Platform 327

Just got back from a NaNoWriMo get together… the last one that I’m going to get to because the official wrap party is on my first day back at work. Boo.

So anyway, I didn’t finish but I’m not the only one so I don’t feel quite so bad. I actually did a lot. Apparently it’s some kind of pattern that most people don’t finish the 50,000 word goal in 30 days in their first year and of those who do, most of them don’t finish in their second. So woo-hoo! I’m not a loser, I’m a faceless statistic!

Even though I face-planted this year, I’m looking forward to next. I’ll likely sign on again. The goal from now to then is to fit some actual fiction writing into my regular schedule and not just write when some editor calls me up to interview a bunch of people I don’t know about crap I don’t care about. I remember when it used to be fun and something I wanted to do and it’s time to recapture that feeling, dammit!

There’s nothing I can do at this point but give up.

I shot myself in the foot this year with NaNoWriMo by not writing jack all during the first two and a half weeks of the month. I planned my vacation so that I would have “plenty” of time to work on my novel, but instead I spent my days watching bad daytime television and running little errands that ended up turning into all-day ventures.

I did pretty well in the last couple of days, though. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be enough to pull it off. At this point, I don’t even want to. Last year, as the clock ticked its last, I was still having fun writing the novel. The narrative had disintigrated, the characters had little or nothing to do, but it was still fun. This novel isn’t fun anymore. I even started resorting to cheating by having one of my characters quote long — and I mean long — passages from Henry David Thoreau to pad the word count. Once I managed to get some sleep, I looked at what I had “written” again and just felt like an idiot.

So after deleting the the Thoreau passages, my final word count is 27,335. Not bad, considering I was only at 8,000 or so words on Friday morning. I don’t leave this NaNoWriMo with a spiffy certificate or any neat little icons to put on my blog, but it does reinforce the idea that I can sit down and write. The problem is, I just don’t. I have to figure out how to incorporate writing into my life for more than just one frenetic month out of the year. Cancelling my cable TV might be a good place to start.

For the here and now, though, I’m just going to relax on the last couple of days of my vacation.