NaNoWriMo Day 11

This is Stumpy.  He's our Portland Region mascot. Isn't he great?

I won't lie.  I am behind on my word count.  Oddly, though, I'm not worried.  I'm going to settle down for a long writing session this afternoon, and I'm probably stopping in at a write-in this evening, so I'm probably going to give my word count a good boost today.  But I think that's not the major reason I'm not worried.  I think I'm not worried because, for the first time, I feel like I am a writer. I put these words and sentences together, I pour this story out onto the page, and I know that this is what I do.  I can do this.  I *do* do this. And what's more, I am feeling confident about my ability to finish this novel.  Not just reach 50,000 words but actually reach the end of the story. Not by November 30.  But I know that I really do know how to keep going and write until the end of the story.

What's my plan?

• Write a beginning of the month post with my word count goal for that month and what I'll be working on (because someday, not too far from, now it will be revisions!)
• Write update posts at least twice a week about what I've done on my goal that week (Thanks to my one of my writing buddies for this idea: The Crystalline Aerie)
• Post these goals and updates to Twitter for my writing buddies to see
• Write a wrap-up post at the end of the month (although there's the possibility that this one might be part of the goal setting posts instead of a separate post; we'll see)

 Obviously, this month my goal is 50,000 words (I'm at 13,149 right now).  Most months will probably be about  half of that. I think 25K words December will probably be quite a lot less because of the holiday craziness.

I plan to finish the first draft of my current NaNo novel--Chasing the Moon--by the end of January.  Then I'm going to set it aside for a resting period and work on Ordinary Girl, my 2006 NaNo novel that I never finished. I'm expecting that one to take 3-4 months.  After the first draft of OG is finished, I'll go back and start revisions on CtM, but since I've never gotten to the revision part of a novel, I don't know how long that will take, so I'm not going to try to schedule things any further out than that.

So, yeah.  There it is, that's my plan. Now, I'm going to go get some of those words written. I'll report on that later.

Birthday Intentions

Friday marked another year on this Earth for me.  I love my birthday, so I was thrilled to find yet another way to mark it.  Jennifer Blanchard offered two reasons to set new writing goals on your birthday over at Procrastinating Writers, and I'm taking her advice.  I'm a couple of days late--I was visiting my family last week--but I think it's still well within my traditional birthday week. (Yes, birthday week. Really, I love my birthday.)

This year:

• I will not only write 50K for NaNoWriMo, I will actually finish the story (rough draft finished by December 31, 2010)
• I will finish the first draft of Ordinary Girl, then revise and submit it
• I will save the money to attend Willamette Writers' Conference again

Those are the writing goals.  I have a few others, too:

• Create a regular exercise habit
• Offer two online workshops
• Lead a writing retreat
• Lead a soul tribe retreat

Write a book with Holly Lisle

I have been stuck in planning mode for so long. I'm doing Holly Lisle's Think Sideways course, but I'm plodding and dragging and just feeling stuck. The course is great. I'm just having a hard time doing *anything*, not just that.

Enter a new venture by Holly. She calls it "Write a Book With Me." And it's pretty darned brilliant. Simple rules, simple goals, an easy place to post your progress. No pressure. Lots of fun. Lots of words. And I just realized that, even doing the bare minimum 250 words a day five days a week I will have a draft finished in four months (80 working days which works out to 16 weeks). And with a load that light, I can easily keep up with my course work.

I am not going to start on the course novel just yet. I think I'm going to pull out one of my back burner ideas and work on that. I'll tell more about that on Monday once I have some plans in place.

Moving Merrily Onward

Okay, maybe not so merrily. I feel clunky and uninspired still, but I know that will go away once I can get myself back into a normal routine of writing regularly. Meanwhile, while I work toward that routine, I am slow and sludgy and draggy. And yet...And yet there is a story building in my head. It's a Greenvale story--Greenvale is my made-up city on a bay on the shore of the Pacific and has a university and a lighthouse and a thriving art community. It's a great place even mostly unformed as it is now, and a few of my story nuggets are going to be Greenvale stories.

So I am still left with the question: Why am I so resistant to writing? I can't stop thinking about writing and my stories. My head is filled with all of it all the time. So what's the problem? What is holding me back, keeping me from actually doing it? I think there's a lot of worry that once I really try I'll find out I'm not actually good at it. I've had positive feedback in the past on both my fiction and other writing, including from professors and other teachers. But I find a quiet, whispery worry in the back of my mind that warns that those situations might just have been flukes and that I won't be able to repeat my success. That whisper is accompanied by another that tells me that my years of not doing a lot of regular writing have probably dried up my talent so I have nothing left to actually put down on paper.

I don't think those whispers are actually telling me the truth. At least, my rational mind doesn't believe them. But I am somehow letting them thwart me even though I know they lie. Part of my plan to overcome them is to keep writing about all of this here. Maybe someday this will even be useful to other writers and creatives who are caught in the same sticky trap.

Now, though, I am going to do one thing. I am taking one step. I am going to post this and then get out my Lesson 5 papers and finish my D&L. By tomorrow, I plan to be able to write here that I'm ready for the next phase.

Fingers crossed...

Write some more

Today I read Robert Lee Brewer's "Poetic Asides" blog. He interviewed poet Cherryl Floyd-Miller, and she said: "Write! And then write some more. When you feel like you truly (((can))) *quit* writing, then you should quit ..."

It seems almost an answer to what I wrote on Wednesday about toying with the idea of quitting. Don't do it unless you feel like you actually can. I don't feel that way, so I am definitely not quitting. I am still a writer.