eureka

I’m dropping in to let you know that I haven’t died. I’ve just been less of a stickler about my update schedule this month. It’s a personal failing. But in this transition time as I re-determine what the purpose of this blog is I thought I’d stop in and share something with you about writing. Well, how I write anyway.

  There’s this movie I used to watch a lot when I was a kid. Sabrina the one with Harrison Ford instead of Humphrey Bogart. I really love that movie. Particularly there’s this one line in the movie that sticks with me perpetually. Sabrina says to her father, “I love that you took a job as a chauffuer so that you would always have time to read your books.” Even as a kid I knew this was a man to look up to.

 My job allows me a lot of mental freetime. I sit in a big wooden chair for hours on end and watch people move around a junior olympic size pool. Most of the time I make lists: to-do lists, inventory lists, lists about the members in the pool, lists of steps I would take if an emergency happens, prayer lists… stuff like that.

  A few times in the past few years as I’ve been sitting on the guard stand an idea has fallen into my head. It’s not always a good thing because I get nervouse that I’ll forget it. They’re like the ideas you have just before falling asleep and you try to convince yourself to remember it the next morning, but you didn’t write it down. I try to think about it, hold it in my brain, until I get the chance to rotate down and make a small note that I hope I’ll be able to decipher later.

  Today a though I’ve been pondering for a month or so finally clicked into place about two minutes after I sat down to guard. I managed to get it to stick. And that was exciting for me. I think that days like today are the reason that I love guarding so much and hate the thought of any other kind of job.

Final NaNo Update

This was supposed to go up on the blog yesterday, but some time-bandits nabbed Camille and me and wooshed us off to Orlando to solve some problems and get some Christmas shopping done. So, blogging didn’t happen.

If we’re Facebook friends or you look at the full blog on a website you probably already noticed that I won NaNoWriMo. But here’s the “official” announcement.

I am a 2011 NaNoWriMo Winner

with a grand total of

50,406 words

Greetings from NaNoWriMo

I actually finished on November 27th. And then I didn’t know what to do with myself for a couple of days. I must be learning some really good habits from my friend Jenna because I already had my next goal lined up before I finished NaNo (reading 15 books before 12/31) so I didn’t lose too much time in my indecision.

I finished the fourth book I’ve read since I decided to do 15 so that leaves 11 in 31 days. The challenge comes in with the fact that I’m teaching LG updates the first three weekends of the month… so that will take up a lot of my time (preparing for it and such). But I think I’ll be able to swing it. I’m going by the library today to pick up a butt load of books and I’m really excited about it. I have 7 books waiting for me there and the one I bought from Inkwood a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, back to NaNo… Of course the most obvious question I get after telling people about doing it, or finishing is: when will I get to read it? And to most of those questions I kind of shrug, wince a little bit, and respond, “Never?” I mean it’s in a VERY ROUGH form at this point… the way they encourage you to keep up the word pace is to throw editing to the wind… and I mean, I wasn’t able to do that entirely… but I know there are inconsistencies and such in it that I need to work through.

However, I have decided to share at least one part of it that I wrote at the end. Writing the end was probably my favorite part of the whole process (not because it was almost over) but the last 10,000 words or so really started to become the thing that I wanted to write… and I realized I like to write these terribly sad things much more than anything else. One of the last nights I was writing I was actually in the living room by myself crying as I wrote. My poor main character had just found out that her best friend and boyfriend were in a car accident and as a result were in comas at the hospital. She didn’t know yet (I did) that one of them wasn’t going to ever wake up.

A couple of nights later my favorite part to write just sort of fell into my head as I was doing something else entirely. I sat down and about 4,000 words just poured out of me. That was a bizarre experience, let me tell you. I think that was the most in one sitting I had written during the whole thing.

So, once I do a little reworking of that section… make sure it makes sense to other humans beside myself I’ll plop it up here to share with you. Until then I’ll tell you about what I learned from NaNo. When I started I had no real idea what I would be doing. I had a vague plan of what I wanted to maybe happen other than just hitting that 50,000 word mark. And I didn’t think I would get too much valuable experience out of it. And boy did I underestimate that.

See, I’m generally crippled with fear. There are a lot of things that I just think I’m not good enough to do, so I never try. I wasn’t the most confident kid when I was younger and these pieces of my personality have morphed into a strange sort of adulthood for me. I’m still afraid to try things. And even when I switched to English as my major I never thought I’d write anything of note. I saw it as a way to be surrounded by things I enjoyed: reading and writing. And when people ask me what I want to do I tell them I want to own a bookstore, not that I want to be a writer. It’s hard for me to admit that. I read so many books and I suffer from an insane need to compare. I often think, “I will never write anything like that.” And thus I don’t even try.

I wasn’t even trying.

And then NaNo popped up and it seemed like just as good an idea as any and I learned that it’s okay to write a bunch of silliness I will probably never use for anything because it all chalks up to practice. And here I am with a bank of way over 50,000 words (including the blog and other projects I worked on during November) and I feel like I might actually get to the point where I can do this.

It reminds me of something I read once that Ray Bradbury said. He talked about his love of certain famous authors that came before him. He used to wander the stacks in the library and see great names like Dickens and Poe and Hemingway and think… if only I can run along like a lapdog to their fame then I will be happy. I’m trying to shift my thinking… I may never write the perfect great novel. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

So Personal Growth through NaNoWriMo for the win! And almost 1,000 words for you to read on this lovely Friday morning.

Peace.