Sharpening my pencils

Back to school has been going pretty decently, but now I’ve decided to kick things up a notch or three.  I keep telling you all I neglect the writ­ing por­tion.  I sus­pect that, as usual, that’s because I have some­thing I really want to say and am avoid­ing the real clar­ity writ­ing can give.

Ear­lier this fall, Chris asked if I wanted to par­tic­i­pate in NaNoW­riMo, or National Novel Writ­ing Month.  I have always scoffed at NaNoW­riMo, because every year tens of thou­sands of peo­ple sign up to write stuff and just don’t.  Or they do, and flood pub­lish­ers with crappy drafts of nov­els that mean that good nov­els don’t see the light of day.  Or any other num­ber of cyn­i­cal, jaded things that some­one who once aspired to be a writer can think of to talk her­self out of actu­ally doing some­thing.  So I almost laughed at him, but he was actu­ally ask­ing for moral sup­port while he wrote this month.  I can’t laugh at that.  That boy has libraries of books inside him, wait­ing to be writ­ten.  He’s even got them all mapped out, if he’d just do it.

I, on the other hand, get hung up when­ever I try to write any­thing big or fic­tional.  I get hung up on the whole story arc con­cept, and want to know what is hap­pen­ing ahead of time.  I get stressed out. I make char­ac­ters I love and then don’t know what to do with them. I freeze.  Plus, today my neck decided that the old injury would flare up, and I spent a large part of the day in bed.  And why did they choose this month for these things any­way?!  Aaah.  I guess Decem­ber would be slightly more chal­leng­ing, but not by much. Plus, other excuses.  Lots of them.

So, when Heather blogged today about NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month) I imme­di­ately thought, Yay, com­pro­mise! The idea of nablopomo is based on NaNoW­riMo, but isn’t really restricted to only Novem­ber.  But I think I can com­mit to a blog post a day, though Thanks­giv­ing week is kind of iffy, being at Granny’s and hav­ing com­pany in from out of town.  May have to do a few in advance, or just write some­thing very short and sweet for those days.  So in other ways, it’s even more of a com­mit­ment, because I’m not going to be given any slacker time.

The short of the story is that I’m ten­ta­tively com­mit­ting to both.  After all, can’t you tell I’m bristling with self-confidence?  Might as well.