Well, I warned you.
This post, churned from procrastination, is going to mainly consist of frustration and self-deprecatory statements. Well, those self-deprecatory statements will probably be erased (with a sharp jabbing to the backspace key, of course), but just know they that existed. Oh yes. They existed.
NaNoWriMo. Oh, NaNoWriMo... I thought you were going to be an easy, fun, nice little writing exercise for me. I thought it would be easy to crank out 1667 words a day. I thought that by the end of the month my story would be publication-ready. I thought, on December first, that I would be running around in the Texan winter air (that should be cold but probably won't be) and do a celebratory fist pump.
Man, was I naive.
It's November eighth. According to my handy-dandy calculator, I should've crunched out 13,336 words by now, well over the 10% line.
As of now, though, my total word count is a petty 5,833.
And so here I sit, typing this message with time that I really shouldn't be wasting, listening to Disney songs in an effort that they'll motivate me (Mulan's I'll Make a Man out of You is high on my list of motivational songs, right up there with the Rocky training song and Eye of the Tiger, which is why I have it on loop) and trying to keep my hand from twitching toward my Halloween candy.
Why, you ask?
Because I've found that writing isn't easy. But at least I'm not the only one who thinks so.
On the NaNoWriMo website, authors post pep talks for people like me who are stuck in a rut. One of these pep talks, written by Maureen Johnson, compares the act of writing to Australia. Australia is a country with most of its civilized ports and major cities resting on the coast line, ringing around the continent. So the coastline is beautiful, filled with tourists and five star hotels and quaint towns and pretty surf shops and whatnot. But when you move in the opposite direction of the alluring sea and accented-people, you begin to brave the unknown jungle. It's uncivilized, lonely, filled with bite-happy reptiles, and, in old days when it wasn't colonized, European prisoners were sent here, so you might run into a vengeful ghost or two. That, those thousands of miles of land, is the biggest and most dangerous part of Australia. But when you do get out of it, there's another beach waiting for you at the other side.
And that's what writing is like, she says. The first couple of days are beautiful, wonderful, easy, [insert good adjective here]. It's only when you delve deeper, when you begin solidify your plots and characters, when you grip the handle of your machete and become paranoid that a two-faced vampire kangaroo is going to jump at you, is when things start to get difficult. But when you make it through, you're rewarded with something great (A freaking book), and I guess that's what makes it worthwhile.
So I guess it's time for me fasten on my helmet and arm myself with a Harry Potter book (great for knocking out two-headed vampire kangaroos) and open up that Word document.
Because, dang it, I am going to finish this novel!
