P.S. About NaNoWriMo

It is November 30th.   I did not finish, I did not win this year.  Again.  I only made it to about 18,000 words.  And I’m okay with that.  I’m over the guilt, over the feeling of failure.  (Almost.  By tomorrow I’ll be totally over it.)  I’m relieved that December is here so I can quit feeling guilty because I’m too distracted to focus.  I’ll probably try again next year, when no one is getting married.  When I’m not doing two presentations at NWP.  When my calendar is clear, because so far next November’s calendar is completely clear. And I’ll plan ahead.

So, for this year, I’m over it.  Yeah!!

Another NaNoFlop

Well, that’s how I’m feeling today.  I set myself this task that I believed was doable, even without any particular advance planning, and disregarded the fact that I always travel for a week in November.  This year we threw in a family wedding and bachelorette party to prepare for along with cooking the TG dinner (nothing too new about that!) and I am wobbling around at less than 18,000 words with only four days to go.  I don’t know why I thought I could actually do this, in this of all years, but I did.  I see my writing colleagues spinning along at 35,45, 48,000 words and feel like a flop.  I feel like I should have made sure I could do this because Grant wrote that article about me, I took on the task of being a Municipal Liason, and, well, I believed in myself.

Or did I?  Did I undercut myself by not planning it all out ahead of time?  Do I just get mid-novel ennui in which it seems like too much to actually write through the whole thing?  Do I fear not knowing how to end it so guard against that by not really getting beyond started?  All of that, probably.  Whatever it is, this has not been my year for finishing. Again.  No matter how much I write between now and Sunday, 30,000 words are not going to happen, certainly not 30,000 words in which I go all the way through the beginning, middle and end of a novel.  So, there you have it.

A nanoflop!  There’s always next year, I guess.  Although if I can’t work past my stuck-in-the-beginning without a way to forge aheadness, I will never finish.  The nanoflopness isn’t about doing it all in the month of November, or this month being too busy.  No, not really.  It’s about me.  Gulp.  That’s way more than November being busy.  Way.

Taking it all on

Today is a day of preparation.  Preparing for Melissa’s bachelorette party tonight: making pozole, buying prizes for a game, buying a pair of green underpants for my friend to give her in a game because my friend doesn’t have time to do so.  Preparing for Thanksgiving: making cranberry sauce, pumpkin pies and precooking the yams.  Also, picking up the turkey, buying shoes for the wedding on Saturday, preparing a basket of goodies for the wedding couple’s hotel suite on Saturday, going to visit the hotel suite this morning to see what we might do to prepare it for a luxurious night apart from its being itself (the Executive Suite at the Hotel Diamond is no sniffing matter!), making the concentration game for the bachelorette party in which the prizes are candy with names like Hot Tamales, Big Hunk, Nerds and Airheads and buying said candy.

Breathe.  Did I say making pozole?  Yeah.  Okay, did I say writing 30,000 words to a novel I’ve begun and want to finish by Sunday?  Oh, I forgot that.  Yet it runs around in my head nearly every minute.  I’m onto an idea that I like, but I’m too busy preparing to write.  And it will get worse before it gets better.  All must be purchased before Friday because I wouldn’t dare be in a store on Friday.  Black Friday.  All hell breaks loose in the shopping world Friday.  No stopping to pick up something I forgot Friday.  Today is the day.  That’s why I went to Safeway at 6:00 A.M. and at 7:00 A.M. am already cooking pozole.  It’s also why I went to Walgreen’s at 6:48 A.M. to buy the candy with goofy names for the game.  Because I couldn’t sleep and those stores were already open.

The thing is, no matter how much advance planning and shopping I do, it’s the last minute stuff that’ll sink me.  Send me out into the fray at the worst possible hour.  Happens every time.

A wanna-be writer

I love to write.  I’ve thought of myself as a writer for some time now, ever since my first teaching article was published back in 2001.  For some reason it took that acceptance for me to say out loud that I’m a writer.  I’d kept journals forever, but that was just my journal.  Just my journal.  Now I have published a few other things, and it’s definitely an “open a vein and write” kind of thing to get an article ready for submission.  I eliminate every unnecessary word, crafting them to as much precision I can achieve.

That kind of writing is great for professional articles or a Master’s Degree thesis, but not for writing fiction, or anything creative.  As I slog along through my current NaNoWriMo novel, I am realizing that I’m not a good fiction writer.  I am so accustomed to being spare with my words for professional articles that my recreational writing is boring.  Maybe that’s just an excuse for not being the kind of writer I want to be.  This month I am so denigrating of what I am writing that I don’t even want to do it.  I am a wannabe, and it’s making me feel low.

Maybe this slogging has a purpose other than to make me feel dumb!  Maybe I’ll come out on the other side with some new understanding about myself as a writer.  Maybe I should take a creative writing class somewhere.  I want to be good at writing for pleasure and change, but may need some help to get there.  Funny it took this long to really realize (like grok it) this about writing for different purposes.

Just my journal, indeed.  That is some of my best writing.

Flick’r on the blog

I am absolutely delighted that I finally figured out how to get the Flick’r widget to work on my blog, with my photos.  It took me way too long to figure it out, so I’m thrilled to see it is still there, still working.  The smallest things sometimes give the greatest pleasure!

NaNoNutzo

I am in a really stuck spot with my NanoNovel.  It’s making me crazy – I wrote a couple of thousand words today, but am no further ahead than I was when I began.  I might even be behind where I was.   I met a new NaNo friend today who is using a method called the “Snowflake” novel method.  (You can google it – I did.)  She loves it and says her work is going super smoothly and fast.  I may try it next year, but think it’s too late for this year.  Seems kind of formulaic, but who am I to complain since I’m not exactly zinging along?  The thing that stopped me today, besides the complexity of my story and how much do I really want to go into anyway? was when my new friend said she was working on last year’s novel, but is only counting the words she does this year in her word count.  Wow!  what a concept.  Like having your cake and eating it too.  So I began to consider that possibility…and got completely mired in my mind muck.

So I made dinner for one, played a little MahJong solitaire and worked on one of my presentations for NWP in 10 days.  Anything to avoid deciding what to do.  Now I’ve discovered that the water in the hot tub is actually hot for a change, and I’m going to go make the most of that.  Then I have my Initial Self Certification to do for AVID and several weeks of grading to do. Not to mention weeks of “Brothers and Sisters” episodes to catch up on.  And a walk that needs to be taken.  A sub to call…I could procrastinate for the rest of the month easily.  Then renew my good intentions again for next year.  What a flake.  I’d better try to get another thousand or so words in tonight.  Just cause.

Puzzlement and Elation

I am of two minds this morning.  First, I am elated by Obama’s election.  It gives me hope for our country, for us as a people that we have elected by such a huge margin this man and the position of hope and change that he embraces.  John McCain conceded graciously, and I appreciated that as well.  What I don’t understand is the people whose commentary I read in my local newspapers who are disappointed, who seemed to have expected a different outcome, who say they are worried about our country now.  What is left to worry about after eight years of George Bush’s devastation of our country and others?  How could anyone have hoped for a fine tuning and continuation of those policies?  Which of us is rich enough or blind enough to think that narrow-minded Republican platform is good for the United States or the world?  Beyond my incredulity at such a stance, I think it’s just our turn.  How dare they be all disappointed that they didn’t win after taking (literally in the first one) the past two presidential elections with such an incredibly harmful result?  We have watched the horrific results and had to just go along with it all for so long now.  We’ve watched that bumbling fool they elected for eight long years now, and really, we’ve had enough.

It’s time for them to move over and just see if someone else with more heart and more consideration for the common people will work.  I liked Obama’s comment to those who didn’t vote for him that he is their president, too.  I sat on my sofa listening to his speech and cried.  I felt the shifting of a deep depression and shame that I’ve carried for the past eight years, and hadn’t realized was so pervasive to my being.  I hope those who wanted a different outcome are able to see that change is a positive thing and can bring themselves to join in the effort to reclaim the goodness and sense of community that has always been part of the intention of this nation.

And then there is Proposition 8.  I don’t get that.  Why are people so threatened by what other people do in their personal life?  Why does the marriage of two women or two men so threaten people?  How will those people’s marriage threaten anyone else’s?  It just doesn’t make sense to me.  Why would anyone stand against people who love one another?  Why marginalize yet another group of people?  How much longer will it take until all our citizens can be free?

Behind the elation and the hope there remains puzzlement.  But a change is in the wind…YES WE CAN!!!