Seasonal Plume

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:

NaNoWriMo 2007

words: 20,299 / 50,000 (41%)

That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the day, as it’s only 9pm). Unfortunately, I’m still not half into the 2.5 years that my memoir is supposed to cover. Granted, there shouldn’t be too much after the first year, but I’m unearthing a lot of things from my journals as I go along that I never really know.

There are two things that are bogging me down from going through the events:

1. Research. There’s a lot of journal entries to wade through, both relevant and irrelevant to the memoir, but things I need to go through anyway.
2. Processing. This does chronicle a trying time in my life, and going through my journals is painful and troublesome.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creation itself is also scary. It’s not just the pain that going further in the memoir is going to give me, but also the general reluctance and fear that comes packaged into translating something into writing. Already I’m running into decisions that I’m putting off until the second draft: decisions and questions like, should I be as faithful as possible to what really happened or can I combine certain conversations together in order to conserve space? and how do I filter out effectively all that’s not needed, or how do I compact these into shorter, more concise scenes?

Already, I see that whatever my output for this month is, by the second draft, it’s going to be cut by half. I’m going to have to wade in with a highlighter and highlight important scenes and ideas and emotions, and find out how to make it more concise (see Questions Number One, above) and cut off the rest. I also see that I am going to need a printer, and lots of scrap paper. Oh joy.

I haven’t written more than once since my last post, and it was a very short session which brought my total to a paltry 4,404.

nanowrimo 2006

words: 4,404 / 50,000 (9%)

I am lagging behind, quite obviously, and need around 12,000 words to catch up. Meeep. I have realized two things: 1) the Internet is an evil, evil thing and 2) my organized side is rearing its “ugly” head and forcing me to write the story in order (again) when I’ve already decided I was going to do it the way I’ve always written and finished stories, which is to write it in mixed order as I felt like it. I am reverting! Someone save me! Help!

Seriously, though, I feel much better about this brand-new resolve. I have to keep remembering it if I’m to finish anything. I am in extreme envy of those who have already met half their 50k! Damn, I want to have time to myself so that I force myself to write. After all, one can always edit afterward. Rawr!

Ahem. Now, I shall disconnect myself from the trusty DSL and force myself to write disjointed scenes until the words blur on the screen. Toodles!

Edit: No, I ended up not writing. I did a last check of my email, and when I got Mr. Darcy (my laptop) up to my room, it was well past midnight and I had to get up at 5am today. Sob. See, the intarwebz is ebil!

Yes, I am alive, but sadly my (fiction) writing is not. It’s gone into hibernation yet again, buried by work, emotional stress, the Various Little Things That Take Up Your Attention. Plus the super typhoon. (We still don’t have electricity in Laguna.)

October makes me remember NaNoWriMo, though. Sadly, every single year I’ve joined (I’ve been joining for a while), I’ve always lost. The steam disappears after around a week or so, and then the Various Little Things start covering up anything left over.

It still doesn’t stop me from toying with the idea of signing up (and eventually losing) again. Yes, I fear I am a masochist. Seriously, though, I always have my ideas all bottled up in my head, and if my journal entries are any indication, I can easily write reams of words enough to meet (and exceed) the 50k word minimum.

Only I don’t feel satisfied with the way the words convey sentiments, or my thoughts are all jumbled up. My emotions are always connected to what I write. But I always have difficulty understanding my emotions, which is why I am always, always, always writing about it, analyzing it to death, trying to piece it all together and be able to label it accordingly. I feel this, I feel that. No, I don’t know what I feel about this yet, I need to find out what I feel about it. And so on and so forth.

My subconscious finds a lot of excuses. Oh, but you have to do your exercises. Oh, it’s already late, you should sleep. Oh, you should take advantage of your website layout creativity right now and revamp everything, you know it can go away again in a while. …and so on and so forth until it’s the last day of NaNo and I’ll just think, oh! It’s the last day, oh well, I failed again.

You know what would be a luxury? To take November off and just write. (Fat chance of that, though.)