I spuddle.

As you all know, I was doing Nanowrimo and as you also know, I was mostly doing it for the coffee cup because I like it and it says AUTHOR on it and makes me feel like a valid AUTHOR when I’m desperately gulping caffeine from the AUTHOR cup while doing non-AUTHOR things such as taking the kids to ballet or gymnastics or school or the grocery store or the park or wherever to do non-AUTHOR activities that sap me of all creative AUTHOR-type energy. Anyway, the cup came in the mail yesterday and it is all that I hoped it would be AND MORE, only not really more, it is just a cup, but it’s a nice shade of brown and the graphic is pretty.

But now! Now, my pretty people, the coffee cup is also a physical manifestation of GUILT and a reminder that I am an affront to Nanowrimo authors everywhere and am not WORTHY of the CUP OF BEAUTY (not the least reason of which is that it just took me three tries to correctly type “beauty” — there, I did it again, but the second time it took only two). The thing is that I have a really hard time writing through without stopping to edit. I’m an edit-in-progress writer. I like the beginning to be madly polished and JUST SO before I do the next bit and if I plunge forward with a sloppy beginning then my novel is all off-track and can’t find itself, like a teenager who is trying to decide who they are going to be and not quite succeeding and thus having both an enormous number of piercings and a collection of LaCoste clothing. I need to know my direction before I can go on with a volume of words just for the sake of volume, so, Nanowrimo, I’m sorry. But.

I quit.

Only I’m not even really quitting, I’m 11000 words in, and these 11000 words are polished enough that they will stay in the completed first draft but I’m also — ALSO! — actively pursuing an agent, I need a new one, as you know because I’ve mentioned it a thousand times, and am prepping manuscripts for submission and query letters and doing research on who is who and what is what and and AND — also! — I have another book I am working on and my Nano book, which I love love LOVE, WILL get done but the problem is (and here is another excuse) that I get damaged when I see my Nano “friends” and their wordcounts (some of which are awe-inspiring) and I become a puddle of insecurity and self-doubt and I wonder how they are doing this and of course, they may not have twenty children (or two) (or three) and a babysitter only for 8 hours a week plus Saturdays to do writing and I don’t know if the words they are generating are really good words or just words like a million monkeys would generate, but still, it triggers in me this thing that you all know as PROCRASTINATION. I don’t know why, but somehow seeing that PersonX has done 178,000 words already makes me switch windows over to the JCrew or Anthropologie websites (or, more likely, a real estate page) where I fantasy shop for clothes that have no relevance to my actual life or waterfront property for my fantasy lake house. Next thing I know, the day is over and I’ve produced only 200 words, which for me is a joke because when I’m just writing in my regular way and no one is measuring it, I can easily write 2000 words in an hour. Already this post (which has taken five minutes) has 587 words. It’s something about the measuring stick and people asking me for wordcounts that makes me think of when I used to diet and people would ask how many pounds I’d lost and I’d immediately — just spontaneously I think, with no food intake whatsoever — gain 10 pounds. I never diet now and I’m thin, even though it’s a fat-thin as you know if you’ve memorized every blog post I’ve ever written. It’s the lack of a measuring stick (or in this case a scale) that makes it work.

Nano is measuring me. NANO IS JUDGING ME FOR MY LACK OF WORDS. And then what happens is that instead of producing more words, I delete half of what I’ve written because some of it wasn’t properly produced, it was just words for the sake of them.

But — BUT! — I don’t think YOU should quit. No, you should not, for all the reasons I mentioned in my previous post about learning how to write a book and finding out that it’s hard. I am not NOT WRITING, I am writing madly and accumulating a lot of words in other books that I’m editing because they need it and I also need to SELL them and so my time, my precious time, is divided and I want my Nano book to be good. At the end of November, I’ll probably HAVE 50,000 words but the only way I’m going to get there, because I’m half-crazy or fully-crazy, depending on your unit of measure — is if I stop tracking words and comparing to other people and start just writing this insane 80s ghost story-romance-fantasy without looking at the wordcount to see how well I’m doing.

I’m TOTALLY going to use the coffee cup though. AUTHOR coffee tastes better than regular coffee and besides I love it when people go, “WOW, YOU’RE AN AUTHOR?” as though it is a requirement to BE the thing it says you are on your coffee cup. Maybe I’ll put PRINCESS on my next one or ROCKET SCIENTIST.

Filed under: writing