Day 7: I remember this

It's day 7, and I am behind on word count. Between 4th of July and absence of my scene planner (poster board with 100 sticky notes worked just great in 2012, and I'm overwhelmed by Scrivener at the moment), I'm a little adrift but planning a marathon writing session on Saturday, which is my birthday. What fun--a day in the library writing, and then perhaps to treat myself, a wee trip to Ulta for new eyeshadow. Bliss.

I am remembering this thing: I love Camp NaNoWriMo. It actually feels like camp, where you get to stay up late and do something delicious and scratch the mosquito bites you got at twilight. It seems like a summer adventure--possibly because I have other fond associations with the joy of writing on summer evenings, CN in 2012 and summer 1986 and 1988, when I attempted my first long writing projects.

Another remembering: the way to do CN is totally liberating, just madcap balls-to-the-wall write your guts out. There's no worrying about quality, and there is also no worrying about voice. These things come later, or if you're doing it for fun with no future expectations, not at all. Love this.

One more time...

Camp NaNoWriMo starts again today, and in a seat-of-the-pants move, I decided this morning to attempt the BHAG of 50,000 words again. And even better: with an idea I just cooked up. Well, if I am entirely truthful, I believe I wrote one scene of this idea more than 10 years ago. Sue me.

Can I just say that it's murder the NaNo's make you define a project in order to add it? Synopsis? Upload a cover photo? These are all ready-made distractions for someone whose first literary effort was a lovely yarn-bound book with a colorful cover...and 500 blank pages of college-ruled notebook paper. How the hell do I know what my project is? I love the possibility--it's the actual writing part that's the killer. But leaving those fields blank seems untidy of me.

I'm off to an excellent start. !

20 days in

Can you write a novel four sentences at a time? My 300 days project has been an exercise in snapshots so far, tiny fruity pebbles of writing each night or at lunch. No more than 20 minutes at a time until tonight, when I've had a luxurious hour to myself. I've written every day except one when I was so sick and tired I fell asleep at 8 p.m. I keep thinking of the image--via Anne Lamott, I think--of the writer who would get up from the desk, drive around the block, race back to the desk and write as many sentences as possible until he couldn't bear it anymore, then drive around the block again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Why is writing so hard and so essential at the same time?

Also read an interesting article on the tyranny of Word as word processing tool. I've been using Evernote to write my bits: sometimes dictating through my cell phone, on the Kindle, iPad, web version. You can't get very precious with Evernote, which is the point--no endless font picking, just butt in chair. . .you know the rest.

the 300-days project: soft launch is in the bag

During resolution season, I decided a new Big Hairy Audacious Goal was needed for 2014: I'm embarking on 300 days of daily writing. To make sure it isn't 300 days of one-word-per-day (I can be sneaky that way), I've set some guidelines:

* I will write at least 10,000 words per month

* I have two book-length projects I can work on, and I will write wherever the "juice" is (this is to avoid project spawn--new projects can be so much more appealing than the one right in front of me, especially if I've written myself into a corner)

* Non-project writing (scene lists, journaling, character studies, writing prompts, blog posts and tweets) don't count toward the 10,000 word limit but may count as writing for the day in a pinch

Today marks the 300-days-left-in-2014 point, so it's the official start of my project. I "soft-launched" last week and with a few days in the bag, I'm feeling good about the goal. More to come. . .

sources

Today, I decided I needed some inspiration. (Yes, I know. I should be writing. And I am. This NaNoWriMo has started out pretty rocky, and my wordcount is hosed, and I don't care because now I'm on the right track.)

One of my favorite tests of good writing is from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It reminds us that every written word, certainly every written word of a novel, is part of a dream. In order for that dream to be believable and sustainable, it must be "vivid and continuous." I've been using this test to silence the inner editor, that nasty little voice (I once had a boss who called it "Mort" and posted a cartoony face on her corkboard to remind her just how unreal he was) that likes to tell me my novel has probably been written before and thus is derivative at best and plagiarism at worst, that you can't indulge yourself in details--the inner editor that has had a delightful time while I've been living at warp speed and just skimming the surface of everything.

The concept reminds me that 1) the story, the characters, the setting are supposed to be dreamed up and 2) it's not only okay but necessary to go deeply into it. I don't need to worry because first drafts are supposed to be squishy, lumpy, self-indulgent messes that get cleaned up later. Whew.

So, in deciding I wanted this to be on my wall in a big giant way, I found this little tool, that lets you make professional-looking motivational posters for personal use (no, not that goony type with the black border and white "iconic" word that keeps FranklinCovey in business, but slightly edgier ones): www.recitethis.com. It's free, fast, and shareable/downloadable. Here's mine:

It was so easy, I made another one--we'll call this the downer version to the upper above, for those times when you need to take a breath and remember:

another go!

July 1 approaches--the start of Camp NaNoWriMo 2013.

Quick wrap-up: I finished 2012 on August 31, 8 p.m., racing the deadline and finishing with 50,491 words. Then I put the manuscript away and couldn't look at it for a year. I didn't feel accomplished or different, and it was several months before I could believe I'd done it. Burning the candle--staying up sometimes until midnight, or even once or twice getting up in the middle of the night because I'd gone to bed without writing--at both ends stretched me and my family to the limit, and September was a rough recuperation.

But when I opened my work from last year recently and read some of it, I realized two things: when you just crank and write as fast as you can, you can not only produce some words, but some of them are actually good, and usable. I recognized my voice in them--and that became a touchstone for everything else I've been working on. I don't know if I'll ever turn that mass of pages into a novel--I realized well into it that I have a ton of research undone--but it was a great jump start to writing again.

This year, I'm tackling a novel that has been rattling around in my brain in various forms for several years--the pivotal scene, a secret that the matriarch of the family carries that has become the source of rumor in her small community, started off in another novel idea when I was in college. That one never got written, but the pondering on this book has been going on awhile. It was one of the contenders for last year's event, but I was afraid I'd "ruin" it by using it as my trial run. Its time has come. . .

Making scenes in Scrivener, doing character sketches, trying to figure out when I will actually write and how much. If writing hasn't exactly become play--some days I still get nauseous when I face the blank page and will do just about anything to avoid it--I again know it's essential.

Writing matters. 

day 11: making friends with the slog

It's been kind of a hard week around here on personal and professional fronts. Yesterday was a doozy for reasons I don't want to get into here, but let's just say I needed a giant-sized margarita at dinner last night.

It's been really important to me not to let go of my dream of completing this month-long challenge and to write something daily, though, so every night I've dragged myself to my desk to put in a few hundred words. Except for one brief five-minute period where Husband said it was fun to listen to the rapid clatter of the keyboard, it's mostly been peck-peck-peck. And I ended the week a few hundred words short of where I need to be. It's hard to want to write well, make lovely understated copy, and churn out schlock, but I'm doing it and am managing to feel darn proud.

This morning, Husband took child Blossom grocery shopping and deposited child Sprout at a friend's house. I sat down to an unfinished scene and in the quiet (and without the sleepiness of my usual 10 p.m. date with my desk), I found the words flowing again and even got a couple of ideas to move the plot along a little further in a section that was so hazy it was starting to feel like it didn't belong in this plot--even though it was the spark for my original idea. It made me realize that, even on these hard nights where I planned to just sit down for 50 words so I could keep my promise to myself to write daily, I usually ended up with at least 500. And with a weekend that promises at least a few more 30-minute bites for working, I expect by Monday, I'll be groovin' along again--with the added bonus of having learned that the slog works, if we just keep at it.