Nanowrimopromo

Somehow we have arrived at Thursday without my noticing. I have been head-down all week working furiously on the book (and making good progress, thank goodness, as you can see by my handy word-count-o-matic), and the days have gone past in a sort of blur.

I have a project in mind for Nanowrimo (although we all know how well that worked out last year), and I'm really excited about it. Seductive New Ideas are always dangerous for a writer. When you're at a painful stage with your work-in-progress, it can be very tempting to 'just make a start' on your SNI. Before you know it, you are completely sucked in and conducting a mad affair with the new book while your poor little current book sits at home wondering why you haven't called and whether that was lipstick it saw on your collar. That is why I really want to have my first draft completely wrapped up by the end of October. Taking a month off to work on something new will be such a relief, and will help me approach the Ferocious Edit (which is December's job) with fresh eyes.

For those of you who haven't taken part in Nanowrimo before, here's the deal (from the official website):

"National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

I've participated in Nanowrimo twice before, and I have some possibly sage advice:
1) Pace yourself. Last year I decided I was going to write the 50,000 words in two weeks. I did it, but then got horribly ill and exhausted. One of Nanowrimo's many benefits is that it prepares you for a steady, productive writing life, and reinforces the fact that doing some writing every day will eventually produce a novel.
2) This goes hand-in-hand with the point above: pace yourself, yes, but keep to your daily quota. If you let it slide, telling yourself that you will catch up, it gets harder and harder. If you know you have a couple of busy days coming up when you won't be able to write, get an extra few thousand words under your belt beforehand.
3) Finish the whole story in November, even if it means you have to under-write and sketch out scenes rather than write them in full. I got about halfway through last year, and then dropped the story where it stood when I reached 50,000 words. I went on to re-write my previous novel and didn't come back to the Nanowrimo novel until about April or May this year (the Nanowrimo novel is the one I'm still working on now). All that time, the Nanowrimo novel had been drifting aimlessly, getting in with a bad crowd and possibly taking some drugs. When I came back to it, it took ages for me to make friends with it again. So I speak from experience when I say: finish the damn thing in November, no matter how bad the first draft is. You can improve it and flesh it out later.
4)Announce that you are taking part to as many people as possible, to make it very embarrassing if you give up. This will keep you on track.

Speaking of which: I thought I might write a weekly post throughout Nanowrimo where I chronicle my own progress and link to posts from those of my readers who are also taking part. Keep this in mind for November, if you're interested: I'll put up an official sign-up sheet towards the end of the month and publish a list of the participants in our group on the first day of November. It is always more fun doing it in a gang and discussing our experience along the way! It helps to keep one's Nanowrimo-mojo up too.

Wedding Anniversary!

Today is LOML's and my second wedding anniversary. Six years together, two years married! (You have to add that 'six years together' bit, don't you?).



Notice that I have aged the photos to represent how very OLD we are now. Also, about two seconds after that central photo was taken, I dropped hors d'oeuvres down my front.

I'm going to be really soppy for a moment and post a poem that I wrote many years ago, when LOML and I first started dating.

cliché

no one has ever felt like this
no one has ever done this before
we are the first

the rain presses its nose against the
window
like
a small boy at a toyshop
breathes on the glass

I haven’t felt this safe since I was
five years old
listening to the rain, thankful I
wasn’t in it, feeling smug about those
who were.

with you my life stops
I dance in the space between the minutes
time dances in the space between the raindrops
without getting wet.

you are my bedtime story;
you are too close to see.

I want you to know

that this rain has fallen for good
each drop is different, and is gone
we splash in the puddles and are lost

until then

no one has ever felt like this
no one has done this before
we are the first.

LOML is at work today, but tonight we are going out to dinner at the restaurant where we had our first date, and then we are going to watch 500 Days of Summer.

Sailors and brain drain

For the past few weeks I have felt like a skimmed stone skipping over water. I have been ticking off endless daily to-do lists and being very productive, but living on the surface, constantly moving, with no time to properly live in the moment. There are lots of reasons for that - perhaps Holy-Cow-It's-October Syndrome has something to do with it? - but I'm more interested in the solutions. I've been a fan of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way for years, but I have never been very consistent with the writing of Morning Pages (the three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing that she recommends as a daily tool). Whenever I have used them, I have found them very helpful - more as a way of staying grounded and in-the-moment than as a writing aid. I'd like to try Morning Pages again this week, though, and see if they help.

I used to keep a diary religiously (and the old ones are hilarious to re-read), but now that I write full-time and blog as well, there doesn't seem to be much of the written Andrea left at the end of the day. I suppose writing Morning Pages will be a return to keeping a journal, in some ways, but since they are written before the day starts rather than after the day has ended, they are more of a focusing tool than a personal record of events.

Although I no longer keep a diary, I do lug around a couple of blank books on a daily basis: my day planner and my notebook. These are absolutely essential if I am to live like a functional human being. My brain is a scary place. It is full of debris and space-junk: an endless procession of worries, ideas, rants and ramblings, with a jaunty 'Here be Dragons' or 'No Fishing' notice sticking out here and there. These two little books act like a drain in a particularly messy wound, keeping it clean. (Apologies for the analogy: I have been trying to think of a less disgusting one but, hey, this is the country of Black Sheep and Braindead. We can handle it.) I write absolutely everything in my day planner, no matter how small ("Clean fluff out of pockets - done!"), and it gives me a great sense of satisfaction to tick off the items at the end of the day. If something unexpected came up, I write that down too, purely for the pleasure of ticking it off.

If the day planner is where my organised, adult self lives, the notebook is for my inner two-year-old. It is full of ideas and doodles and little imaginary maps, interspersed with notes on my current project. The handwriting is nowhere near as neat in this one. It has pictures and ticket stubs and receipts tucked into the pages. Eventually it gets so fat and full that it explodes, and then it goes to live in a drawer with its other deceased relatives, and I buy a new one. I find these notebooks immensely satisfying as well.

I sometimes wonder what my notebook and my day planner say to each other when they're alone in my handbag. The day planner probably thinks the notebook is immature and frivolous, and the notebook probably thinks the day planner is stodgy and dull. They don't have much in common. I like to think that they realise they need each other, though, and are friends.