NaNoWriMo is over, and I ‘won’ it with ease*. Writing many, many words has never been an issue with me. In fact, when I used to write for ABLC, someone coined the phrase ‘pulling a Minna’ for writing any article over 2,000 words long. That’s like a sneeze for me,** so I don’t do NaNoWriMo the normal way. For those who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, basically, you write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November, which breaks down to 1,667 words a day. I can write that in roughly an hour and a half if I really concentrate, so I usually set a different goal for NaNoWriMo. This year, my aim was to write 5,000 words a day. I’ve had the same goal in the past, and I’ve met that goal twice, I think (out of two times). It was feasible without being terribly burdensome, and I managed to meet my personal goal with ten thousand words to spare. I finished one novel, started a second one, decided it was a crap a third of the way through, and started a third–which is much better than the second, thank you for asking. It’s still crappy right now as is the first one, but at least they are both down on paper.
Really, that’s the reason I did NaNoWriMo this year. I haven’t written much of anything in the last year or so, and I wanted to kick-start my writing again. Once I stopped blogging regularly, I wasn’t disciplined enough to to write daily on my own. I’m externally motivated, which is a bad thing, but once I fully commit to something, I’m all in–which is a good thing. This is the reason I’ve decided to commit to posting a blog post every day in December. I miss blogging, and I was quite good at it, which is a full-blown brag and not a humble-brag at all. I had a passion for it, which helps, but I also did my research thoroughly and edited the shit out of my posts. Editing my fiction is not my strong point, which is ironic since it’s what I do for a living (editing, not fiction, though). For whatever reason, I have a harder time chopping up my fiction than I do my blog posts. I think it’s because while I can be flamboyant in my posts and many of them are my opinion rather than hard facts, My fiction, on the other hand, is a delicate flower that blooms in the hothouse that is my mind. It’s my baby, and I am pretty protective of it. Don’t get me wrong: I do edit my fiction–just not as rigorously as I do my blog posts. If there’s a phrase I like or a scene of which I am enamored, I am loath to excise it, even if it doesn’t fit in the piece overall.
But I digress, as is my wont. My point is, and I do have one, that while I love writing, I don’t do it nearly as often as I should. Therefore, I used NaNoWriMo as a way to make myself write, and now that it’s over, I want to continue the writing train. For some reason, now I have this song stuck in my head. “Come on write it, train. Write it!” “I think I can; I think I can!” And, because I know myself well, I know that I have to give myself goals in order not to allow myself to fall back into…well, not writing at all. So. My declaration is that I will write and publish a post every day.*** If I don’t write a post, I will write 5,000 words of fiction instead. The latter will have to be on the honer system because I’m not going to publish unedited fiction–no one wants to see that.
Continue Reading
Hello. In my last entry, in addition to posting the pics of me as Miss Indy Pedant, the foul-mouthed fifties housewife, I teased that I had been mulling something over for the past month or two. I said, “Hey, watch this space for a kinda big announcement. It’s coming. It’s gonna be (kinda) BIG. Really, I mean it.”
