If you started singing a Bon
Jovi tune after that title, then you’re my kind of person.
I’m surviving nanowrimo this
year. Yesterday marked the halfway point
of the month and I hit the halfway point for word count (25,000) two days ago,
so that puts me ever so slightly ahead of the game in terms of shooting for the
bare minimum. More importantly, it puts
me a whole lot of words ahead of where I failed out last time, so it’s already
a win in my book in a lot of ways.
I say that I’m surviving,
but it really depends on the day. The
last two have been particularly tough to even struggle towards that minimum
goal, tough to even get started if truth be told. There have been days along the way that have
veritably flown by, hitting the minimum some time in the morning (and often
continuing on from there). Days when I
felt like I might actually have something to say (that people would actually
want to read). Days when I can call
myself a writer and not feel like a complete and total fraud for saying that.
I would say there have been
at least five or six of those days along the way. (And I think for most writers that would be a
pretty good percentage.) And then there
are the days like yesterday and today.
The days when I’m walking uphill, when I feel like I am moving through
quicksand, when every. single. word. feels like a struggle. The worst part about those days for me is
when I finally do get to a respectable word count and I look back to find that
I have written absolutely nothing that I will keep – that every word I have
typed out in my monumental struggle will be ceremoniously deleted come December
first when the number of words no longer matters and I have to actually think
about quality rather than quantity.
It is days like those that
make me come close to throwing in the towel.
When several of them come in a row without any real breakthroughs or
moments of awe from the muse is when it starts to get really tough to continue. That’s when I start to wonder if this grand
experiment is worth it at all. And
honestly, on those days it probably isn’t.
Most of the time, I hit my minimums without anything that I will keep.
But in the grander scheme of
the month, I can come back to the positive side of looking at it. I will probably end this month with more
revisable work than I have written in a good long while. It’s no novel, but I have several possibly
nearly complete stories, some poems, even a couple of short non-fiction pieces
that seem like they could grow into something more. (I have never submitted any non-fiction
pieces before. At least none that I have
actually called non-fiction.)
I really don’t want to see
what the final word number is once I start deleting come the first of
December. But I think that I have some
decent writing mixed in among the crap.
And that’s really the point of this exercise. As I said, so far I see it as a win. There are just days (like today) when it
certainly does not feel like one.
In non-nanowrimo news, I
have signed two publishing agreements in the last week – both for short
stories. It is amazing to me how much
legalese I have to wade through for magazines that don’t pay. (Well, I’ll get my customary contributor’s
copy, but….) And strangely, the
contracts stress me out. I know that none
of my stories are plagiarized and that names have been changed to protect the
innocent, etc. But I somehow feel like I’ve
been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
Weird, isn’t it? I suppose it’s
the same concept as why I get nervous every time a police car drives by me,
regardless of what I’m doing, why I panic when I have to go through security at
airports… I suppose I have more than a
healthy level of paranoia. At any rate;
yay, new publishing agreements!
I have read very little this
last week, so I don’t have much to say on that front. Right now it is all about writing and the
push for ever more words.
I’m past the halfway point. Less than 25,000 words to go. Hopefully some of them will end up
brilliant. Or at least passably useful.
Wish me luck.
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