50,000 Words In 30 Days? No problem!

Central Park in a different storm!

Happy to report that I am back in the land of the living and the land of electricity. I was a victim of this weekend’s snowstorm that came out of no where. (Way to downplay the storm in my parent’s part of the work EVER WEATHERPERSON IN NEW YORK.)  The “1 to 3” inches that were supposed to start after 9 p.m on Saturday night were about 3” before noon.

And it just kept snowing.

So I was stranded in the suburbs sans power, heat, trains and all the rest.  Now I could deal without the power, if it was a bit warmer in the house.  One of the many great things about visiting my parents and one of my favorite reasons for going is that I can essentially drop off the map and get the time out from life that I’m usually looking for.  So I’m fine without the internet and the a few days without TV, but the inability to cook sucked.  Ditto on the shower.  And wearing a winter hat, five shirts and two pairs of socks was not exactly fun.  Oh and the whole “I hope that tree doesn’t fall on the house” fear wasn’t exactly a walk in the park (more of a trudge in the snow…ba-dum-DUM!)

Maybe it was the brain freeze, but I found myself suddenly missing all the things I COULD have been doing if I was warm and there was light.  Like writing.  Trying to convince myself that if I had all the perks of home that I would actually be sitting down writing and not useless on the couch watching another episode of Housewives.  That I wouldn’t be just napping my weekend away. No.  No.  No. I’d be writing of course.  (Even though I haven’t in the weekend’s past.)

But I swore to myself that I would hit the ground running when the power came on.  IF the power came on.  Making deals with Mother Nature (and the powers that be at Con Ed) if they would just flip the switch and let there be light.  Now why Mother N. or a bunch of electricians would even care if I wrote again, I don’t know, but that’s beside the point.  And then the power came back.  And eventually the train. And life went back to normal (ish).  The good news is that I didn’t totally go back on my work and I wrote for the full 45-minute train ride home.  It may have just been free writing.  But writing it was.  I kept saying I’d get back to it, waiting for the time to be write…the mood to strike…the stars to align…my head to be in a better place.

And then I don’t.  And then I do it all over again the next day.  Or rather don’t do it.  Shortest path to staying unpublished?  Don’t write.  Not exactly rocket science.  And not exactly going to help me realize the dream.

In all fairness, I can pretty much find an excuse for anything.  Why I didn’t write today.  Why I didn’t read the book on how to edit my book to make it submission ready.  Why I skipped the gym.  Why I blew off my laundry for another day.  Why I don’t want to go to work.  Why I can put off today what I can also put off tomorrow.  I fully own the excuses for not doing these things (tired, lazy, world-class procrastinator).  But how lame is that?  I don’t want to be the all-talk girl.  There’s plenty of those kind of people in the world and honestly, they all kind of bug the crap out of me.  And then I realized I was becoming one of them. I had all these goals of things I’d accomplish by my birthday (I am more of resolutions on my birthday vs. at New Year’s kind of gal). But my birthday was three weeks again and I totally didn’t accomplish those goals.  Sigh. Boo.  Another year older and none the wiser.

There was some time to mull and sulk over what could’ve been.

And then it was time to pick myself up and try again. 

What I was in need of was a giant kick in the ass to get myself going.  I’m very deadline driven.  But one of the hardest things about being an I-am-dreaming-of-getting-the-call-that-an-agent-wants-to-represent-my-novel writer is that there isn’t an official deadline at the end of my road.  Just the self-imposed ones.  And I said it before, and I’ll say it again, you will often find me cleaning the bathroom instead of writing.  I think I can rationalize it in the sense that I may not be writing, but I’m still doing something active and accomplishing something legit.  I don’t know.  Makes sense up in my head. 

Doesn’t put any words on the page.

And then the universe gave me the ass kick.  It’s November 1^st which means it’s National Novel Writing Month.  For those of you who don’t know anything about NaNoWriMo, it’s simple (well not really):

1. You join a free online community of writers who took the pledge to spend the month writing their way to a new novel.
2. You write at your own pace.  Share the writing if you want.  Or keep it to yourself.  But definitely share your word count.  And write you ass off.
3. You have to start a new novel.  Not a work in progress. No back editing an old book.  New.  New.  New.  From scratch.
4. Oh and the goal is to write at least 50,000 words.  In 30 days.

Amaze-balls!

Yeah, so it’s not as easy as it sounds.  (When you break it down it’s less than 2,000 words a day but even that’s hard since even the best of the best don’t always write every day.)  But it’s up to the writer to do what they want with it.  The goal is to provide something workable and not 50,000 works of crap.  But what’s important is that you write. 

I’ll confess, I signed up a few years ago and I quit part way though.  I honestly don’t remember the details but am sure I just got off track, didn’t have my head in the game, made up some excuses, got frustrated when it got hard.  Welcome to the game!  If it was easy then everyone with a dream of writing would have written something. 

Fast forward to today and I’m not the same woman.

So I decided to do NaNoWriMo around 1:00 p.m. today and so far all I’ve written is this blog.  Part of my snowstorm pact with nature was that I would post at least two blogs a week, but now I’ve just road-blocked myself, so the next month is going to be interesting.  Factor in Thanksgiving and that’s going to be tricky.  Plus all that turkey can make a girl sleepy.

But here’s the what – towards the end of writing my last novel – a.k.a the one in desperate need of re-editing (the rejection forced me to see that the idea needed to be fresher, the stakes needed to be raised, and the whole thing just needed to be B-E-T-T-E-R) I kept having ideas for another mystery.  Someone getting murdered at work.  (That probably says more about where I was mentally at the time with my last job.)  Snippets of ideas and dialogue kept pushing through and I have little scribbles in a hundred different places.  So I decided that there’s no time like the present to get this baby out into the world.  Or at least out onto my computer.

So without any further ado, I’m off to Day 1 of NaNoWriMo.  I’ll be tracking my progress here and with a lot of focus and a lot of discipline I hope to be at 50,000 words in 30 days.  But for now, I’m going to worry about tonight, tonight and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.  (To paraphrase Terry Francona while talking to his 2004 Red Sox before Game 4 of the ALCS.)  Words I keep repeating.

I will cue the endless episodes of Castle and Bones and Murder, She Wrote (which often are the best background noise I can find).  And will also cue some music.  I must confess Kelly Clarkson came through again.  There’s just something about this girl and her anthems:

Anyone have any crazy goals for the next 30 days?  If not, why not do something to focus on your passions?  Consider this a challenge!