Friday, November 6, 2009

Yeah, well . . .

Yesterday, I said I was going fishing and wasn't going to write.

Yeah, well . . . I didn't go fishing. And I wrote a grand total of 382 words, not counting this post.

What I did was, I went to NaNoWriMo and started an account.

NaNoWriMo. You know.

National Novel Writing Month. Like November, dude!

You join and you try to write a novel of 50,000 words in a month. I can't do math but I know that's a lot of words every day. Even more if you don't begin on the 1st of November.

And I didn't join until the 6th, so I'm already a word or two behind. But hey, I'll consider myself a success if I write 15,000 words in November! Or even 7,500. I think my borderline is somewhere around 5,000 though. If I can't do 5,000, I give myself a D minus.

The whole point is to write a bunch of crap really fast. Now that I can do!

No, seriously. The point is to write really fast so you don't have time to edit, procrastinate, overthink, or otherwise obsess so much that your brain freezes up and your plot won't move. Sound familiar?

If so, do yourself a favor and check it out. Here's the link again. NaNoWriMo.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

A Time to Cast Away Stones

Everything, as Ecclesiastes 3 says, has its season, and writing is no exception. There's a time to write and--I believe--a time to keep from writing. Maybe there's even a time to throw away something you've written, as if it were a moldy old stone weighing you down! That's where I am.

I'm at the end of something, but I haven't figured out where or how to begin again.

Years ago, when my husband was frantically working toward his doctorate, he said there was a point at which it became counterproductive to pursue work that he had no taste for. Better to go fishing! Why wrestle with a task that, at a better time and in the right frame of mind, you might accomplish with ease?

But sometimes I don't take my own advice. This is the third time I have worked on a blog post. The first two I deleted because I just couldn't say anything meaningful. So I'm going fishing!

I'm as confident that my reservoir will fill again as I am that winter will follow fall. And when it does, my pen will be in my hand.