NaNoWriMo Is Coming

The site (nanowrimo.org) has been reset for the year, the forums wiped clean just to be dirtied by our rambling minds again. It's a fresh start! I'll win this year, I swear!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and takes place every November not just nationally but internationally. It's a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month (which is short, as far as novels go). No, there's no prize if you win. But you get stickers!

It's an exercise in just getting words on the page. Quantity, rather than quality, is what matters. Save your red pen and editing for December! Or January, when you're not quite so sick of what you just wrote. Being a perfectionist about writing and also awfully lazy, I've never managed to win, though one year I came close and it was only due to an evil conspiracy hatched by my computer and flash drive that I lost (a previous copy of my novel, backed up on the flash drive, was copied over all other existing files at four in the morning, erasing around fifteen thousand words and brutally murdering my motivation).

I'm going to win this year, though. Really I am. Surely it will be easy to write 50,000 words about impossibly adorable genetically engineered pocket sized dragons eating faces, wreaking havoc, and causing moral quandaries, all with a side of questionably motivated genocide and corruption.

Right? Right.

I'm still nervous.

Finding the Words

There are so many things I want to talk about. I am nearly overflowing with topics, with thoughts that would do better on a page than in my head. But...I don't seem to have the words. Anyone who knows me can tell you that that's a rare thing, I can talk about nothing forever, and when I actually WANT to talk? You've got no chance of getting me to shut up. I'll tell you what I'm thinking whether you like it or not. Apparently I intimidate people with how vocal I am about...just about everything (pardon me if I think that, perhaps, those people NEED to be intimidated, so that maybe they'll learn to speak up, too).

But today I just don't have the words. Today I'm tired. Two weeks ago I fell off of a horse, all that remains as evidence is a scar on my face and a lingering sprained ankle, but healing is tiring. My heart hurts, because caring is tiring. People are strange and complicated animals and understanding them, or at least trying to, is tiring. (I don't think I'm ever going to perfect that skill, but maybe I'll learn to find an off button for whatever makes me want to understand people.)

If I was going to try, I could write about: the mustang roundup (though I already did that, and I just need to edit it from an essay into a blog post), my accident and how much I hate hospitals and bitchy ER nurses, the damned horse that hospitalized me and how much I love him, or how much fake concern from people who hate me annoys me and has made me want to hit something in the past few weeks. If not those, then I could write about how I've been reminded lately why I haven't consistently watched the news in years and why I stick to abstract concepts of social justice rather than current events, because the world makes me sick and I like to cling to what little faith in humanity I have left. Or I could be a bit less tragic, a little more hopeful, try to remind myself that there are things worth paying attention to by talking about the It Gets Better Project (and how much I sometimes love Dan Savage) and all the amazing people who have already participated in it and who are spreading it to reach those who need it. I could say that sometimes Violet Blue, or maybe The Rejectionist, say really cool things.

Perhaps I could try grounding myself in real life instead by writing about Beth DiCaprio who runs the Grace Foundation and continues to give me amazing opportunities to do inspiring things (and has really cool dogs that I want to kidnap).

I could meander into discussing music and how much I love it and need it and really need to acquire more of it. I could tell you how cute my puppy is at great length, because she's damn cute and and a really good foot warmer to boot. Had I the words, I could probably go on about books forever because, you see, I have so many and they're all pretty wonderful. Maybe even a mention of Banned Book Week and how ridiculous banning any form of literature is, though I haven't bothered to read a banned book this week even despite having meant to.

But, see, I don't have the words. I have all these really cool words, strung together in sentences and mashed up into paragraphs, but I don't have the right words. I can't find the ones I want. So I guess that will all have to wait.

An Ode to Theoretical Writing Space

(Prompted the The Rejectionist's post about writing spaces http://www.therejectionist.com/2010/07/rejectionists-writing-room-also-yours.html)

My writing space is currently only theoretical, in that I have never actually written in it. Currently it is That Space With a Desk and Some Books and Notebooks and Crap Overflowing onto the Floor. It's actually a walk in closet, and it looks like this except less blurry:

There is no chair at my desk because I haven't used my desk since I moved it in there around a month ago. And yes, that is a Pirate's of the Caribbean poster. Everyone is allowed to go through a horribly depressing period of liking bad movies once in their lives.

As you can see, there is no space to actually WRITE in this 'writing space'. I cannot fit a computer or a spare notebook on the desk at this point. The desk is a crap catcher for books and notebooks and magazines and horse figurines and pens and incense and jewelry and pictures that don't fit on the bookcase (and a dead plant that I only recently removed, as I have a black thumb and cannot seem to keep anything alive, especially in the summer heat). You could conclude logically and perfectly accurately that this space has not actually been used for writing in a very long time.

But, you see, it's my writing space because as long as I have a named 'writing space' I can continue to labor under the delusion that at some point I will do some actual writing in it, and get out of this horrible slump of writer's block that has been consuming me lately.