I met a requested deadline today—and a week early, too!
This almost makes up for missing the personal one I’d set for last Friday morning, which meant I spent the afternoon catching up instead of rewarding myself with a matinee of RED. A strong sense of responsibility is a curse and a burden.*
But hitting the send button on that finished piece during my lunch break today leaves me with only two forefront projects leapfrogging over each other.
It’s like my own personal tag-team Nanowrimo.
I love National Novel Writing Month. It’s all about discovering that you can find the time to write an amazing amount and finish a long piece of fiction. Not to mention realizing how truly odd your subconscious mind can be as you dredge up all sorts of things from the bottom of your imagination and throw them onto the page.
It was during my first Nano, <cough, cough> years ago, that I realized I could do this thing—I could write long fiction.
Not necessarily good long fiction, Lord knows. But that fifty-thousand seventy-four-word pile of legal pads, printouts, envelopes, and old library pocket cards had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I hadn’t quit.
I even plowed through chapter ten, when all the doubts sidle up to whisper in my ear and I become convinced that everything I’ve written up to that point is utter garbage and a worthless waste of time.
Because it doesn’t matter. Nanowrimo isn’t about getting it down right, it’s about getting it down right now.
That’s an incredibly freeing philosophy, being allowed a truly crappy first draft that’s allowed to be an only draft. Marketability can go hang.
You can write anything.
Pirate Nuns! On the Moon! Growing celery! To fight the Evil Mutant Monks from the Asteroid Belt! Who need celery to establish trade relations with the Gaseous Beings from Venus!
Hey . . .
Unfortunately, if I actually try to add Nano to my schedule this year, my head will implode. But I will honor the spirit by hitting my deadlines spot on or even early, come fire, famine, floods, or Mutant Monks.
Anyone else want to take the pledge?
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* But the next installment is coming along nicely, so I’m going to see RED (so to speak) this Friday night with my friend Grace.
Earful of Cider 