NaNoWriMo

I've been meaning to write about my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) experience since its conclusion, but seeing as it's the middle of December now, I guess you already know one key fact about it: it has not upped my literary output.
NaNoWriMo is a simple idea: try to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days, specifically November 1st to the 30th. I've tried in previous years but never got very far. (The first year, in fact, was when I got diagnosed with Crohn's; nothing like getting a colonoscopy in the middle of the month to render one less excited about producing a novel.) This year was the first one in which I actually signed up as an official participant at the NaNo website. It wasn't to give my attempt more credibility and thus to motivate myself to stick with it, although that proved to be a side benefit. No; I signed up because Neil Gaiman had agreed to be among the writers who would send out pep talk emails over the course of the month, and the thought of getting an email from, you know, NEIL GAIMAN was irresistible.
I started the month full of enthusiasm (I think; I can't really remember back that far). I bought a couple of new notebooks and a couple Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball pens--my favorite. The notebooks were the toughest to pick out. I like the Mead Fat Lil' Notebook (known in Spanish as "Cuaderno Fat Lil'," according to the back) because they fit well in my purse, they've got lots of pages, and they're spiral-bound, but they are kind of bland, with solid-color covers in conservative shades. I was sorely tempted to buy a notebook whose cover featured a big-eyed Siamese with an elongated neck and the caption "Yes, I am that fabulous." But the Fat Lil' won out in the end because the Siamese was kind of disturbing.
I wrote in the mornings before work; I wrote faithfully, purt near every day, but had a tough time reaching the target daily word count. This may have been because I was writing and not typing, but I compose better that way. I think my thoughts arrive at writing speed, not typing speed. Later in the day I would enter my work into the computer to get a word count. This was a distressing exercise because usually, when I am working on a story, I use the typing stage to create a second draft--I'm altering as I go. (This entry is a case in point--its original draft was written in the Fat Lil' and is ever-so-slightly different.) But I wouldn't let myself do this for my NaNo project lest I lose precious words in the editing process. I had to just grit my teeth and type whatever I'd written, regardless of my low opinion of its quality.
And the quality was very poor indeed. I'd begun the project with one plot in mind--a second attempt at a story I'd thought up for last year's NaNo, plus a twist I was really jazzed about, an idea that had fallen from the sky in late October. I could hardly wait to begin. But in the actual process of writing the idea lost its savor. To keep myself going I started importing more and more from my own life, changing friends' names and barely fictionalizing details. The last 10,000 words, my desperate race against time, were a dream sequence only vaguely related to the rest of the plot.
Oh, those last 10,000 words...I had been plugging away, as I said, every day, falling further and further behind where I needed to be to keep pace. I wasn't being very faithful at typing up my work, however, so for a long stretch I didn't know my word count. On Thanksgiving I had a marathon typing session and discovered I was at 20,000 words--more than I'd ever managed in previous years, but far behind where I needed to be. So over the holiday weekend I abandoned the notebook and typed. And typed. And typed. Over three days I got out 15,000 or so more words--again, not quality stuff by any means, just quantity. Sheer verbosity, with the occasional glimmer of something interesting (but not enough to make me want to go back and read any of it).
Now I'd done 15k in a weekend. Could I do an additional 15k over the course of five weekdays--when I was at work during the day and had class and other obligations at night? When I was already feeling some ill effects from sitting in front of a computer screen most of the weekend?
I managed 5000 more words Monday through Thursday. No problem, though, right? I had until midnight on the 30th. At peak over the weekend I found I could churn out a thousand words an hour if I really, really pushed myself. I got off work at 4:30...at some point I'd have to eat...I figured I had seven uninterrupted hours in which to write. Maybe I could do it. I was too close to give up now, anyway. I had to give it a shot.
That's why the last 10,000 or so words were a dream sequence, really several of my own dreams strung together with some other elements--the Corpus Christi Carol, for one--thrown in. I'm sure it would make a fascinating psychological study if I could ever stand to let someone read it.
At 11:59 and 30 seconds I dumped the whole thing into the NaNo website's word counter and...
49,681.
Five more minutes and I coulda made it. That's all right--I got lots of sympathy from my fellow NaNoers at that weekend's Thank God It's Over party. They felt my pain.
That's another great aspect of the experience (and yes, I think it was a great experience, my griping about so-close-and-yet-so-far notwithstanding)--the chance to meet other Cincinnati writers. Throughout the month we had "write-ins," announced in the website forum, where folk could come together and work. There's nothing like a whole bunch of people all feverishly typing to keep you on task for a couple of hours.
Interestingly, the first write-in was held at the Speckled Bird, the neighborhood cafe, so of course I went. And there of course as I was sitting with this group of writers I did not know, I kept seeing people I did know--friends in the neighborhood. So every few minutes I'd look up and wave to Chris, or Bill, or Des--and after a while I wondered how this looked to my new writer friends. Did they think I was like Norm from Cheers?
I'd also mentioned to one of the writers that I lived down the street--and pointed in the direction of my house. But when I was leaving--at the same time that she was--I didn't go in that direction. I went over to the JFCCCH to walk Cori. Luckily she didn't ask me about this. I would have had to say, "No, I don't live there. I just occasionally go in their house and walk their dog."