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By ‘crunch time’ I do not mean heaping bowls of nautically ranked golden squares containing unimaginable quantities of sugar but rather the time of year when at my day-job the work overflows, overtime is authorized, and I often work six days a week.

I work for a non-profit HMO in their Medicare membership division. Each year from October 15th thru December 7th people on Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or change their Medicare Advantage Plans so loads of applications and roll into our HMO during this time and that translates to loads of work. It’s good, I am paid well, represented well by my union, and being a non-profit I feel pretty good about the services my HMO afford these Medicare recipients. I sock my overtime money aside and use it for frivolous treats.

This year it is even more of a ‘crunch time’ as I am on the final stretch for completing the first draft of a horror novel. One written without an outline. As of the writing of this post I am sitting at about 73 thousand words. I expect the piece to land somewhere between 80 and 85 thousand. At one thousand words or so per day that means 7 to 12 writing days to wrap it up. Looking back there is less spade and reconstruction work that I had expected when starting the ‘no outline’ adventure. There is some rework to be done, some scenes to be rewritten but no major points of conflict or retroactive continuity to correct. I credit this feat to my decades of running tabletop Role Playing games, where there is never an outline that survived contact with the players and the need to make sure that nearly everything fits together coherently is fairly great.

In short I shall be busy during November, but not unhappy.