My Office

So I'm doing that thing again, that thing where I don't blog for days at a time. But this time, I forgive myself!

As you probably remember, November is a crazy month for people like me. NaNoWriMo is in full swing, and although it's consuming most of my days, I'm managing to stay on track. In order to be successful, you have to write an average of 1,667 words a day. We're on day three, and I'm about to hit 5,000, finish my second chapter, and I show no signs of stopping just yet!

It's been a continued struggle to keep myself off the brilliantly amusing but gravely distracting NaNo forums and back into my prose, but I'm feeling optimistic about this year. It's easy to when I have such an amazing office to work from!

My book has already attempted on several occasions to hurl itself in another direction. My characters are also sneaking in little changes to my original idea and taking control of the reigns a little. In the end, I can't wait to see what I come up with. It's going to be pretty bad, as all first drafts are, but magical things can happen when you turn that inner editor off!

In the coming weeks, I'll try to keep you up on my progress, reveal a bit more about my story, and possibly even share an excerpt.

To those of you who are participating, Happy Noveling!

NaNoWriMo

I don't know what exactly prevents me from blogging as frequently as "I'd like", except for laziness, which can't be the entire story, right? I do know that I start out with the intention of writing far more often than my track record will show. Many mornings, I convince myself that perhaps I just need some caffeine in me. I pump myself full of coffee while reading others' blogs until the point in which I'm much too jittery and unfocused to compose even one coherent sentence. Other days, when I aspire to write later in the day, I decide it'd be helpful to treat myself to an afternoon cap or two in order to breakdown the inhibitions that often plague me, prohibiting me from typing in fear that the prose that comes out will be, gasp, less than perfection. I manage a few soon-to-be discarded sentences before ending up sloshed and distracted by the kitten or something shiny.

All of this leads to a very important question: if I truly long to be a writer, why is it that I always dread... you know, writing? Especially when said writing is something as frivolous as a blog followed by mostly friends and family who only want a little insight into the exotic, new life of their long-lost, loved one? No really, if you know the answer, please share in the comments!

Perhaps, I need higher stakes. Maybe the reason I'm not writing is simply because I don't have to. I have more free time than ever right now, so there's no reason for me not to participate in National Novel Writing Month. The objective of NaNoWriMo, which takes place in November, is to write a 50,000 word piece of fiction in one month. It trains the author to get over the often fatal preoccupation with quality in every word that he writes. The mantra of NaNo is Quantity, NOT Quality. In order to produce a successful body of work, it first needs to be written! The bestsellers on your shelf probably barely resemble their original drafts, because writing is a process. I'm going to embrace that process once again, and hopefully mark my second "win" in NaNo.

I already have a plot brewing, and I'm excited to see where it takes me. I don't know exactly what effect this added strain will have on my blog. Perhaps it will leave me burnt out, and you won't hear a word from me in November. Or perhaps I will become so overwhelmed with the book that I'll turn to writing blog posts as a temporary distraction, finally viewing it as the fun, pressure-free activity that it is. We'll see!