NaNoWriMo: Less Than Two Weeks Away



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I finally wrote the synopsis for my novel I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. It took me a while to decide to do it. I guess because it's up there and so many people will see it! Oh Lord! What a thought (sarcasm). It's very easy to write a blog or write stories or write anything, for that matter, including a novel, when no one will see it but you. It's a lot harder when it's something a lot of people are probably going to see. That makes it more important, more essential, especially in the eloquence department.

When I post my synopsis on NaNo, it's there, for all the world to see, and that means it's official. The novel is being born. It's in the conception stage, but soon we will be a beaming mama-to-be of a bright, shiny new novel. It's terrifying. It's not so scary when you're sitting on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night so you won't disturb your husband who has to be at work in a couple of hours, and you're scribbling hurried notes in your metallic yellow reporters' pad, using your super-special University of Alabama pen.

It's not so scary when you're picking out this year's super-duper new 'Notebook for NaNo' and your pen that will be the ticket to fame and fortune. It's not so scary when you're getting together all the stuff you'll surely be able to put to use this year until you eventually throw all that crap back in your office and use a Bic pen and a legal pad and your laptop. When it gets to be Bic pen and legal pad and laptop time, it starts getting scary.

Scary is when the count-down clock on the NaNo site tells you there are less than two weeks to make your final plans for notes. Scary is when the die on 'Dice City Roller' keep screaming at you it's time to get off your butt and start that outline, that the notes you've written won't put themselves in order. Scary is your office whispering every time you walk by, "You've been nesting for three weeks now, and I'm all cleaned out, and straightened up, and set to your liking, and now you have to admit you're avoiding me." (Of course now that the husband has discovered a new civilization game and is taking up his own corner of the office and yells every five seconds, "Look, baby, look at the smoke coming out of the smoke stack of my level 9 houses!", it's very hard to concentrate, so there's a good excuse.)

The news will have to be turned off, children turned away, dinner turned over to the husband and the phone turned to silent. It must happen. I have done it three years in a row now, and I've never won, and this on my BUCKET LIST. It must happen. There must be no fear, there must be no hesitation. I cannot continue to ask my husband if it is a month-long waste of time, knowing he's only going to tell me, "No, this year you are going to finish, all fifty-thousand words, and you're going to write a novel, and people are going to want to read it." So I have to quit fishing for encouragement, and just repeat the same things to myself I do every year at this time, that, "...it's almost time, it's almost time, it's almost here..." and get ready. That's it.