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.
