National Novel Writing Month, Day 2
When you’re on fire, your skin crackles and peels, your guts boil and explode and…wait, this is a metaphor. Let me start again.
When you’re on fire with your writing, you get that itchy “gotta get back to it” feeling where your mind keeps going back to the story while you do other things and you fairly trip over yourself sitting back down at the computer or, if you’re Harlan Ellison, a 70 year old typewriter, diving back in to see what happens next, to enjoy the thrill of the ride.
Now take everything I said in the above a paragraph and reverse it. That’s how I felt about returning to my novel today. It’s not a bad premise–weird guy who keeps a weird journal and maybe has some kind of supernatural writing ability that causes weird (and bad) things to happen–but it simply isn’t grabbing me. I co-opted the characters from my short story “The Dream of the Buckford County Church” (itself a failed expansion into a novel back in NaNo 2012) as the protagonists and so far haven’t really gotten a handle on them. One is maybe a little a more sarcastic than the other (so more like me) and the opening scene has them cracking wiener jokes around a campfire. It’s not exactly my finest hour of creativity.
So today I am taking a break, mulling over what to do. Start over with the same story? Drop in different characters? Grab some other loose premise or situation and truly start over? Give up and cry into my pillow?
I am as yet undecided, but I know if I don’t have a course set (reset) by tomorrow the endeavor is likely doomed.
The pleasant weather isn’t helping, either. I have in the past written during lunch but with the sun out and the choice of either getting out into the fresh air and power-walking for an hour or staying cooped up inside and writing, I have been opting for the former. The decision to write at lunch is easier when it’s making like a monsoon. I don’t like walking in monsoons. It’s still an excuse, of course. If you want to write, you write. If you’d rather walk, you’re more a walker than a writer, aren’t you? Walking isn’t something you tell people you do. “I heard you were doing that National Novel Writing Month thing. Are you a writer?” “No, I’m a walker.” [blank stare] “But I do write sometimes! When I don’t bore myself with my own words.” [blank stare turns uncomfortable, eyes shift looking for an escape route]. “Come back, I want to tell you about this crazy squirrel I saw out on my walk. Where are you going? We’ll catch up later, okay? Okay!”
If I do end up bailing and my writing continues to atrophy, I’ll invest energy into the best excuses instead, like:
- the switch back to standard time messed me up–who can write when time itself is changing?
- I’m freeing up time (which totally changed, see above) for that acting career I foolishly abandoned
- writing is just a fad, I refuse to be a sheeple
- no matter how much I tried, I could not make the premise of “shit squirrels” work
- writing, shmiting
- it’s not like we’re going to face a book shortage if I stop
- I probably would have eventually turned to writing werewolf sex novels, anyway
