My NaNoWriMo is at 17,823 words. The big start I had has given me the cushion to withstand a few slow days. I'm still on track to hit 50,000 by the end of the month, but I'm behind the pace I wanted to be setting. I'll be traveling during the last week of November, with uncertain opportunities to write. More importantly, I don't know what my connectivity will be, so I need to get NaNoWriMo finished well before the end of the month.
Here in Week Two, I am, as usual, convinced that this book is the dumbest waste of time and effort I've ever undertaken. My inadequacies as a storyteller are revealed more plainly with every dreary thousand words I fling onto the page. The manifest truth is that I was never meant to be a novelist. The searing, brutal, reality of this is inescapable.
This isn't about me. For the good of society, I should a) stop writing, and b) burn everything I've written up to this point, lest some unsuspecting innocent happen to come across it. I'm committing a crime against humanity, creating a weapon of mass destruction. This book is a bucket of powdered polonium, a mylar balloon filled with uranium hexafluoride, a rack of leaky vials of the Zero Hour Plague. This book I'm writing is the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the one God loved the world too much to set free.
And I'm behind schedule on it.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
Here in Week Two, I am, as usual, convinced that this book is the dumbest waste of time and effort I've ever undertaken. My inadequacies as a storyteller are revealed more plainly with every dreary thousand words I fling onto the page. The manifest truth is that I was never meant to be a novelist. The searing, brutal, reality of this is inescapable.
This isn't about me. For the good of society, I should a) stop writing, and b) burn everything I've written up to this point, lest some unsuspecting innocent happen to come across it. I'm committing a crime against humanity, creating a weapon of mass destruction. This book is a bucket of powdered polonium, a mylar balloon filled with uranium hexafluoride, a rack of leaky vials of the Zero Hour Plague. This book I'm writing is the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the one God loved the world too much to set free.
And I'm behind schedule on it.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
Bah. Bah, I say. Aren't first drafts supposed to suck? Besides, I was up late last night trying to talk Angela off a ledge when a Twitter glitch insisted that all her followers were gone. The numbers I saw from my end were normal, verified using multiple browsers and a nearby tablet, but the freakout was monumental.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a surefire seller, you'll have to write erotica and change your name to Heather Truelove or something. (Oh never mind, I actually knew someone by that name. She was 10, so it wasn't a pseudo.)
True, although it would be a pain in the ass to try to maintain a suitable pen name just so I could write lousy erotica.
DeleteStop that. Stop that RIGHT NOW! I enjoy your writing. I like you as a person. And I realize I'm just one individual, but I know you've done a lot to keep me from deep sixing my creative endeavors.
ReplyDeleteIs this book crap? Probably -- so's mine. But we're not mining for gold, we're just digging dirt out of the cave as fast as we can so we can go through it later for nuggets and veins of ore.
Look, I understand beating myself senseless better than almost anyone else you know. I want to cry some days when I post something on Facebook and nobody -- NOBODY! - likes or comments or other wise notices my existence. I've been on the verge of quitting more times than I can count, and the only thing that keeps me there is that it's the only way I can keep in touch with my personal "nugget of gold". It's hard to have 300+ "friends" and only hear from about 25 of them, but there's something in it for me so I don't quit.
So get back to writing. Keep going even when the dirt under your nails smells suspiciously like bullshit. Don't. Stop. I believe in you and I know I'm not alone in that.
Thanks, J. Still, there is an awful lot of dirt to sift through in this one. I'm writing and writing, thinking to myself, "I'm never going to be able to rewrite and edit this into anything worth reading." Not a great place to be as a writer. I'm sort of at the point of wondering if people are getting tired of my schtick as a writer. And by "schtick", I mean "writing" and "personality".
DeleteSometimes I wonder if NaNo is worth it -- the pressure to finish x words in y days means you have to sometimes write garbage and *knowing* that adds its own pressure -- if that makes any sense.
DeleteI'm pretty sure you have a good idea and it motivated you enough to turn it from a puppet into a real boy. Right now, you're still carving out the rough copy and it's discouraging. But let me tell you again that you're good at it and it's gonna turn out ok.
(Waves her "blue fairy" wand and vanishes ...)
It's not crap, or if it is, that's only because it's a first draft. But when you are done you will go back and find the jewels and jettison the crap, so that's FINE
ReplyDeleteI'm in the same place though!
It's a hard slog here in the "this sucks and I hate it" phase of writing a book.
DeleteJust keep swimming, just keep swimming...
ReplyDelete