Day 24--A time of corrections and other stuff

First, I have not just celebrated my 19th wedding anniversary. It was my 18th. I figured that out several days after. See how time passes when you're having fun.....

Second, please remind me that I don't like turkey. Rather, I like turkey, but only the dark meat. So the idea of cooking a breast for leftovers was a generous act for D who loves turkey of all stripes.

Third, my NaNoWriMo project is coming along nicely, thank you very much. It will be ready for publication sometime in 2008.

Fourth, we're going to Los Angeles on Sunday. I am so missing living there. I feel, I must say, like a fish out of water here in Sacramento.

Fifth, can you tell that I'm babbling?

Gone--one well-crafted rant

I was mid-rant today on a topic of great interest to me--aging and ageism--when, poof! my post disappeared. This verily pissed me off since I had gone to great lengths to do links. In fact, it was a link that caused the loss (I'm on a roll of Ls here). I was searching my LJ archive for a post I thought was on it, only to find it wasn't. And when I finally accepted that, my well-crafted, albeit unfinished, rant was gone.

What to do what to do what to do????????????????? How about a little soft shoe? Or a few bars of My Yiddische Mama, a song that never fails to make me weep. Oh--you'd rather have something a bit lighter, appealing to a wider audience, a little more commercial?

How about my report on NaNoWriMo? Do I have anywhere near the 25K words I should if I'm to make the deadline? Have I posted anything I've written? Have I written anything? No, No, and yes.

Here's the deal--commitment I believe we were calling it in an earlier post--I made to myself about NaNoWriMo. I never intended to even try for the 50K word count. I know myself as a writer too well, and that kind of a goal is certain writer's block for me. Instead, I promised myself that I would work on my NaNoWriMo project every day. I would make no judgments about it--the quality of the work or it's potential or even whether I was interested. I would just keep on writing every day for thirty days and at the end of that time, then I'd see what I have.

This I have done. And a funny thing happened on the way to Day 15. Something is taking shape here. There's a story that I'm telling that I had no idea I wanted to tell about people I've never thought about before. It's wonderfully weird this feeling of sitting back and reading what happens next.

NaNoWriMo Journal

I can't get into my writing these past few days, and I'm not sure why. Which makes it difficult to solve the problem. I'm impatient with creating these characters because they've lost a lot of their luster for me. Not for any reason, probably, other than that I'm actually writing them, rather than thinking about them. I'm always better and more eloquent in my mind than when I have to put the thoughts into words.

But even with my blog, I'm not totally there. I'm pushing the writing. And second-guessing myself. And erasing/deleting a lot.

What's going on? Here's what I think. Getting invested in the writing is too scarey for that part of me that always wants to be in the future, about to happen, all potential. That's why I would lie in bed at night thinking great thoughts, planning great deeds--only to wake up in the morning and forget the details. That's why last week, before I stopped working, I was full of energy for my NaNoWriMo project. Now it's put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is time -- and my defenses are in full sway.

You will not write, Jane. You will not have another interesting idea. You will not come up with that perfect turn of phrase or that on-spot metaphor. When you sit down to write, a hazy brown smog will float in front of your computer screen. Your back will hurt. You'll be hyper-aware of the heat your laptop is emitting. You will write through all this, hoping to break the spell, but to no avail. You will write in shortish, bluntish, tedious paragraphs. You will bore yourself. And ultimately, you'll give up. You'll wander off to do something else. Pay bills. Clean house. Pluck your eyebrows.

Day One - NaBloPoMo

...and day one of NoMoWriMo...and day one of my back-to-being-my-own-boss life.

I'm curious to see how the six month (six month?!) stint of regular employment has affected my freelancer sensibility. For one, I got up at 7:30 this morning, and it's now 9:30 and I've started my NoMoWriMo stint, read some of my favorite blogs, stripped the bed, and here I am, both fingers and brain at the ready.

I don't anticipate a real problem with NaBloPoMo (except getting my fingers to untwist when I type it), since as everyone knows I am never without something to say about anything and everything.

It's the NaNoWriMo that I'll have to push my nose to the whetstone about. (Yeah, I know, that'd give me one helluva sharp nose.) I have deliberately ignored the word count as too intimidating. When I did it last year, I spent half of my writing time figuring out what my word and page count had to be. And when I fell behinder and behinder and behinder, I just mentally hung myself and gave up.

In my defense, I must say, however, that I only learned of NaNoWriMo last year at the end of October. So I'll remove the rope from my neck and admire my courage in throwing myself into a freakin' project that called for writing a novel in a month. As if I haven't been trying to write a novel in a lifetime.

This year I come to the project prepared. I have characters, I have plot (ish), I have tone, I have setting--and now I have some 300 words already. My goal is to write every day. Not to rewrite. To see if I can use the deadline to quell all the critics in my head. If I end November with a first draft that I may or may not want to revise, I'll be happy.

And if I end November on NaBloPoMo with an Audience that justifies the capital A, I'll be happy there too.