don't usually end up obsessed with "the big thing". When I do hop into fandoms, it's usually because I found whatever it was long before it was popular. I watched the first episodes of Steven Universe and Star VS premiere on cable, same with Gravity Falls. My major two fandoms were just things I was exposed to as a kid. No big deal.

Suffice it to say, I had no clue what was going on with Hamilton. For a long time.

I did eventually figure out that it was a musical- but no one can afford tickets so we're all sitting on our asses listening to the soundtrack- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand admittedly I never took the time to listen to the whole thing. However, there is one song in Hamilton that I adore and it is Non-Stop.

Why?

This: 

So, this MAP is really. Really good. That's not the (entire) reason it captured my heart though. If you look down in the description, you'll see it came out on October 23, 2016... 7 days before I started my NaNoWriMo.

I stumbled into this while planning-

Why do you write like you're running out of time?

-and watched it. Ten times. Back to back.

Needless to say it was not a productive day.

The next day I flipped on my laptop, started writing, pulled the song up for background music-

HOWDOYOUWRITEEVERYSECONDYOU'REALIVE/EVERYSECONDYOU'REALIVE/EVERYSECONDYOU'REALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE-

(they are asking me to lead, i'm doing the best I caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan)

-then I worked on Deja Vu for two hours instead. Everyone in the new Deja Vu cast was fine with this. Everyone in Roses and Thorns was decidedly less so but what can you do.

Eventually I calmed down about this song but any time I was lacking in motivation I would pull it up and let it W A I L through the speakers. To this day whenever I forget why I'm doing what I'm doing I either pull up this song or another song I can't talk about because it's spoilers for one of my current projects.

That said I do not know if I'm going to succeed this month. Every time I'm not writing I feel like it's doable and when I return to the stories themselves I feel like I'm scaling a mountain with my bare hands. Finishing all three books in one month is insane. I've failed on so many similar goals before that it would shock absolutely no one if I gave up three days in and managed a decent but unassuming ~2k average for the rest of the summer. 

Let's be real, here. I'm doing this not to destroy my summer break but because I need a break. Junior year has been looming over me since the eighth grade, ever since I joined the crew team and heard the older kids talk about five-hour homework chunks or sleep schedules that less resembled schedules and more resembled afternoon naps... starting at 3 AM. (Usually ending at 5, because more homework.) I knew all of this going in and my immediate response was to take the hardest classes I could shake a stick at, schedule a fall rowing season over my first two months of the year, and the second my mother started prodding me about minute detail I caved and made my math even harder. The only bone I threw myself was to get out of advanced Art, and despite what a time drain that would have been, I feel like I just cut off a good chunk of my right hand to offer up to the Scheduling Gods so they can eat the rest of me a little slower.

If I can get all my writing out of the way now, I'll have two months to breathe. More importantly, if I can do this, there is nothing high school can throw at me that I won't have covered. 

And so help me, I am not throwing away my shot.

(Encouraging PMs would be great. I calculated out my workload for the next month and it's 74 chapters and an estimate of ~150-200K words.)