Well, you know, not really, but lately it sure seems like it. I’ve been listening to a lot of McCreary the last week or so – something about the mix of drum tempos and vocals gets me motivated, especially when I’m trying to write. And I need all of the motivation I can get. I’m plodding along, making progress (wouldn’t go so far as to say great progress, or even mediocre progress, but its still progress), with McCreary’s soundtracks from the Battlestar Galactica series playing in the background.
Writing Sophie’s character is currently slowing me down. Its not her fault, really, she wasn’t a planned child of the muse and me. I’ve spent so much of my writing time lately in Niki’s head, its hard to shift gears and personalities to get this voice just right. Which I’m not, but I’ve finally, truly come to grips with the fact that the first draft is shit (thanks Hemingway for such a quotable quote). The perfectionist in me disagrees (actually, its not so much perfectionism as an effort to conserve energy – right the first time means I don’t have to do more work 😉 ). For a great talk about this, go catch this week’s podcast of Writing Excuses – Howard and Dan and their guests touch on this as they discuss the revisioning processes they all go through.
But that’s where I’m at. I hope to have the little meter on the side of this screen up to 35k this weekend. Hope. If you’re wondering, “why share all this writing crap?”, well, I have an answer to that. Like Carrie Vaughn points out over at genreality, the success of nanowrimo (and by extension, in my opinion, since I see the same thing in the blogs of established authors like Cherrie Priest, Jay Lake, and Tobias Buckell), is a matter of accountability. With nanowrimo, you have accountability for your numbers with your peers – you’re all working towards the same goal, trying to keep everyone appraised of where you are in the numbers game. In writing blogs – and whatever strange amalgam this blog has become – you find posts about writing and numbers for pretty much the same reason. Its not necessarily because we want to share, or feel compelled to tell you how we’re doing while writing X. Its a matter of making ourselves accountable, of creating a sense of peer pressure (“I told all these people that I was working on this and where I was on it, I can’t stop now!”). It doesn’t always work out, but that’s why I write these posts about my writing. Not so much because I think everyone out there cares about an unpublished writer’s attempt at finishing a novel, but because by putting it out there I believe I’ve generated (at least in my mind) an expectation that it will be finished.
In other news, for those still reading along, I’ve had the first set of results come back from last week’s blood work. So far, everything’s looking good, though there are more tests and consults and grueling encounters yet to come before I could be considered on the healthy track. But, I’ll keep chugging along. Let’s say my inspiration just left for school.
OK, enough babbling for me this morning. I’m off to have more needles stabbed into my arm where they can leave even more giant green and purple bruises before driving to work. Have fun!