You would think that someone who (with marital collusion) built a house on an island where, at the time, the only way to bring in construction materials was by a barge that had to be beached for unloading - well, you would think that person might be prone to impulsive, slightly insane gestures.
You'd be only partially correct in my case. The impulsive gestures in my life have been few, and their results mixed. The house on North Caicos happened to be a good one. Others ... not so good. And now here's the latest bout of sudden insanity: I signed up for NaNoWriMo.
What sounds like some exotic tribal ritual is an abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in quantity writing. Each participant writes a 50,000-word novel in the 30 days that hath November. I'm a word person, so I didn't do the math, but the Daily Writing Tips blog did: It's about 1,700 words a day, or six double-spaced manuscript pages. Aaugh!
The big question, of course, is why? The quick answer: It's a start. Or, borrowing again: "The point is that you will have overcome your trepidation at devoting so much time and effort toward crafting a towering achievement in prose, using the novelty of the project as an excuse. And then you will have a first draft of a novel (and then the real work starts)."
My plunge into NaNoWriMo was indeed impulsive. Just days before, I had put my second novel, She-Pirate of the Taino Islands, on the shelf, having decided that it was bogged down in talkiness, that not enough was happening, that I lacked passion for it. Then came this challenge. I wondered what would happen if I tried restarting it in a different place.
So, boom, I signed up without thinking much further. Now, yikes, here I am looking at Nov. 1 and trying to reshape my idea. Already, it's keeping me awake at night. I haven't written anything yet, but so far I have a new working title - Hurricane Lorraine - a new metaphor (that's pretty obvious) and an idea about the first scene.
I'm not exactly sure how this whole thing works. Will someone say, "Ladies and gentlemen, start your word processing programs"? We'll see.
And I promise to provide reports.
You'd be only partially correct in my case. The impulsive gestures in my life have been few, and their results mixed. The house on North Caicos happened to be a good one. Others ... not so good. And now here's the latest bout of sudden insanity: I signed up for NaNoWriMo.
What sounds like some exotic tribal ritual is an abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in quantity writing. Each participant writes a 50,000-word novel in the 30 days that hath November. I'm a word person, so I didn't do the math, but the Daily Writing Tips blog did: It's about 1,700 words a day, or six double-spaced manuscript pages. Aaugh!
The big question, of course, is why? The quick answer: It's a start. Or, borrowing again: "The point is that you will have overcome your trepidation at devoting so much time and effort toward crafting a towering achievement in prose, using the novelty of the project as an excuse. And then you will have a first draft of a novel (and then the real work starts)."
My plunge into NaNoWriMo was indeed impulsive. Just days before, I had put my second novel, She-Pirate of the Taino Islands, on the shelf, having decided that it was bogged down in talkiness, that not enough was happening, that I lacked passion for it. Then came this challenge. I wondered what would happen if I tried restarting it in a different place.
So, boom, I signed up without thinking much further. Now, yikes, here I am looking at Nov. 1 and trying to reshape my idea. Already, it's keeping me awake at night. I haven't written anything yet, but so far I have a new working title - Hurricane Lorraine - a new metaphor (that's pretty obvious) and an idea about the first scene.
I'm not exactly sure how this whole thing works. Will someone say, "Ladies and gentlemen, start your word processing programs"? We'll see.
And I promise to provide reports.