So, last year, like all wannabe wordsmiths, I had a go at NaNoWriMo, and failed miserably. An entire month which you are supposed to dedicate to crackin’ out a 50k word novel, at a rate of 1.5k words a day, and I was hosed by the third day.
In the end, I think I nailed about 7,000 words that I didn’t immediately regret writing, and fell way short of the destined goal.
I think in the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew before I started. Whenever I sit down to write, some hidden and magical thing suddenly occurs that cuts short my efforts.
“I’m hungry! Oh snizzap, we got popcorn!”
“Oh no, I forgot to do XYZ work-related thing!”
“Hey, Seinfeld is on!”
I know I can do it — I have an unedited 90,000 word novel I wrote about 2 years ago floating around on my computer. It’s not impossible. But it was clear last year that I was missing something then, something that let me unleash myself with wreckless abandon.
It was pressure, I think. The pressure to succeed. When I started that 90,000 word behemoth, a few friends knew about it — people whose opinion I respected, for better or worse. I had something to prove. In my head, a clock was ticking, telling me that failure would be disrespect. So I wrote, and I wrote damn good, and in the end I finished something resembling a rough draft.
Then, I stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe I got too comfortable with the “I’m done!” feeling that it gave me. Maybe I got distracted and just never got back to it. Either way, I now count my former success as a total failure. NaNoWriMo was a test to see if, by my very quiet self, I could succeed. I don’t think I can. Not now.
So, the purpose of this blog is not only to chronicle my life as writer who’d be washed up if he ever finished anything in his life. It’s also my own little pressure cooker. I’ll be posting daily excerpts of what I’ve written, good bad or god awful, out here, on the Internet, one Google search away from total shame.
We’ll see what happens.
First up: finishing the tentatively titled, ‘The Hungry Thirst of Bloodfeast Mountain,’ which is a terrible name but one I’m not too concerned with fixing at the moment.