NaNo Time

Yeah - I know.  I do this every year.  I rarely enjoy it.  I have yet to finish.

But this year, I'm going to approach it differently.  No deadlines.  No daily pressure to write some insane number of words/pages.  Whatever I get, I get and that will be more than I would have written without the push of NaNoWriMo.

This year, I'm going back to my roots.  Waaaaay back to roots in pre-historic German soil.  This is the NaNo project that burned up my laptop and caused me to outright quit in 2009 (or was it 2010?) when I lost the entire shebang.  Over the month of October, I have been re-typing this work from what hard copies I have (maybe half the whole).  I have about one chapters-worth left before Thursday.  Maybe I will make it before then, maybe not.  Word count for this year will begin AFTER the current count which will be somewhere between 20-25K.  So see how I'm setting myself up to succeed?  Even if I fail to reach the 50K word count of a full NaNo success story, I should make a dent in the material in my head AND reach 50K for 2009+2012.  Success is success however I define it.

So my goals for NaNo 2012
    
     be kind to yourself
     write a page everyday
     write more than a page if you feel the need
     dont get hung up on the numbers.  It's a book not a math equation.
     absolutely NO EDITING!
     you may take the NaNo project and force your small group to listen (heeheeheeh)
    the goal is not to finish as much as it is to just write
    in the end remember Aesop.  Maybe you are a turtle in a month of hares.

So excuse me, I'm off to sharpen the pencils and set the muse's altar on fi-yah!

Recently, I've been taking a break from the blog.  Perhaps a break from writing all together.  Just enough material to look like I'm busy writing for class, but most of it is crapola.  I wish I could say that I was lured away from the paper by something tall, dark and sexy as hell, or something that smells like cool and colorful fall leaves, but the truth is I just haven't felt the need to say anything. 

I spent some time wondering if maybe I was done with writing (I know....AS IF right??).  I think the answer to that is I will be done writing when they pry the big red pencil from my cold dead fingers. 

Then I wondered a while about blogging as a medium.  Is it just some self-aggrandizing thing?  It just feels dead to me these days, a Christmas toy broken after ten minutes of play and discarded.  Not to mention the fact that there are about seventy-leven million bloggers and about five people reading.  If no one is reading, then what is the point?  That seemed a good question. 

I've never really pursued blogging for any reason other than my own.  That hasn't changed.  While I am glad to know that people have found something of interest here to discuss, it isn't about chasing that, can't be about that.  I love lots of people who read this, enjoy your feedback around the pieces, but I don't ultimately care if you love them or hate them.  I don't care what you think about them.  (NB:  Please don't read that to mean that I don't care about you)  When I focus on what you think too much, it twists the way I write and suddenly I'm no longer writing me, but some zombie verison of me that wants to make an impact on someone else, to have someone validate my opinion or worse validate ME!  UGH!!  I don't need validation. 

Writing in that manner is a dead end.  Have I done that?  Is that why the words are dribbling out at a snail's pace?  It doesn't feel like that's what has happened. 

It feels more like I let go of the kite string.  OK.  Maybe I was standing in a hurricane at the time and maybe the kite was the size of a sail and it started to yank me off the ground.  I got scared.  I let go. 

There will be other kites, other strings and I will learn to hold on better. 

So in honor of kites and their strings, here is a poem.  I have been writing free word association poems for years.  They are just for me, like the blog, rarely shared and even more rarely read.  The completely odd thing is that for about the last year, I have refered to them as kite string poems because the words on the page resembled exactly that to me. 

hold tight

to the kite

to the string

string

fling

kite tail flutter

picture shutter

picture pretty

pretty kitty

boo bear baby

how I miss you

missed

opportunity

knocks

hard knocks

hard rock

AC/DC

Fling Thing

kite string