Reader, let me tell you. The world is a dangerous place. One day you're still thinking of all the things you should be posting about and then some devil rears it's head and says "You have to earn for a living, puny human! Mwahaha." and then you have to work like a crazy person.
I've had a few escapes this year, but they were brief moments where I could breathe and go "ooohhh, I can use the keyboard of my laptop for things other than work..."
But usually by that time, my brain is so fried that all sense of comprehension flies out the window and I end up staring dumbly at the computer screen with, maybe, a little bit of drool dripping off my chin.
Then I drag my carcass to the xbox and play games that I don't have to think in all that much. Like Brink. I'm probably the only person who likes it even if its AI drives me insane. Or Far Cry 3 - South African villain, ftw! Ahem. Well, not really. We don't like villains. Refer to the 'some devil' reference above. But at least the accent is there... Or I stay at my laptop and play Evil Genius and lose hours upon hours. Or Seven Kingdoms - same thing. Or Harvest Moon - I have that wench's heart going pink but I'm more worried about my crop than feeding her rice cakes the whole friggin time!
Ahem... now where was I?
Ah yes, the moments of clarity that turns into gooey brains and pointless gaming.
But is gaming really pointless, do I ask you? Especially when games ask questions about life, or asks us specifically how far is too far gone to return? Is it pointless when you know you want the good ending, but for things to make sense, it just really can't? What a conundrum!
Brain dead living also sometimes means staring blankly at a screen that is showing moving pictures with people talking and not acting like the fourth wall exists. Through this means I've seen Khan be seriously creepy and the actor playing Kirk (a character I loathe) giving such an amazing performance that I was ready to cry with him (I shall neither confirm nor deny whether I actually succumbed to this notion). And Spock being awesome... And I saw Superman cause a ton of collateral damage and the people of the Daily Planet just having the worst luck with falling concrete and an amazing-looking Clark Kent. No muscle padding needed in the blue suit, no sir. He reminds me terribly of Christopher Reeve...
And what else... hm. Agends of Shield. Walking dead. A little bit of Downton Abbey. Game of Thrones - Rains of Castamere pops into my head the MOMENT I thought of the title. Uhm.
So I have been keeping my mind topped up even if I haven't emptied it on anything bloggish.
But I felt that now, two days away from NaNoWriMo - yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's that time of the year again - I should show my face. To remind people that this notion of writing like a crazy person for a month - come hell or high water - exists to give one the opportunity to feel like you've emptied yourself, wrote something that might be utter garbage in the end, but hell now you can't say "one day I would like to write a story". You sat down and you sunk your teeth into it.
So as a recap, what is NaNoWriMo?
Well, first it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Only now it's an international thing where over two-hundred thousand (it has hit over three-hundred thousand at least once) people all over the world, from all walks of life, make the commitment to start writing a story, starting on the 1st of November and hitting fifty-thousand words at the end of the month. The stories written - on paper, laptop, phone, typewriter, whatever - aren't open to the public to read. Your story is your story and you're the only one who has you're story. Only when you're writing with a 50 000 word count, some might not be inclined to write you're but rather 'you are' seeing as that makes two words instead of one.
But back to the point. It's (it is) your story and it doesn't (does not) get taken from you because listing your number of words on the site is all about your own honesty. So that golden piece of writing can be anything you want it to be and can become anything you want it to be. There are quite a few books that have been published by authors who used nanowrimo as a place to write their first draft. It's helped people write dissertations, non-fiction, fanfiction and stuff hardly worthy of using as toilet paper. The point is that you're writing. You're actually writing. And fifty-thousand words? That's three pages a day. One-thousand six hundred and sixty-six words a day. You'd be surprised how surprisingly easy it can be to chuck out that many words.
You'll notice that we're talking about words. Not content. Quantity. Not quality. The reason for this is we don't want there to be any evil editors standing in the way telling you your writing is shite. Frankly, it's SUPPOSED to be. One thing people don't always understand is that the good story you might read somewhere didn't start the way it ended up. The words that it took to get to that final published strips of tree were infinitely more than what the ink on the page suggests. It is the proverbial block of marble from which a statue is chiseled. No marble; no statue. No copious amounts of writing, no book.
That's what nanowrimo provides its participants: the place to write up a storm of words that make up the proverbial marble. What you make of that is later's worry. Here you can write your space opera, your self-insert into Lord of the Rings where you tell Gandalf that flying is much faster than walking, your crime novel full of the type of gore that would make others cringe, or your romance novel with scenes that would make EL James blush. It's the opportunity just to have silly fun with a group of people who're probably just as high on life (but more likely caffeine and sugar) as you are.
This is my eighth time participating in nanowrimo. I did not "win" every year. I've gotten stuck at ten thousand the one year and that was after I had managed to make the target the year before. But it's not about winning or losing even. Sure a person can make it about that, but mostly it's about being creative and changing a 'one day' into a 'right now'.
Novembers are usually terrible on me. In my part of the world, nearing the end of the year isn't a 'halfway' mark. It really is the end of the year. And that means all the tons of things you were trying to finish throughout the year actually has to get finished immediately. And oddly, ever single deadline manages to find its way to November. It is in that month where I come in early and leave late, where I sit and buckle. Where the test isn't to see whether I manage to get everything done, but how long it'll be until I crawl underneath my desk with my box of tissues. November is NOT the month of creativity.
But I take part in Nanowrimo anyway. Because under that desk, I have my little world where characters are fighting my battles for me or drawing my frustration from me or commenting on the fact that I am probably insane given the fact that the conversations that go through my mind tend to be between people who don't exist. It is in nano where I give my characters names of people I can't throttle and then have things happen to them. Like a falling piano or a travelling shovel or a disease that makes them a zombie which then obviously justifies decapitation.
I'm actually a pacifist. All bunnies and things. Really. Ahem.
At the end of November, I look at my work and feel that the rat race has been a rat race. I have run myself to death just to end up at EXACTLY the same place. My pages have simply moved from right to left on my desk and somehow that makes the world happy for a month before January starts the race again.
But also at the end of November, I look at nanowrimo and find that I actually achieved something. I've written something and learnt things. I communicated with fellow participants from different places - local and international - and we went through something together. There's something. Not just a race. Next year my story won't be the same. I will feel different in many ways and the only similarity will be my excitement for trying this crazy thing that makes no sense but, at the same time, makes all the sense in the world.
That's what NaNoWriMo gives me. It might give you something completely different.
If you are a blogger, a fiction writer, a person keeping a journal or someone random who suddenly stopped and felt writing a few lines would be kind of neat: I would really and truly recommend giving this a shot. It doesn't cost you anything, but it can give you a lot. It can give you a little confidence in your writing because you learn to build a rhythm. You find a pace that works for you, a time of day, a particular setting. You begin to discover how you think and how to put those words across. You begin to unlock something in yourself that you might be quite used to unlocking or have rarely dared.
And then finally. Remember how I said that nano basically requires you to write one thousand six hundred and sixty-six words? Well, here I present to you a word count of approximately 1690.
Simple as that.
