National Novel Writing Month

Oh so frozen.

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:00:00 GMT

You may or may not have noticed my absence from my blog in the past month or so...particularly after I said that I was going to try and blog everyday until the baby was born. Clearly that did not happen. This is what happened instead. National Novel Writing Month was/is November.

I used to (pre-child) participate in this event and I really liked it. I completed three novels this way. In 2006, I was pregnant with Ben and though I made a valient effort I didn't finish even though I was pretty much on track until he was born. In 2007 Ben was a year old and that's still a fairly needy phase and then I had surgery that month and was hence derailed. In 2008 I really thought that I was going to be able to do this. Ben can play independently or at least watch TV for some time by himself, he still is napping well most days and is in bed early. I have the time to write a novel this month. Plus, I can pretty much promise that I won't be able to do it next year because I'll have an 11 month old and an almost 3 year old and I don't see that working out.

So, this is all building in my head starting around mid-October as I start thinking about what I could write about. I get zero good ideas. The pressure builds. How can I say I want to be a writer if I don't write anything? How can I claim to be a real person if I don't pursue the one hobby that I really enjoy? How am I going to live with myself for the rest of my life if it turns out that I'm nothing but a mother and I can do nothing except mothering and cooking and heaven save me, cleaning? Clearly I am a shell of a human being with no personality, no viable dreams and the world's largest case of writer's block by November 1st. Ironically, there is one story that I work on (every six months or so for a day or two) that I think has possibility, but National Novel Writing Month doesn't lend itself to working on anything that you actually value because it's really about product over process and quantity over quality. That said, anything that you like needs to be safely tucked away.

Seriously, by the beginning of November I could feel my computer glaring at me every time I walked past. I contemplated draping a sheet over it so I didn't have to look at it. It turns out when you've decided rationally or otherwise that the success of the entire rest of your life depends on whether you can write 1,667 words a day for a month fashioning them into something that roughly has a coherent beginning, middle, and end it's a lot of pressure. And, for some brains, like mine and my apparently cowardly muse, way too much pressure. I couldn't sit down in front of my computer and type my name in a Word document. Way too much stress involved. Blogging was out of the question. Personal emails were not possible. The climax of my literary acclaim during this time was updating my Facebook status and even that gave me the sweats.

This complete and utter terror and writer's block lasted until this morning when my brain decided that by the 18th of November there was no feasible way that I could knock out a novel this month and so the fog has lifted. Do I still wonder if there life during motherhood? Yes. Am I racked by guilt for being unable to complete this challenge? Yes. Am I convinced that I will probably never again in my lifetime be able to write a novel? Nearly. But hey, as long as I'm not trying to think up a plot none of that matters. I least I can blog.

The Death of a Novel in 2007

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Okay, so my novel died. It was struggling weakly along and I would have carried it through to the end despite our rough beginning, but my emergency surgery and then recovery period delivered the killing blows and I decided there was just no way that I was going to be able to pull this off this month. It was a sad decision. I mourned (parts) of my novel. I grieved for another November passing without my completing a novel. I've also decided that I'm going to give myself a "re-do" month once I'm fully recovered and back up and around. So, this thread might be revived later on, but I just wanted to let anyone who was wondering (aka no one) what had happened to my poor book.

November 6, 2007

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:00:00 GMT

I am suffering. My story is suffering. We do not go well together. Nothing is going well. (Note to the concerned: there's not actually anything wrong with me besides the story.) I have 6,319 words. Today I should be breaking 10k. I have a very definite feeling that I will not be making that goal. The prospects of me finishing this story are getting slimmer and slimmer (quite unlike my stomach and thighs) because I'll be spending a week in Kentucky this month as well and that will not increase my word count in any meaningful way. Failure is looming over me...and my screaming son looming under me...

November 4, 2007

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Yesterday did not go well. I realized all over again how stupid my plot/lack of plot was and how I didn't really like anything about my story and I didn't know where to go with it and I was seriously considering burning down the girl's house and having her reincarnated into another life and plot somewhere else. However, with the wisdom only a long-time mother possess, mom came up with an equally interesting and less violent proposition. A time travel machine. I was immediately intrigued and have decided to time-travel my female character back in time and pop her into a wagon-train/pioneer drama. This hasn't really given me a plot, but it's a change of direction at least and so I'm just going to go with it for now. Saturday's funk has left me with only 3,705 words where I should have 6,668 leaving me 2,963 words behind. I wasted most of Benjamin's first nap today watching tv and so now I'm definitely feeling the time crunch.

November 2, 2007

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:00:00 GMT

I'm ending Day 2 with 3,416, which puts me just slightly ahead of where I ought to be. The good news is that I'm not behind yet, the bad news is that tomorrow I have to write basically all my words. The badder news is that my story is not good. It's really not. Somehow before all my beginnings have turned out pretty well and that at least gets me a rather inspired start. This year that is not the case. I have no description. My dialogue is trite. My plot is sparse at best and is taking me places that I don't know about which means my choices are to either make something up (hard to keep up over 50,000 words) or do research (slows the whole process down). I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about it. But for me to be stumped on page seven does not bode well. Week One is supposed to be this flurry of inspiration and Week Two is supposed to be the bog so I'm just not sure how this is going to work. I'm giving serious thought to starting Day 3 with the sentence "And then she woke up from a really strange dream, but couldn't quite remember it." And then restarting my novel along a different tangent. The only problem is that I don't even have another tangent to take right now! I'm beginning to think this was not a good week to give up soda. My only inspiration may be found in the bottom of a Coke.

November 1, 2007

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 06:00:00 GMT

This is my first entry in my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Blog because today is November 1st, hence the first day I'm allowed to write on my surely disastrous novel. I SHOULD be writing right now and so while the writing has yet to begin the procrastination is in full swing.

I've been thinking about what I'm going to write on and off since the beginning of October when I realized that this day was fast approaching. This is what I came up with: _________________________ Nothing. Now, it's possible to sit down on day one and start without a clue as to what's going to happen. I've done that before and the results are about what you think, some good, some bad, and a lot ugly. However, since last year I've added the complication of having a son which severely limits my writing time, plus having Andrew taking college classes online also limits my access to the computer.

I started my noveling notebook by titling a page National Novel Writing Month 2007 and finding an inspirational quote by Hemmingway to put in there. "The first draft of anything is shit." Perfect!

So, I figured that in order to have a chance at getting a novel written it would be helpful if I had lined up what order the events in my book would take place. So, in the last week I became desperate to conceive a plot. However, apparently my muse hates Georgia as much as I do and she has apparently left the state, and myself, behind. This is unfortunate. So, in a pitiful effort to have some type of idea what was going to happen in my novel I thought that I could list a phrase about what I wanted to happen in each chapter. I got this brilliant idea and then remembered how inside a DVD case they list the same thing for each track of the movie, essentially dividing it up into chapters.

This brings me to yesterday during Ben's nap. Yes, it took me the entire month of October to get that far. Brilliant, I know. I remembered that Legends of the Fall, my favorite movie is based on a novella and since 50,000 words is *technically* a novella I decided it would be inspirational for me to watch. So I did. Then, since it is a novella after all and I'd made no progress on defining my story I decided to arbitrarily pick the number 28 for the number of chapters I'd include in my book since that's how many tracks the DVD had. Progress is mine!

At 10:30 on October 31st, 2007 I had no plot, no ideas, and was seriously thinking about scrapping the whole idea. My notebook had only scribbles, mostly where I had scratched out previously terrible ideas that were nothing more than genres I could write. I wrote in big fat letters on a blank page the word ZERO, as in I had zero ideas. And then happily I started to get some random ideas, which I will be using to start my novel in about fifteen minutes.

In order, this is how and what my muse fed me:

Zero

"I don't know how to make cursive z's." (This is actually true, but after I wrote it I decided my heroine can say it.

Gypsies

A model

She's a photographer--weddings, portraits, landscape scenes

She used to be a psychologist and worked with the FBI for profiling (HEY, my ideas don't have to be original this month, leave me alone!)

She's kind of a know-it-all

Father-figure: her boss from the FBI, old friend of the family

Her family was murdered by a crazy after she started working for the FBI, after they found the guy she quit because of guilt and all that.

The Ff comes to her to help them because they're getting notes addressed to her from a crazy, that list the numbers 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 and her name is on zero. Everytime he kills someone he sends them a note with the girl's name by the appropriate number. The Ff doesn't tell her that the notes include her because if she knows she's being targeted again she'll run.

It's tentatively titled "Countdown" again, unoriginal, but whatever.

That's what I have so far. It's 10:42 am and I'm going to pour another cup of coffee, turn on my writing music and start. I have 1,667 words to go today! Wish me luck.