Day One word count: 1924. Goal met, with a little cushion. (Unexpected discovery: Google Docs is the greatest tool ever for taking advantage of time "bites." I wrote some this morning using my Kindle Fire, a few more words on my phone while at a stoplight on my way to work. I love mobile life.)
Facing the blank page at 6 a.m. was a little like waiting for the roller coaster to climb the hill--scary, butterfly-inducing. I hadn't picked a scene to start with. Even though I have plenty of scenes outlined to keep me writing this month, somehow I fear facing the day when none of them has enough juice, so let's just save them for that day, thank you very much. . . And so I dorked around for a good five minutes just trying to get started with the previously-unplanned scene (you know, the one that had so little juice it hadn't even bubbled up onto the scene list yet). Then I remembered: leap in. Don't wait for the muse. Just begin. I left for work with a few hundred words, managed to sneak in a few hundred more at lunch. Ideas for expanding the scene and its place in the plot floated in throughout the day.
I checked my "cabin" assignment last night (Camp NaNoWriMo groups you into a virtual cabin with other writers who are like you--age, genre--or at random), and that got me thinking about my good friend Katherine, a Christian Scientist whose belief in the perfection of the world, especially about the balance of abundance and need, has been very sustaining as I try to reclaim this part of myself. In the past, I would have spent a lot of time comparing myself to the other writers in my cabin, judging their work, figuring out my place in the idea coolness or experience pecking order: a deficit-based orientation. This time--remembering Katherine--I was like, hey, that sounds like an interesting idea, isn't it great we're all doing this? I took a deep breath and posted my very-rough synopsis, knowing it would not fare well in anyone's coolness evaluation at this point, and just not giving a damn.
I've become the high-on-camp girl, the one who posts cutisms on the message board. Isn't it great? There's enough creativity to go around!
We'll be singing Kum-Ba-Yah and eating s'mores soon.
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