I’ve written about both my plans to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo and my Honeymoon Prep. These two events will be colliding later this week. As promised, here’s my most recent business card idea for the convention:
I’ve already promised myself that I won’t stress about writing while we’re in Austin, but I guarantee you I’ll be thinking about my word count during the slow points in the day. What better way to spend long periods of time in line? Playing Pokemon?
Actually, that sounds like a good idea too. Someone remind me to pack my DS. After all, I am…
BOOM. Used a graphic twice. I feel so accomplished.
Good luck to everyone prepping their novels! And to those who will be at RTX, I can’t wait to see you there!
I’ve impulsively decided to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo this year, which is madness, so I’ll wish myself luck.
In case you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and is held in November each year. The goal is to write a 50k word novel in one month. The “camp” sessions have the same goal*, but take place during summer. I’m planning to join the session that begins July 1.
Now for the madness. I’ve successfully completed NaNoWriMo twice, and while I was quite happy with both novels, I never finished the editing process on either. Two years later, the second is now very close to being finished. It would probably be smarter to dedicate my brain to completing that, but who wants to be logical?
It’s also mad to try and jump in so soon. I don’t have much of a plan, which scares me a little. What if I run out of story too soon? What if I realize halfway through that it doesn’t make sense? Of course, not having a plan could also be a lot of fun. I can make my characters do whatever I want. Outline? What? Outlines are for sissies. It means I’ll spend more time thinking what to write each day than I would if I had an outline in front of me, but I think it’ll be worth it. The last time I did NaNoWriMo I was in a similar boat, and I was happy with both the result and the experience.
The final reason this whole thing is madness is I’m going on my honeymoon in July. My husband fully supports me doing this, and while we’ll only be out of town for a few days, I still feel guilty that I’ll likely be taking up some of those days writing. He has assured me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, so I’ll do my darndest.
Is anyone else participating? Anyone else nervous? I know that getting through the first two weeks will be the toughest with my schedule, which is a little scary because the first week tends to be the easiest. Knowing that, I’ve decided not to get on myself too hard if I don’t complete the 50,000 word goal. I obviously want to complete it, but I don’t want to spend any part of our honeymoon stressed out.
(Basically, I’m trying to trick myself. If I don’t feel pressure, maybe I’ll speed right toward that goal. Don’t tell me about it. It’s a secret.)
Wish me luck!
*The camp sessions actually allow you to change the word count goal, but it defaults to 50k. I’ve lowered my goal on the website to 40k to try and allow myself breathing room for that honeymoon, but the goal in my head will always be 50.
The Internet really likes to pretend that fun quotes belong to famous people. One I’ve noticed a lot lately is attributed to Hemingway:
“Write drunk; edit sober.”
I’m sitting in my nerd-ed out home office, where my husband banished me to write, thinking about that quote. In particular, I’m thinking about the novel that I’ve put aside for the last couple of years. At first I stopped working on it – and all other non-essential writing- because my hands were bothering me. I was using the number pad on my keyboard a lot at the time, and my right hand was beginning to ache throughout the day. Since my mom had carpal tunnel at a young age, it worried me.
That’s no longer the case. Sometimes my hands hurt more easily than they should, but I’m not having the same troubles. Trying to write again after so long, however, is intimidating. One of the purposes of this blog is to get me doing just that.
Yet that novel sits untouched, waiting for revision. I know what needs done. I know which chapter needs discarded, which needs a little love, which needs significantly more than a little love, and which needs to be removed from my head and put on paper.
But all I can think is that working on that book right now makes me want to do the exact opposite of what “Hemingway” says.
I figure that’s a bad idea. Okay, so is basing one’s writing methods on the advice of an an author, whether the quote is legitimate or not. If I’m going to do that, I should at least look to advice that resonated with me specifically.
*34 minutes later*
Okay, I’m just as bad as the rest of the Internet. I’ve been searching interview after interview with Joe Hill. I love him because he writes easily digested horror, but he writes it with such obvious care. The first page (and chapter) of “Horns” ends with a man peeing on himself, and when I read it, I thought “damn. He hooked me with that?” I read an interview with him once that stuck with me, and I can find no trace of it. I’m certain I didn’t invent it. Then again, maybe that doesn’t matter? Maybe what matters is what I got from it: If you aren’t having fun with what you’re writing, then you shouldn’t be writing it. Maybe you’ll have fun writing it tomorrow. Maybe it’s never going to be fun, so it’s not right and needs changed. Maybe the whole thing needs scrapped.
Don’t get me wrong, actual Hemingway definitely beats out Joe Hill.
I think working on that novel will be fun again. Today isn’t the day. I need to focus on the basics, and to practice on you poor people who stumble across this blog.
I think I’ll spend the rest of the evening enjoying the environment in my office. What’s more inspiring than Halo toys, Pokeballs, an abnormally large Darth Vader figure, and all sorts of other nerdy goodness?
Out of the Well recently posed a question to readers: What is the value of keeping a journal?
The purpose of my journal has changed with almost every phase of my life. My earliest journal existed because diary-style fiction was popular for young girls at the time. An earlier version of myself fantasized about falling into some grand adventure and leaving behind a marvelous journal detailing the excitement for posterity (though I certainly could not have used that word at the time).
As an early teen, my journal existed to hold my loneliness. Friends weren’t a common commodity for the awkward girl who walked around with her head down and arms crossed all the time, but a journal would listen to her ever-so important rants, her questions about boys and fantasies about living a fairy-tale.
In high school, I journaled for release. I could complain and say all of the horrible, scared, mean things that ever crept through my mind, just to get them out and away. My fear of someone getting a hold of that side of me was so strong that I carried it everywhere – class to class, room to room. Though it contained some happy memories, that journal existed to help me deal with some of the anger and confusion that comes naturally at that age.
Its purpose once again changed with the next phase of my education. The college journal held not only personal words, but it existed as a creative outlet as well. Until then, I had always kept creative writing in separate notebooks, but combining the two had a drastic impact on my writing. I like to think that my personal recollections became more creative, and my writing more personal.
Now that I’ve settled into life and a career, my journal has become the constant that it was in high school again. It’s gone from the bulky thing sitting on top of my stack of textbooks to a sleek notebook kept inside my purse. It lets me hide away the grievances that I’m not yet ready to share. It’s a record of my life and relationships, holding everything from details about my wedding day to last week’s grocery list.
Through those phases of life, and all the phases to come, I do not think my journal was ever a complete reflection of myself, but it’s certainly been more than words and poor drawings. Rather, the journal’s purpose has been to house whatever I’ve needed to process or remember, the very best, and very worst of me. I still have them all.
Well, except one. One journal that went into a fire 3 years ago. I never worried I’d regret it, and I still do not. So often, my journal existed as therapy, and in that one case, I went through something bad enough that it was therapeutic to see the memories turn to flames. It’s not something I would ever recommend to anyone else, and this isn’t the time to explain what happened to cause it. What’s worth noting is that while I value every journal I’ve written and enjoy flipping through their pages on occasion, some are still not pleasant to read. I guess that’s what I meant by the worst of me. It’s not just my best and worst traits held in those books, but the best and worst experiences as well.
Okay, and some really bad drawings.
Because pictures are always better…
A friend for my early teenage self
Below is a picture of my journal from sometime in middle school. I have no idea what this entry was about, but in case you were wondering, I still cannot do the Electric Slide.
True Love as a young teen – the kind that can last 2 weeks without the other party’s knowledge
A place to process
I remember being young and thinking it’d be really awesome and dramatic if it looked like there were tear stains on a diary page. Since I couldn’t muster up any tears, I sprinkled the page with water. I remember thinking about that, and that tear stains were not, in fact, awesome and cool, when I wrote the entry below and found myself crying through it. Confession: when I flipped through my old journal and spotted this picture, I started to tear up. I’m not sure of a better way to define the value of journaling than those tears.
This was high school. Notice the handwriting didn’t improve at all since the picture above…
At some point in my youth, I thought it’d be really dramatic to have tear stains on a journal, and I’m pretty sure I faked them on an entry. I couldn’t find the original, but here’s the first time the tear stains were real.
And a for happy thoughts as well
Another high school (maybe early college? I should have looked at the date) picture, that I took entirely because I saw the Avatar: The Last Airbender flip-book stickers. If you decide to read the text, I’ve got a spoiler for you: I married someone else. It was nice seeing that bit of happiness from my past though.
Another high school journal. I was so cool that i was into Avatar: The Last Airbender then. I was not, however, cool enough to be willing to share that knowledge with anyone besides myself. Clearly I’m over that.
A pile of history that’s just for me.
Finally, a picture of the mess I made of my middle school to high school journals while going through them the other night. There are plenty more. The one on the bottom left is actually fiction. I wrote it for a project in my 8th grade English class, and applied my superior knowledge of writing diary fiction that I’d learned at age 9. I’ve never gotten rid of it because of all the time I took sewing the darn thing together.
A pile of journals from my teen years. Once day I’ll organize them.
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