NaNoWriMo Writing Frenzy!

NaNoWriMo is kicking my butt!

For those of you who don't know what that is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's a yearly period from November 1st to November 30th in which each participant tries to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.  My goal, because I'm a chronic overachiever, is 100,000 words and at least some good bits in there to balance out the rest.  I'm right on target, but, man!  It's getting harder and harder to keep at it.  Ghirardelli hot chocolate mix stirred into warm almond milk is keeping me going.  It's just something about that chocolatey sweetness...mmm!  It makes me feel like I'm sitting in front of a fire on Christmas morning and am slipping into a lovely little state of relaxation, which, naturally, is totally nuked by the stress of writing 3,334 words in a day on top of schoolwork, but at least it neutralizes my playing field.

Additionally, it was the only hot chocolate mix I could find one chilly morning at Publix that didn't include corn syrup solids and nonfat dry milk whey garbage.  So three cheers for Ghirardelli and their straight-sugar approach (stevia, when will you enter the mainstream?) and I intend to try their mocha and hazelnut flavors next!

Shoot.  I just inhaled a huge clump of chocolate powder and strained a few muscles trying not to cough wet chocolate all over the screen.  That, my friends, is the real downside to this new addiction!

If you check out the top right corner of this blog, you can see a cute little blue box labeled "2010 NaNoWriMo Progress", and along with a miniature changeable picture, it has a bar of my progress and then the actual word count.  Now that I'm at 31,705 and well over halfway for the 50K goal, I'm starting to love that little orange progress bar.  It's got all the satisfaction of running a marathon, but, uh.  It works the mind instead of the body?  Yes.  That's it.  And it takes a month.

So why, exactly, am I running this mental marathon only to get carpal tunnel syndrome as my reward?  Because there is no actual reward.  I get a nice "winner" logo to post places, discounts on Scrivener, Storyist, and Scribendi software, and a free proof copy of my novel in paperback book from from createspace.  I also get the satisfaction of a job well done and I get a steaming pile of literary crap to be proud of and brag about on all occasions.  (Although I probably won't.)  So why all the fuss?

Well, I used to write a whole lot.  When I was 14, I got into Harry Potter fanfiction, and let me tell you, I wrote a monster of a story about Harry's mother that was well over 400,000 words by the time I'd finally realized that nothing could save it from being totally terrible and that I never wanted to look at it ever again.  So then writing fizzled out, and I missed it.  A lot.

A few years later, I still wasn't back to writing fiction, because I was now convinced that anything I wrote would be miserable rubbish since I was out of practice.  So whenever I would write anything, I never got past about five or six pages.  (Which is about 6,000 words, you know.  I write in 8 point Verdana, because I clearly want my eyes to die before I'm thirty.)

I am depending on NaNoWriMo to break me out of this.  Among other amazing tools in its arsenal, the website provides you with pep talks written by some really awesome authors:  Neil Gaiman (!), Meg Cabot (who wrote The Princess Diaries), Gail Carson Levine (who wrote that lovely story, Ella Enchanted, which Disney subsequently butchered), and Katherine Paterson (remember Bridge to Terebithia?).  I have to admit, I've kept Neil Gaiman's pep talk in a star-struck open window all week.

It is a marathon of writing anything that comes to mind and not editing, not editing at all because editing is the DEVIL and will make your hate yourself.  Editing can come later.  Right now, writing is important.  And it's amazing, because although I'm still secretly second-guessing myself at every turn at least I'm spitting out ideas and characters that were never in my first outline or anywhere in my head on November 1st, and I'm realizing that I'm better at pacing and writing dialogue than  I thought I was, and overall this story is getting way, way, way more exciting than I ever imagined!

I love my characters.  And, after several heavy editing sessions that will take much longer than NaNoWriMo did, I intend to bite the bullet and write up a few letters to send out to agents and/or publishing companies, because, damn it, I have always wanted to be a writer in addition to everything else.  Why else would I start a blog?  I had to have some outlet for the never-resting drive to bang out words.

Of course, the only drawback is that now I have abandoned my darling blog for more than a week and I have all these gorgeous pictures of detox-friendly recipes pleading to be posted!  My poor laptop had to be wiped a few weeks ago, just before the Thai Red Curry post, so unfortunately Photoshop still has to be installed.  All my pictures will have to undergo a slight delay so that they can be posted from my computer at school, but it's worth it, right?  What's a recipe without pictures?

See that monkey in the NaNoWriMo web badge to the left? That is what is going on with my life.  It's bananas.

The Five Stages of NaNoWriMo

Energy!

Have you ever been interrupted by the absolutely lovely sound of a group of approximately twenty high-schoolers rehearsing several pieces of classical choral music in an acoustically ideal university lobby?

It was the most beautiful sound I have heard in months.

(I have to add, though, that if you really want to hear a sound that will bring tears to your eyes, all you have to say to a friend who knows what you're talking about is yiff!, and you will be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable, hilarious tears.)

Being around these kids is fascinating. They're bursting with all kinds of energy, and these are the kids who are gargantuous nerds at home but who can show their teachers up in Photoshop or Latin grammar. They go outside during their breaks and discuss their most recent German class, the seriously intense Social Studies debate about abortion or laws concerning religious constraint; they talk about Danté and Kant's categorical imperative and Aristotle while at the same time clutching a Marie Claire or a Seventeen magazine. These kids are so fascinating.

They inspired me today. I've been staring blankly at Tetris while watching a computer lab for about two weeks now (occasionally interspersed with the Evil level of WebSudoku) and was generally feeling miserable as a result. I ran across a couple of kids trying to teach themselves yoga and yelling at each other in French, and I finally decided to do something with all this time I've got.

A day into this burst of enthusiasm, I have four pages covered in rough sketches of female figures, three pages added to the beginning of a novelette, a lot of almost-forgotten recipes firmly cemented into Microsoft Word, and did a lot more research on the pros and cons of veganism. (I have to. Would you embark on a new dietary lifestyle with so much ridicule attached to it without checking it out first?) And--what do you know?--I feel absolutely fantastic. Productive. Far, far less lethargic. I'm loving every energetic minute of today. I cleaned my room this morning and I'm looking forward to falling asleep peacefully.

Now, if only I had an available kitchen. ;) But my juicer will have to do for now.

Have you ever noticed the spurt of energy that comes when you decide you want to start something? When you clean your apartment or your house, go to the gym (yeah, that was a three-week stint for me and never again), start a new kind of diet, start a new job, start a new year in college, start anything--you do it with a surge of energy that buoys you up for at least the first one or two days. If you're lucky, it lasts forever! If you're not...you crash and get horribly bored. This is an absolutely brilliant way to recharge yourself--start something new! Start something interesting! I've done it before--zoned out on writing a horrific 40-page college paper, pushed it aside to go paint the river with a best friend, and realized that the paper wasn't bad enough to make me want to kill all human life. It was actually interesting. I finished the paper and got an A. Try it!

If you're continually bored, lackluster, tired--just push sleepiness aside and do something else! Teach yourself rudimentary Photoshop. Try cooking something new. Go to a restaurant you never thought you'd like. (I did that with sushi, and now I'm hopelessly addicted! I love it so much!) Pick up that instrument you haven't played since high school. Plant an herb garden. Read a book totally out of your usual genre!

Try Terry Pratchett's Going Postal (there is a brilliant laugh on every page), Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great (for believers and unbelievers, it's something to think about), Natalia Rose's Detox for Women (inspiring and so, so healthy!), Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring (brilliant, luminous writing), Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (ever wonder how questionable phenomenons like Hush Puppies were catapulted into fame?), or Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI (the Johnny Depp movie's coming out in July!). Try anything! Anything and everything! Life is only there for us to grab it and make it ours!

It's everything we ever wanted, if only we can make it so. So, ladies, let's do it! Let's sing because we can, love because it's fun, kiss in a surfeit of feeling!