Wanna hear a scary story?

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) starts tomorrow! So I have decided what I am doing for Nano and it's a bit unorthodox. But it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and terrified and happy when I contemplate my choice. So friends and family not involved in Nano? Expect me to be buried for the next month.

I am being cryptic, but not intentionally! I need to answer a few emails and then I will be heading out to have dinner and scary Halloween stories at some friends' house! I'm way too excited about this.

More tomorrow!

Okay, let's try this this morning!

Ironically I am trying to get back into making blog posts again during the busiest week of the school year when I have a few 12+ hour days. But let us not talk of frightful nights like Halloween Read and Treat night at our school or parent/teacher conferences. Let us talk instead about writing. I have so much to say about writing. (Oh, and guess what else I've dropped the ball on lately. Running. *sigh* But that's another tale for another day).

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up within a few short days, and what I have learned is that I have a real problem. You may think I'm being a bit tongue and cheek here, and I probably am on some level. I tend to joke about serious stuff a lot, one of those self-protective quirks, I guess. No, seriously. I realized a few weeks ago, with some devastation, that my procrastination is beyond an annoying quirk that I poke fun at myself for. It's an entire story of my life of unfinished projects, unfollowed-through promises, and unfinished dreams. Yes, my computer proves that. Stephen King proves that. How does Stephen King prove that and what does he have to do with my writing life? Well, he has this method that he talks about in his book On Writing, about how he accomplishes life as a writer, and it is a very different world from how I accomplish writing. And guess what. He's published more books in his life than I could ever dream of and more. What he does works. And it has little to do with talent. Don't get me wrong. Stephen King is talented. He's in fact overlooked a lot because snooty literary people have only seen his movies and not his books, and a lot of his books do not translate well to movies and they just end up looking like trashy horror. Again, don't get me wrong. Stephen King DOES write trashy horror on occasion, but it's GOOD trashy horror. The man knows how to spin a yarn. He knows what he's talking about. He knows what goes bump in the night and how to scare the crap out of anyone who doubts that things really do go bump in the night.

Anyway, a day in the life of Stephen King: write all morning with no distractions, do errands and other stuff in afternoon plus some editing, read books in evening and family time, go to bed. (Granted, Stephen King doesn't have a day job, but he did at some point before he was famous and he did a variation of that schedule around his work schedule.)

A day in the life of MY writing schedule on a NON-WORKING day (to make it equiv.): screw around on the internet, play with cat, try to decide between two or three writing projects to work on, arrange files on computer, write for 15 minutes, get distracted by shiny forum about hair care/Siamese cats/clean eating/running, google random things, decide I don't want to work on project I chose to work on, play with cat, go run some errands, talk to old friend on phone for 3 hours, clean house minimally, look at my files again, screw around on the internet, watch a few more episodes of Parks and Recreation, think about how much I want to succeed as a writer and feel resentful toward people like the Twilight author who can't write herself out of a paper bag and yet at least finished what she started hardcore and is now laughing her way to the bank, cry a little, look at files and can't decide what to work on again, feel resentment at other people who are organized and know how to manage their time well, go to bed

So, here we are at the eve of Nanowrimo, and part of my big dilemma is: Do I put my big girl pants on and pretend to be Stephen King, stop screwing around, and pick my oldest project that already has 124,000 words (so yes, cheating, but I have a plan to make it NOT cheating for Nanowrimo) and do this ONE PROJECT and one project alone until it's finished, I don't care how long it takes or how sick I am of it? Or do I pick something for pure pleasure and fun and do it and then promptly never look at it again like last year's Nanowrimo project? I'm leaning toward the former at this point.

Oh, if there were prayers in my life, I would pray for Stephen King's muse and focus.

And too bad The Shining was about a job gone wrong and not about a vacation gone wrong because that would be an awesome movie to review for my theme.

Redrum! Redrum! REDRUM!

Really Dropped the Ball

Okay, I have really dropped the ball on this! I have been mega busy and at the same time, mega lazy. Thus, my free time has been in a zone of staring mindlessly at the television or computer.

So I'm leaving town tomorrow for a short time, but next week I have a few movies to review and a few Very Deep and Profound Thoughts about writing and the creative process.

Also, Nanowrimo is coming up in a few short weeks. Do YOU know where your muse is?

Back to Reality

My brain is fried and I don't actually have anything specific to say today, but I just got back from a much-needed mini-vacation (no, it did NOT go dreadfully wrong) yesterday. I left Thursday evening and just got back yesterday.

This means:
1. No writing, running, or anything that involved thinking or healthy eating for the last six days or so.
2. No groceries in my house AT ALL (and was too tired to deal with that yesterday)
3. You know the phrase "when the cat's away, the mice will play?" Because my cat was also on vacation the last few days (staying at my parents' house), there is a possible mouse in my house that my cat has not taken care of or even discovered yet. I have seen some evidence in the kitchen and so I am encouraging my cat to get on this and soon. Right now, it's the last thing on Helo's mind. He just wants to bliss out and purr all over me now that I'm back and he's back in his own house.
4. *WHINES* I don't want to go to work today! I want to just laze in bed and write and watch shows that I've taped/downloaded and hang out on the internetz.

I hope all of you have a spectacular Tuesday!

I can does writing, yes?

To the average person looking at my life, it would appear that I don't write. After all, what do I have to show for it? Not too much, and my laptop isn't talking. Sometimes, during some periods of time in my life, this average person would be right to question my writerlyness. They might be right to question my actual work ethics. After all, I am now 41 years old and I was supposed to be published and wildly popular by the time I was 30. Of course I cringe whenever I think of my writing style back then. So young, so naive. And as for the published at 30 thing? I think most life plans are a joke anyway, and the people who actually attempt to follow and accomplish them are a little weird (yes, me, the writer, is calling someone else weird! Where does the madness end?). They are even weirder if they succeed at it. I always look at such planners with suspicion. They can't be real humans who make huge, life-changing mistakes and have random bad things happen to them to divert the planned course like the rest of us mortals.

So back to evidence of being a writer. A person who likes to knit or quilt will have a lot of physical evidence of their talent either as presents to their long-suffering nieces and nephews in the forms of fuzzy sweaters, hats, or scarves, or family quilts that get sent down through the generations because wow, that Auntie Lala could sure quilt. A person who paints will have paintings sitting around that guests to her house could, in theory, ooh and aw over. And of course our dear Saturday Sequins and other people who make jewelry also have their beautiful work displayed so people can see it. It's easy to show someone a piece of jewelry you made or a painting. It takes one minute.

But what about writing? You can't very well make everyone at your family gathering shut up so you can read them what you have of your novel so far. Well, maybe if you passed out enough alcohol. And let me tell you, I guarantee it would be a helluva better entertainment than watching Dancing With the Stars or any of the other insipid reality shows out there these days.

What people don't know about me is that I have way more writing stored in my computer than you all can possibly imagine. I have so much writing on my computer that if you were trapped on a desert island for a year and could only have my computer (no internet) as entertainment, that you would most definitely keep yourself entertained for a long, long time.

Some of this writing is the six or seven (eight?) versions of the novel that I've been picking at since 1995. I've referred to this novel as the bad boyfriend who wears leather, drives a motorcycle, drinks a lot, is rude to me and cheats on me, and yet I still keep coming back to him. Yes, this is the bad boyfriend that I keep trying to change, keeping trying to break up with because we're definitely better off with other people, but no matter what, I always go back to him. After all, THIS time we're going to make it. THIS time he's not going to suck. Because let's face it, he has charisma and character and he's really hot. I've finished this novel multiple times but it's never enough.

Aside from that, I have a really strange novel I started soon after that while I was in Scotland in 2002. There are at least 100 pages of it. I have another that had started right around that same era that I really focused on more in 2003 when I came back from Scotland and was in school. I have a metric ton of fiction written based on some movies (more than you all can possibly imagine). And by the way, I keep that life VERY separate, so please no more said about that part. I only mention it as a point that I have written so much more than most people reading here can possibly imagine. I have short stories galore, my Nanowrimo novel from last year, multiple starts of brilliant ideas in which I got about 70 pages in and then decided to go back to bad boyfriend mentioned above. Recently I got a short story published in a Trinidadian collection of short stories. It has not been published yet, but it's in the final stage.

But because I don't display these things or offer to show people these things, it is as if it doesn't happen. I might even look somewhat normal to the outside world. After all, I have a day job that people ask me about all the time, and I will talk and vent about that, too, although after a time, I bore myself to tears talking about work. I think my big fear when it comes to what people think of me, which pretty much comes rarely since I usually do not care that much what people think of me, is that people will think I'm a poser because I talk about writing and being a writer and then obviously have very little to show for it. And maybe my even bigger fear is that they will be right because lately I have not spent nearly as much time on my craft as I should.

Although right now all I can think about is how sore my legs are from a six-mile run I took yesterday at a faster than usual pace. And because I randomly added in a detail about my running in this post about writing, I think that some day you guys should suffer through a post about how running and writing are actually very much alike. You non-runner writers will appreciate that.