Writer-In-Progress

NaNoWriMo seems such an unassuming challenge on the surface. Spend your November working on a new manuscript and pack in 50,000 words by the first of December.

Not necessarily easy, but doable, right?

Doable, yes. But there’s a mindset to working NaNo that begins on the fringes of your life and soon works itself into the fabric of your daily life. My usual NaNo MO is a morning session of about 1k words, a day of teaching middle school English, and an evening session of about 1K. That break in the middle is a refreshing change of pace and helps me look differently at my evening session than I did in the morning. Sort of like resetting the iPod with hopes of it working better.

But sometimes the reset doesn’t take place and I’m left to live my day with NaNo Brain. I haven’t quite determined how often this has happened over the past few weeks, but I have discovered its obvious existence in my life.

Signs I’m In NaNo Too Deep and stuck in NaNo Brain?

*counting every single word I Skype with my son about his college coursework, upcoming exams and Thanksgiving break before I hit ‘send’. And counting the words like they matter.

*typing an email to a co-worker so quickly that the last letter of one word becomes the first letter of the next word, and not stopping to correct my error because I fear Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die is going to start making my screen blink from inactivity.

*creating a worksheet on the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World and getting frustrated with the Word toolbar for *not* giving me a little wordcount box when I repeatedly right-click on ‘Tools’ on a district computer that does not allow the action.

There’ve been a few more examples, but I’ll spare you the agony. How about you? Does NaNo happen to get in your brain and rewire the common-sense creative synaptic connections in your brain? I’m totally OK if not. I’m used to being like this but it is an interesting phenomena…

(353 words in this blog post. Can I count those, too?)

• 1 Comment
• Filed in BethWorld, NaNoWriMo

Yeah, that’s me. I did all those words. All very stream-of-conscious. I don’t think much of what I wrote will make the cut when I do a second draft, but the one thing I like about this statistic is that it is showing that I put my butt in the chair twice in one day. Despite a very long day of testing and random school nonsense, I managed to not only go for a good, long walk with the dogger after school, I had the energy to sit down and write. That’s a win for me.

• Comments Off
• Filed in NaNoWriMo

The A.M. of Day 3, that is. There may be a P.M. post too. But don’t get your hopes up.

My word count is not where I want it to be and my story is getting worse by the day. Welcome to NaNoWriMo, my writing friends…lol.

I am hating the writing with each passing sentence. I feel as though I’m slogging through muck to get to more muck. This is not exciting writing and it is not real storytelling–at least the kind that I like to do. I need the structure to my education memoir to keep me in line with the sequence of the story but the reality of the details are horridly boring. I want to be diving into the stories of my students, the kids who’ve made me the teacher I’ve become today, not the classes that gave me a degree. But there’s gotta be some balance there, a good with the bad and a spine to the story, if you will.

Argh!! Is this how you fiction writers feel, too? I generally read your posts and think those of you who aren’t enjoying every second of NaNo are just whiners, but I think I’m getting a dose of reality here. I won’t let it stop me…I’ll keep writing (garbage) if that’s what it takes. I don’t recall feeling this bogged down last year. Food is more fun to write about than teaching anyway…

Ok, enough griping. Just wanted to make the point that it ain’t all rainbows and unicorns in this challenge. I’m a little behind in word count and have enough time to make it up tonight–which is when I hope the engaging, exciting, fun-to-write part of my story miraculously appears on my doorstep in a UPS box.

Stop by later and see…in the meantime, commence writing my NaNo friends!

• 2 Comments
• Filed in NaNoWriMo