It is November 1st, 2019, and Scrivener is waiting, an empty document opened in the middle of my screen, ready to capture the first eighteen-hundredth fifty-three words of some story I am about to write for this year's NaNoWriMo.

It is also August 14th, 2022, and Ulysses is opened now, a lengthy document loaded in the right section, a cursor blinking in the middle of it, and my mind is tired, telling me it'd be just as good if I were to stop for the day and resume work the next day. Or even split it through the week. More sustainable. More reasonable.

And yet, I have willed myself to do something that day, and the thought of letting go of that opportunity, even if nobody is watching nor expecting nor even minding if I do it or not, feels a price too heavy to pay.

And so, I push forward, and I type and type until the only thing that matters is what's the next word and the one coming afterward, until the counter decreases, and the scenes are done. Two more chapters become one last one, which then becomes "I can also type the epilogue." Before my computer is about to let me know I need to rest (11pm on weekends, 10pm on a regular day), I am done.

Two years, nine months, and thirteen days after I had started, my fingers pressed the keys that were to form the two words I had been waiting for so long to write.

"THE END."

Six letters. Two syllables. The end of a journey.

Some of the first memories I don't remember experiencing, told by my parents, tend to always relate to books.

Like the one when, as a baby, my dad had kept me nearby as he worked, sitting in one of—opened—desk drawers, and I had ended up eating paper, with the fun stomach ache and distress babies tend to enjoy. Or how my favorite toy for a while had been a book my grandfather had put together by bounding different newspapers into a single volume. Or how apparently I had been obsessed with narrating how my grandma had fallen upside down. And my dad had fallen upside down. And my brother had fallen upside down, and so on until I had completed a series of relatives falling upside down.

And then, there were also the memories I remembered on my own.

Of me pressing the keys of an old typewriter, hearing the click and the clack, gears turning into motion, seeing how characters appeared, one by one, on a paper behind a ribbon, line after line, until the page was packed and I would get to turn a wheel to free it up, loading another one.

And the nights spent learning how to use WordPerfect, those charming white characters floating over a background just too blue, and how the more I wrote, the more the screen would scroll, and how some combination in my keyboard would let the printer know it would be needed to replicate everything I had written now on paper, and I would feel in my hands words that before had been ethereal, a privilege I had then assumed only meant for the people writing real books.

The rush whenever the annual Floral Games came, knowing I had once again left one of my favorite activities to the very last minute. I would need to somehow conjure the right set of words in the proper order to make up something that hadn't existed before.

It was magical.

It was perfect.

And it ended.

Eventually, I graduated high school and went to college, choosing to study something entirely unrelated to writing. And the novel I had somewhat finished got lost after a hard drive failed, and we never quite found a way of getting the data back (or at least, could afford to).

Days became weeks which became years, and soon enough, books were only the things I read (and bought) and not the printed works I thought of writing; too busy and occupied tending to more important things, like figuring out how to find clients to afford to pay rent and buying groceries.

It wasn't as if I had forgotten entirely about writing. I started one blog and then another, and when the time felt right, I could still churn one short story on a good night and publish it somewhere.

But just like how other things in my life tend to happen, I stopped thinking about writing a book until I didn't.

After all, why couldn't I? I was about to finish college, and work was, if not better, more consistent, at least. I had managed to buy my own laptop (thanks to my dad's support), and I could finally recreate those fabled conditions of heading to a nearby café and working until the moon was out when I'd be kicked out, ready to return the next day.

It was easy to make excuses, but it was also easy to trick myself into thinking I was actually back into it. I was writing. I was still doing it, you know? Perhaps that meant having only a new short story that year, but that was alright. It wasn't a career. It was a hobby.

It was fine.

And so I would sit and type some words, which could lead to others, until I grew bored, and continue the next day and the next one until I wouldn't, and I would close the file, leaving one more unfinished document alongside others.

NaNoWriMo somehow appeared on my radar, perhaps after checking out some tweet or reading someone's blog. Thousands of people would be about to spend a whole month writing a 50,000 draft (close to a novella), with no rewards nor significant challenge other than starting from word #1 and not stopping until the #50,000th one had been added.

I was learning about this on November 11th, so I did the rational thing and decided to join the already time-limited marathon, but with half the time to spare while going through my last college semester and working full time. It just made sense, you know?

And somehow, it worked. One by one, I was typing words of a story I didn't know I was telling, figuring it out as I went, laughing at some of the bits, hating most of the turns and inconsistencies I was introducing, until, by the end of November, I was done. I had the resemblance of a story living in a single document.

Which I then put away.

Year after year, I continued telling myself I was writing. I had just worked on that novella, right? I had more short stories coming out. I was working on an anthology (still am!).

And every November, I tried to join NaNoWriMo again, trying to recapture that magic, to find the story that would work, that'd help me get to the finish line while working, and traveling, and moving to another country, and raising money for my new company, and going through a breakup. And another.

I was never quite getting where I wanted to be, never quite reaching those two words I had been secretly waiting to write for nearly twenty (or thirty) years.

Having finally managed to do it, though, I reflected on what had changed since then. What had worked this time and never did back then?

It'd be silly of me to say "The secret was X" and call it a day, for that'd assume a better understanding of myself than I have and potentially be too reductionist of what actually happened.

And yet, perhaps that was the secret. That there wasn't one. That the way of getting here was a combination of effort, self-discovery, and luck.

The effort, cause sitting down to type one hundred twenty-three thousand words wasn't easy, even when it wasn't also that hard. Plenty of tasks were way more complex and challenging, and perhaps using that same time to do something else would have had better outcomes. We may never know, for I can only witness the results of what I chose to do now.

Self-discovery because I stopped feeling guilty that I had been able to write more and more consistently before. Instead, I tried being kinder to myself. More analytical, measuring and figuring out behaviors I could try to turn into patterns instead of judging the moments I felt I was going backward.

Having access to data made things clearer, allowing me to see when I wrote more and when I didn't. Which distractions existed in my life, and if I could do something about them. It was easier and faster for me to write when I had some outlining in place and some scene structuring I could follow (which more than doubled the words I was writing in an hour).

And being kinder to myself also meant trying to see if I was lazy or if something else was happening. Learning I had ADHD and was part of the ASD, and what that meant for my own personal projects, my inconsistency in following a routine, the ongoing issue of missing a word or two, or writing something that sounded the same or had similar characters, instead of the proper word I was looking to use, only because my brain willed it into existence even when it knew I had meant something else (as in that tweet above, and just now, when I noticed I had written "routing" instead of "routine") Practicing new skills and developing techniques to cope that I had mocked before (learning to be less of an asshole was also part of the journey). And that medication did wonders for me.

And finally, and oh so important, luck. Of having the great privilege of working in a well-paying industry, in a role where I could carve time for myself and decide when I wanted to write and when not to. And a partner who had both a job where their schedule got busy just when mine was free, allowing me to focus on writing but also willing to let me sit down day after day and listen to me geeking out about the things I was trying to do while doing their very best to prevent anything else from distracting me, even if that meant sometimes having to add more chores on their load.

I think I'm on a better path now, knowing that, at least in the reality I live in 2022, I was able to finish a whole story. And that I have a process I can repeat. A routine I can follow (for example, writing this text to keep my gears engaged and not lose the habit of writing while I take a short break from working on the book).

There is still more in the journey that concerns this novel, but I am proud of what I have done so far. Proud of the work I did and proud that, perhaps if it took decades to do so, I was finally able to write those six letters (and a space) and ultimately unlock whatever mysteries happen when you do so.