Friday, October 22, 2010

Too Early, More Sleep Necessary

I'd like to say that the reason I did not blog yesterday was to give more front page time to Rena's lovely piece titled some hooking phrase on giraffe love. That would be lying and though many say that fiction writers lie for a living, I'm not going to do it needlessly. I'd also like to have another reason that I haven't blogged on my assigned days in nearly two weeks, instead snagging any other day during which I was reasonably close to a keyboard and had a glimmer of a message to give to you. I don't have another reason and so I sit her, at 11:12 on a Friday with the shower beckoning, to tell you that in the last three days, I've learned some stuff.

It really throws me out of my routine when I put myself in a situation where I must wake up early (or what I consider early, around 7-7:30) any number of consecutive days. I can never quite get over that feeling of my entire life and death resting on the fact that I stay in bed and get those next two hours of sleep. It doesn't go away and I'm jealous of all those schoolies who've learned to shove it in a dark corner. I have to resort to Alex Day-ian measures to force myself out of bed.* Each time, it's awful. It also gets worse each day, as I wait impatiently for my reprieve. Tomorrow is the fourth and second last day of this insanity.

In case you're wondering why, I'm getting up for my writing craft. To better it. To meet the purported masters. To fraternize with the enviable published. It's a pretty cool conference and I'm very lucky it happens every year in my area.

I'm tired. That's my thing. I don't really want to get into it now, maybe Sunday when I'm finished donating my weekend life to volunteering. I'll just say that I had an author read three pages of my novel, she raved about it and gave me a couple valuable things to think about and, because of this, I am now as unsure about NaNoWriMo** as ever and am doing a pretty significant edit to my novel, starting as soon as I have time. Run on. Tired. Showering. Talk to you later, after I've introduced Diana Gabledon on Sunday.

*By this I am referencing his bungee jumping video, where he says whenever he needs to work himself up to something he always tells himself he doesn't *need* to do it. And that makes him want to do it. Likewise, I tell myself I don't *need* to get out of bed, that I could stay here and sleep and miss out on whatever cool stuff I'm supposed to be waking up for. Unfortunately, this just makes me kind of miserable for a while, especially as I stare into the mirror and realize I look exactly the way I feel.
**My issue now is that I shouldn't be opening up a new story, a completely new project, when I still have this old one nagging me to finish and query agents. I may end up using NaNoWriMo to finish my last novel, though I know that's not strictly the point. I've got a week and a bit to make up my mind. We shall see what happens.

1 comment:

Vita said...

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

Obvi I am not in your head so I can't say this with certainty, but it seems to me that you need to stop seeing NaNoWriMo as this huge you-must-do-it-or-else-you-fail-at-life essential for a writer. Sure, the purpose of NaNoWriMo is to write as much new material as possible, not to edit/revise something old, but the LARGER purpose is to make people better writers, is to motivate people to write, is to get people inspired, is to get people out of the "I suck I suck I can't do this mindset" and just embrace their core creativity, even if it does -- in its raw, unedited form -- suck. And I don't think anyone behind NaNoWriMo would begrudge you for spending the month rewriting 50,000 words (or whatever) of your novel as opposed to writing a new one. I mean, published authors do that all the time -- they use NaNoWriMo as an incentive to finish their project, not to start a new one. And yeah, they're in a slightly different position because they've got a deadline and money and shit involved, but it's basically the same thing.

In other news, conference (is it a conference? I swear you said it was but I couldn't actually find that word when I skimmed this again... just going insane over here, nbd) sounds super fun and I am jealzzzz :)