Dateline: Friday, November 12, 2004; 2:57 a.m., EST
I am watching an infomercial for the Time/Life Lifetime of Romance Collection. No club to join, money back guarantee, 30 song bonus album. Call now for a collection of the most romantic songs of all time.
I have Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” playing over and over in my head. Which is a lot better than the song I was humming before that-- Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always On My Mind.” Personally, I’m wondering why “Muskrat Love” didn’t make the cut when it is a far superior love song to “Love Will Keep Us Together.” (Great, now I’m going to have nightmares about Captain and Tennille).
Sing it, Patsy. I’m going to bed before I get sucked into the infomercial for Reclaim--the amazing skin care discovery--hosted by Victoria “Age is Blurring My Face and it Hurts!” Principal.
Oops, it’s 3:10 a.m. It may be too late for me, I can feel myself being drawn deeper into the complex issue of skin care regime. Save yourselves while you can! I’m going to learn about free radicals.
Radicals. Regime. When did skin care get so political?
I have come to the conclusion that the reason I’m doing so well with NaNoWriMo this year is because I’m posting my daily word count here. It is perfectly fine for me to flake out and fail in the privacy of my own home with no one the wiser (except Jay, who has to live with me and put up with my self-flaggelation). It is not all right to have to admit my failure in public. Likewise, it is not all right to lie about how much I’m writing, either. So, I’m sticking to the program. Go me.
My goal has been to write 2500 words a day. The bare minimum I’ve let myself get away with has been 2000 words. Hence my rockin’ work count so far. I was tempted to take today off for good behavior, but I managed to write almost 2500 words tonight, even if my eyes were closed for half of them. I’m sure some of what I’ve written is just filler-- not unlike the stuff in hotdogs-- but I hammered out the basics for a couple of good scenes.
Not that anyone cares. I’m just so tired I’m talking to myself. Long day, but infinitely better than yesterday. I will try to start writing about more than… well… writing. Funny thing is, I don’t often talk about my writing in my day-to-day life. I am convinced there are people close to me who think I’m making up this whole thing about being a writer since I never talk about it.
Before I go to bed to (hopefully) sleep blissfully, I just want to wave to Sonja-in-Germany. Thanks. You really made my day.
I want junk mailers to be required to put their offerings in clear envelopes so I don’t get paper cuts opening their trash.
I want George W. Bush to experience a mid-life crisis, resign as president, move to Crawford, TX and go to work as the short order cook at the Roadside Roadkill Roundup.
I want everyone to tell me exactly what they want for Christmas and exactly where I can find it. There are 44 shopping days until Christmas and I don’t want to be shopping on Christmas eve for that one thing you really, really want that you didn’t mention to me until December 23.
I want Sheri to hurry up and get here. NOW.
I want people to stop telling me to get a flu shot. I am not getting a damn flu shot.
I want my neighbors to understand that there is nothing wrong with me wandering around in my backyard at noon in my pajamas. So stop waving and smirking, already.
I want insensitive doctors to be forced to undergo the same procedures they inflict upon their patients. And I want those procedures performed by monkeys.
I want to be able to get six and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. I think it would make me a lot less grumpy, especially toward people who fall asleep easily and sleep through the night every night.
I want today to be a better day than yesterday. So far, so good.
Sorry I’ve been kind of quiet the past couple of days. I have some sort of viral thing that’s been going around (according to my doctor, it’ll run it’s course in another week or two), and it has sapped my energy. Plus, I’ve been writing like a crazy woman. I hit the 25,000 word mark tonight-- I’m half way to completeing the NaNoWriMo challenge and it’s only November 9th! I can’t imagine writing 50,000 words in a mere eighteen days, but I’m on track to do just that. It would be awesome if I could actually finish the first draft of this novel, which will come in around 75,000-80,000 words, by the end of the month. I think that may be too much to hope for because I’m not sure I can keep up this pace.
I think I’ve already written more words than I did during last year’s National Novel Writing Month and I truly don’t know what to attribute it to. Hopefully whatever it is-- luck or motivation or alignment of the planets-- will hold for a couple more weeks so I can make my goal.
I have gotten several positive comments both here and in e-mail about my NaNoWriMo project. For those of you who are impressed with my prolific writing ability, don’t be. Trust me guys, I’m not writing the next Pulitzer winner here. Hell, I’m not even writing the next bestseller. At best, I’m hammering out a workable story that will need tremendous amounts of editing to make it anywhere close to submitable, much less saleable.
If I remember correctly, only a couple of people who have completed NaNoWriMo have gone on to sell their NaNoWriMo manuscripts. The odds are not good I will, either. But selling is not the goal right now. The goal is to get the words down-- something that is often difficult for me to do because of all sorts of real and imagined obstacles. Even though I know some of what I’m writing is crap, I can fix it once I’ve written it. In fact, of the 2500 or so words I wrote yesterday, I know about half of them will end up being rewritten or deleted. I just wasn’t feeling motivated yesterday. Today I cranked out over 4000 words and most of them were okay. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
What I really need right now is a writing sale from another source. Nothing motivates me like selling something, so it would be a nice little kick if it happened. Unfortunately, my run of rejections hasn’t broken yet. I know there are a couple of sales coming, but it will most likely be months before I hear anything for sure. By then, NaNoWriMo will be history, at least for this year.
Still, I did meet my goal of completing 25,000 words by November 10th and that’s something to celebrate. Who wants to take me to lunch? Bribery is almost as good a motivator as a sale, you know.
I woke up very, very early this morning. Not just early for me, but early for many normal people, too. Like 6:30 a.m. early. Granted, it’s not unusual for me to wake up early as a part of my usual sleep pattern. Asleep--awake--asleep--awake--asleep--awake… ahh, it’s wonderful to be an insomniac. But no, this was a different kind of waking up, I was awake for two hours. Two hours! I might as well have gotten up for the day, except that I didn’t get to bed until after 2 a.m. and… well… I get grumpy when I try to function on so little sleep. I’m not pretty when I’m grumpy. Of course, I probably only got another solid hour of sleep after that, but it’s the effort that counts, right? I’m competitive about trying to get my sleep in.
I digress.
So, anyway, I was awake for a long time this morning. And after the usual thoughts: what I needed to do today; wondering what the cats were destroying that was causing such loud noises in some other part of the house (mysterious nosies as it turns out, since I couldn’t find anything that had been disturbed); trying to remember what I ate yesterday because I was really hungry for it to be so early in the morning; contemplating applying for Canadian citizenship, you know, the usual early morning thoughts-- I started thinking about my NaNoWriMo book. And I started to get excited.
No, not that way.
I have been waiting for the motivation to wear off. I have been waiting for the story to fall apart. I have been waiting for the inevitable moment when I hate what I’m writing. One week into it, and it hasn’t happened. And I didn’t even feel compelled to add “yet” to that sentence. Go figure.
In fact, as I lay nestled among the quilts and flannel sheets and down pillows and cats (who had returned from their battles to nap), I started coming up with new scenes, new ideas for advancing the plot (did I mention, I have a plot? I’m not just writing words!), new dialogue for characters. It made me want to get up and start writing. I didn’t, but I thought about it. If you knew me, and how I am in the morning, you’d know what a big deal it was for me to just want to get up and write. Wow.
This is the feeling I didn’t have last year when I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t really have a clear idea what I was writing or because of the hundred other things I had going on last November, but after the first three or four days, my momentum started slipping. I tried to hang onto it, but by the middle of the month it was gone. Once I took a couple of days off from writing, there was no getting back on track and I quit.
Of course, I’m only a week into this year’s novel and there is still time for it to fall apart. I could very well finish this month the way I finished last November-- with several thousand words of drivel. It could happen. But for now, I am bouyed by a sense of accomplishment-- over 18,000 words and I’m pretty sure I’m good for another 10,000 just with the scenes I plotted out in my head this morning. I would like to hit the mid-point by Wednesday, November 10. I know I’m being overly ambitious in hoping to hit the 50,000 word mark by November 23 (Sheri’s arrival date), but right now I think I can do it. I’m motivated, I have a story and I’m excited.
Okay, maybe a little bit that way.
What’s it all about?
Life. Love. Writing. Editing. Sex. Books. Romance. Movies. Friendship. Photography. Teaching. Coffee. (Lots of coffee.) Travel. Feminism. Academia. Insomnia. Memories. Experiences. Rants. Raves. Reviews. Babies. Pregnancy. Motherhood. Insanity. Musings of an insomniac writer. Want to know more?
