I took a couple of months off posting here because I’ve been working on other things. One of those things was NaNoWriMo which, for those who can’t be bothered to click the pretty purple link, is a writing event that takes place during the month of November where the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
A mostly complete novel in thirty days.
For someone like me, with my elite power of mass disorganization and heavily restrictive schedule, that goal is as laughable as it is insane. I first heard about this four or five years ago and managed to completely forget about it each time it rolled around, but this year, this year, I remembered! In October! This was the year I was finally going to do this thing….sort of.
You can set your own goal, but you can’t win unless you get to 50,000 words. Considering one of the only things you “win” is the personal satisfaction of having a hastily written first draft, I was okay with making my own goal a far more realistic 20,000 words. I’d only ever written anything that length over a period of several months, so getting there in a fraction of that time would be just as satisfying to me.
If you defeat NaNo and achieve the mega word count you also win half off a purchase of the writing app Scrivener, but you still get a discount code just for playing. Scrivener has been glorified to no end by any writer I know or follow, so I decided to give it a whirl and since you get a 30 day free trial, it seemed like a good idea for that whirl to take place during NaNo. Lord was I wrong.
I’m sure once you take a like a 20 hour training course, it’s a breeze, but not having the time for all of that it felt like an army crawl uphill just to figure out the rudimentary basics so I could even start writing. I also didn’t get to play around with all of the organization features that supposedly make it superior to other word processors. (I’m not saying it isn’t superior, I just I have yet to figure that out. )
I was going to stick with Word because I’ve used it for years, but as a Poor, I don’t actually own it, I use the free online version. And when, in the wake of all this, I decided to look into buying it I realized that it is pricey! Maybe that’s part of the appeal of the much less expensive Scrivener which I did just buy it so hopefully it gets easier.
She said, as she typed this very post out in Word.
So the NaNo thing was…fine I guess? I can’t fairly judge it because I gather that a big part the experience is that it connects you with other writers in your area also doing it and then you’re all invited to do weekly “write ins”. What’s a write in, you ask? Well, it appears that it’s when you meet up with other writers at a library or coffee shop and…write? Together, but not together, at the same time? I may have that wrong, but that seemed to be the deal and I did not understand the benefit of such a thing.
There is a joke that comes to mind about how you’re not really a writer unless you do it in public where you can be seen doing it. To me writing is a thankfully solitary craft and the idea of willfully doing something like this confounds me to no end- but everyone does their thing differently. Maybe to the less misanthropically inclined these write ins give a boost of productivity or emotional support or at the very least an overpriced coffee that make it worthwhile.
When I entered in my first word count on the NaMo site, it was posted right on my public profile. Anyone could see how well or poorly I was doing. Instantly this whole event became competitive so I dove in pretty hard. I mean, I still failed, but I got 14,000 words in desperate need of revision that I didn’t have before so…go me?
I’ve mentioned that I don’t have a lot of free time. I wait until the children are in bed and all of the housework and preparations for the next day are done before I can sit down and work. However, for this challenge, I had to steal some extra time during the day and the girls were just basically neglected for a month (I kid- but they did have a lot of frozen dinners in that time -with zero complaints).
I worry that to the girls, it seems like I’m just sitting at the computer ignoring them. If I were a visual artist, they would wake up to see the ever- evolving canvases of work, the house would smell of paint, there would always be brushes in the sink and smudges of color on things. They would carry these memories into adulthood and remember that their mother was an artist. But there is no tangible evidence of the thing that I do that I’ve been passionate about since long before they were born.
This bothered me for a while because I’m their role model and all they get to see of me is the Mothering and the Housewifery. Good things. Important things. But not all of the things I am.
The children have often heard me tell them that I was writing, but I didn’t think it particularly mattered to them aside from the fact that it granted them more game time. Or so I thought. Then Violet started writing.
In the last couple of years she would occasionally make little comics with her friends, but since I did NaNo, she started showing an interest in what I was doing and has filled notebook after notebook with stories. They all seem to be about cats or wolves or foxes, of course, but she is writing.
Between that and Lily’s “spirit friends” I think the girls are enough like me and my worry over them not understanding what I do is misplaced. Now I worry about those other things being like me entails…
