WRITTEN ON September 24th, 2009 BY kiwivera AND STORED IN life, writing

Tags: nanowrimo, writing

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

– Douglas Adams

It must have been something I ate. Or maybe I didn’t get enough sleep the previous night. Come to think about it, the yoghurt didn’t taste exactly right. The fact is that, yesterday, I seem to have typed in my details and signed up for this year’s NaNoWriMo challenge.

Stupid, I know. But I hit the ’submit’ button so it’s done now.

There’s nothing nano about the nanowrimo. It’s an epic task that, given my current circumstances, I’m 99% sure I cannot complete. Aside from my full-time job (writing!), I have ongoing freelance assignments (of the writing kind as well!) that take up a good number of hours after work. Plus, I’m proud of my procrastinating skills and I take a great amount of pleasure from doing nothing sometimes.

With all this on my plate (and assorted other tasks that make up this so called social life), I’ve now signed up to have a novel ready in 30 days. Nothing less than FIFTY THOUSAND words in THIRTY days (yes, it deserves capitals!). And it deserves a HOLY CRAP, WHAT WAS I THINKING?

I got my little phone out of my pocket (I’m lying, I’m not wearing any pockets, the phone was just sitting here on the desk) and made the calculation. It turns out that dividing the number of words for the number of days doesn’t make it any less scary. According to my phone, 50000/30 = 1666.6666666667. To give you an idea, I have a freelance article due next Monday that needs to be 1250 words long and I’ve been struggling with it all week (Ok, and by ’struggling’ I also mean going out or watching TV instead of just getting it done).

But still.

I have no clue what I’m going to write about but need to have a synopsis ready soon.

I can’t do it. It is just not possible. And that’s exactly why I’m going to try. If nothing else, even after midnight of the 30th of November I haven’t reached 50,000 words, I might at least have learnt something about discipline and commitment when writing - and there’s no way I’ll call that a loss.