Day Four

I've been doing a lot of NaNoWriMo stuff lately. In addition to writing on my own, I've gone to a NaNoWriMo write in organized my the mini boss of my region. It was pretty cool.

As for my actual writing, I'm doing okay. Wordcount is good and school is falling out of sight but I'm surviving. I'm about to be out of my preplotted material. I had about four chapters in my head on October 31st and now it's all just blank pages. I have more story idea but no particular scenes laid out. I'll be fine.

On an exciting note, I talk to my distance ed school and they're going to give me course credits for participating in NaNo. I'm not sure if this'll be like an elective or if I won't have to take math next year but I am happy about whatever I can get.

I didn't realize until this week how much NaNoWriMo hate/distaste there is out there. I read this article which, in case you don't want to click and give the hatred filled woman more hits on her site, boiled down says something like this:
Writing is self absorbed and narcisstic so will all the peons please shut up and read the stuff more worthwhile people, such as myself, churn out. You're wasting your time to write 50,000 words of crap. Instead I think you should read a book for the first time this year.

But that's just my take on it. I was a little offended. And I mention this not because I want to give the writer, Laura Miller, more attention or to point out that she completely missed the point if she thought the idea of NaNoWriMo was to write the Great American Novel and then send it out to agents and editors on December 1st without changing so much as a comma. No, I wanted to direct you to the comments, some of which agreed with her vehemently and some of which did not. I didn't feel the need to actually write my own defense, because there were so many great ones out there. But I'll give you this and say that the two that I particularly enjoyed, the first of which actually made me laugh out loud, were "Well aren't you just the Queen of Everything" and "...but Laura, have you done it?"

It's easy to hate on things you don't understand. Hence the amount of racial prejudice and homophobia in the world? But I am doing NaNoWriMo this year because I love to write and if Laura Miller wants to tell me that it's a "waste of my time" that's completely fine. There will always be people out there telling you you're wasting your time, whether you're writing a novel or sailing around the world. Fortunately, you get to decide who you spend the seconds you have on this planet. So use them wisely.

How are you doing with NaNo?