A couple of months ago, I decided I was going to start taking my writing life seriously. I was up against some major obstacles, so I hatched a Plan.
So far, the Plan has been a success. I’ll share it with you, if you’d like.
1: Attend World Fantasy Con
Note: There is no “Fan” in “World Fantasy Con.” Nope. Nada. Zip it. T’ain’t there. I are serious writer. This is serious con. Seriously. This is all pro, or semi-pro, on-the-verge-of-pro, or wannabe pro. I made plans to attend because I wanted to create an almost ritual break from my past non-writerly-life. And so, at the end of October, I set out, with not much more than two fancy jackets, my trusty laptop, and a suitcase full of books on writing, and ventured alone into the wilds of Silicon Valley. There, I was initiated into my writerly life, mainly by the ritual imbibing of libations until 3am with People Who Took Writing Seriously, mainly because They Were Writers Too. I also mingled with some of the gods of my world and a couple of these divine people even poured the libations.
WFC is going to require another post to digest properly. Suffice it to say that the event and the people were super motivating.
2: Participate Fully in National Novel Writing Month
From WFC, I traveled straight to San Francisco and checked into a cheap hotel in Japan Town, where, even though I spent much of my childhood in the Bay Area, I proceeded to ignore friends and family and the City around me for two days and to throw myself into producing the rough draft for a 50,000 word novel.
This is the part I’d like to analyze the most. I had hoped that if I pursued NaNoWriMo wholeheartedly, it would result in the following, and most were unexpectedly successful:
a) Confidence in my ability to write a lot, under deadline.
I didn’t think I could do it. I had a plan to work up to the 1700ish words per day required by doing @250 words per day during the first week in October and then building up to 1250 or 1500 words per day in subsequent weeks, bumping my daily amount by 250 each week. I think this plan produced a grand total of less than 2000 words in the entire month of October (for sample obstacle, see “imbibing of libations until 3am,” above).
During November, I churned out three, four, or five thousand words in a day like it was nothing. I kind of wish that my glutes were capable of typing, because on one day alone I pulled over 8000 words from in between them. Put them all together (the words, not the glutes) and I wrote an entire novel, something I didn’t think I would get around to attempting for years.
So now I’m the motherfucking Samuel L. Jackson of writing, ready to pump 50,000 words of modifier-enhanced schlock and horribly mismatched metaphor up your motherfucking ass.
Note that during NaNoWriMo, I did not gain one drop of confidence in my ability to write *well* towards a deadline.
b) Daily writing habit.
Mixed results here. I only had seventeen writing days in November, and on one of those days I produced exactly 42 words (in a back-handed tribute to that great author, Douglas Adams), and on two others I couldn’t break a thousand. Still, I did prove to myself that I could produce actual stories while traveling and working full-time and staying on top of physical therapy and hanging out with family. And maintaining a fairly solid twitter presence…
This is an important realization, because I needed to know that I could write and work and live simultaneously, and this is huge for someone who pokes himself in the eye when he tries to eat spaghetti and fart at the same time.
In other words, I’ve made peace with keeping the day job, but also with the fact that I’m probably only going to be competent at work, and not excel there. Working a lot of overtime and devoting evenings and weekends to training (how I’ve gotten promotions in the past) would take away from writing.
Also, admitting this sort of thing publicly probably doesn’t often result in a turbo boost up the IT career ladder.
c) Overcoming my inner critic.
I think we all have inner critics, but I swear I have the Genghis Caligula Cheney Voldemort Bin Laden Walmart Khan of critics living in my head. Also, I made this critic stronger by foolishly suggesting that you all could read my words if that was the sort of thing you were into, and then realizing that some of you were serious masochists when you said you wanted to read this shit.
And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I could’ve done it without you, since at key times a few of you drowned out the screaming voice of the tyrant living in my brain. Bless your pain-loving little hearts.
There are other benefits of NaNoWriMo that I can’t seem to pull out of my Benedictine-addled brain, but one is that it sets the stage for the next steps:
3: Writing, revising and editing short stories.
4: Submitting stories for publication.
5: Applying to the Clarion workshops.
The cool thing is that although I thought I’d be burned out, I actually have a million–well, maybe a half-dozen–new story ideas running around in my head, pressing at the back of my occipital lobes, just trying to get out.
I’ll keep you posted–stay tuned!
