Freeing Myself From The Election Addiction

To return to the NaNoWriMo obsession.

King or Kornacki?

Pennsylvania or Arizona?

Did you sleep last night?

Has it been called yet?

Don’t bother me about dinner, kids. Eat some cereal. I’m following the election.

Please tell me I’m not the only obsessive-compulsive who spit on every responsibility to pin my bohonkus to the couch and watch every nail-biting minute of the election returns.

What’s a commitment to get my novel uploaded to Kindle by COB last Friday? So what if I’ve pledged to take on NaNoWriMo again and inspire my readers with daily accounts of my progress? Call my friends and family to let them know I’m still alive? If it mattered, they could call me. They’re probably too busy scanning Leslie Jones’ Twitter account to see if she’s posted something new and funny about her crush on Steve Kornacki to worry about whether I’ve caught the virus yet.

Such is the life of a political junky, and who isn’t in this contentious presidential election cycle?

We’d been warned we might not get a result on Tuesday evening. So we primed ourselves to wait until Wednesday morning. But seriously Pennsylvania? You’re trafficking in cruel and unusual punishment now? Making the rest of the country wait five days for the answer to the burning question: What will the First Lady wear to the Inauguration Ball? Oh, yeah. By the way, we also need to know the name of the next FLOTUS.

Procrastination is no way to boost your tourist numbers when Fauci tells us we can unbuckle our seat belts and move about the country again.

I’m going to hop in my RV and visit Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. That reliable community has never made me wait for the wisdom of their elders on Election Day. State law in New Hampshire allows communities with less than 100 voters to open their polls at midnight and close when everyone has voted.

This year it took less time to call the Notch as we affectionately call it, those of us who’ve never visited but like the way their demographics vote, than for Steve Kornacki to check his numbers on his phone before he starts scribbling on the Big Board.

By 12:07, give or take, all five voters had cast their ballots for Biden. Done and dusted. The Notch had put its weight behind Joe for the win.

How hard was that CNN and MSNBC? DN didn’t have to go scrambling to find the instructions for their big abacus or whatever counting doohicky they use to verify their count.

Fingers on one hand, and that’s it. They’ll call in their toes if anyone wants a recount.

Take a lesson, guys. Don’t take forever and a day to count those ballots, or you’ll be losing viewers to the local access station run out of the Notch’s volunteer fire brigade. They might squeeze your commentary in between snow reports and updates on the next pancake breakfast. They’ll be trying on flannel shirts and loading up on firewood while you’re hemming and hawing about when the next tabulation might come in.

When you finally brought us the news that Biden had won, you had to compete with Rudy at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping flanked by a crematorium and peddler of dildos with a registered sex offender as a spox. This is the look we want when the rest of the world is waiting to hear if democracy is going to live to fight another day?

For this, I gave up five days of my NaNoWriMo novel schedule?

Now look at me. It’s nine days in, and I’m 8k words behind. I have a rickety plot, and my characters come and go. I’ve changed the victim’s identity at least three times, and can’t figure out an opening scene.

All because CNN kept moving the goalposts on calling Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. First, they said they’d do it when he had a .5 percent lead. Then the powers that be at the decision desk decided that wasn’t sexy enough. A margin of 10k voters was the hill they would die on until they changed it to 20k and then 30. WTF? Can’t they count?

At one point, I had to go out for food and water, well, food. My faucets still worked. And on the way back from Trader Joe’s, before my shopping cart broke and spilled my groceries all over the sidewalk, we were still in the shadow of Mercury retrograde after all, I finally got a plot I could live with.

But it wasn’t until the networks called it for Joe, that I began to shed my paranoia of the last four years and began to believe it that I could sit down and focus on NaNo. I got in a solid 3k words that set up my new trajectory, brought back a beloved character from previous books, and believed I’m finally on my way.

Sure, I have words to make up before I’m on track. But that’s not really the point right now. Elections like the one we’re still following come along once in a lifetime. My brain was still working on my Darling Valley cozy mystery while my real time focus remained on the mystery of what would happen to the next years in my country.

I didn’t quit NaNo; I got sidetracked. In other words, life happened. But today, I’m back at it, trying to whittle away my word deficit, just like the candidates are tackling the runoffs, the remaining uncalled states.

When you’re writing, everything’s a metaphor. So if you’re struggling with the book you’ve committed to finishing this November, take heart. As Mary Oliver reminds us, the road to heaven is not laid out in straight miles.

Part of the challenge of writing a book, whether it’s in the middle of November or nowhere in August, is bearing in mind that it’s a little like life. When you run into roadblocks and pitfalls, you pick yourself up and just keep going. It’s the only way you get to the end.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading and stay safe.