Why am I not writing my novel RIGHT now?

Cake Wrecks. Damn your delicious hilarity!

Oh, so. I’ve decided I’m going to use my middle initial for awhile and see how it goes. I hadn’t really considered it before, but I’m still looking for a way to differentiate myself from porn Dawn Allison. C stands for clean. Clean, you trollop!!! I have to look that up and make sure it means what I think it means. Yes, a trollop! And a strumpet! Although strumpet sounds like it ought to be some sort of delicious pastry. Cake wrecks really got in my head, apparently.

Actually, the C. just stands for Christina. Now you know!

What I love about National Novel Writing Month

Yes, I’m still plugging away at my novel. I’ll hit 15,000 words easy tonight. That includes about three chapter ones and two chapter fives. I know it’s a sad discombobulated novel. But I can see the beauty in it. To find it, all I had to do was let go of all my plans, expectations, and ideas. November is the time to let the story write itself without interference from you, author and editor extraordinaire. Already I know my beginning will need rewritten, and I’m seriously lacking on description, but magical things are happening, you know how it is. You’re writing things and they take a turn where it seems like you had to have planned it that way, but you totally didn’t. I’ve lost some time on working on the novel from being a world of sick (I think it’s that mucking swine flu) I mean, the one night, I don’t think I could have managed writing the word NyQuil 1667 times to fill my quota even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. It wouldn’t have moved the plot forward at all. Although it might have been nice if I’d had some on hand. The thing about being mad sick and trying to write at the same time is that, provided your brain isn’t torched with fever, it takes your mind off all the misery going on in your head (and sinuses).

Also, I’m doing some reading for school that’s super inspirational, the novel Possession, which I’m really digging, and Tennyson and Browning for another class. LOVE The Lady of Shallot. Ironically, I saw the painting before I ever read the poem, and it kind of inspired the turn-around in my novel, which the poem totally reinforces.

 

Such a shitty day.

It only takes two angry men with guns to make you feel your existence is tiny and fragile.  I slinked away in silence. I am not proud.

I love conversation

I mean, I don’t love having them. In the course of any given conversation I actually have, I will, inevitably, say something really, really dumb. And then feel dumb for the rest of the day. But writing dialogue is probably my favorite part of writing. It’s a weakness, too, because I have whole chapters that are just really conversations with random things thrown in to break up the monotony. As these intrusions aren’t necessary, they’re probably just adding to the whole monotony thing, but I feel obligated to do it. Except this month. Accepting something as a rough, rough, rough draft, and telling yourself you’ll go back to add whatever setting details and suchlike are necessary is an incredibly freeing thing to do. I’m writing pages of dialogue, and nobody can stop me! Muwhaha!!!

And I’m having fun.

In other writing news. Do you ever see gross or disturbing (but totally mundane) things that you know will end up in your writing at some point? I had one of those today. The cat killed a mouse (totally mundane, see!) and kind of hid it behind a box for I don’t even want to think of how long. When I was cleaning this afternoon, I found it, and I literally had to scrape the thing off the floor. It was stinky because it was starting to decompose into the wood. When I finally worked it free, half its skin peeled off and stayed stuck on the floor. I had to mop it off. It ended up flipped onto the ripped open side when I finally got it in the dustpan. It was totally rank and disgusting, and I couldn’t help but look to see what it looked like for the skin to peel away in case I ever need to write about a corpse that went days or weeks before being discovered. Although, if Paul wouldn’t have been sleeping, I totally would have made him take care of it.

The mice are really bad here this time of year. In fact, I’m displaced from my room right now because there’s some that found their way inside my mattress (clever bastards!) I felt them crawling around in there one night while I was trying to sleep, then imagined them coming out and crawling all over me while I was sleeping, and that brings me to here, in the spare room. It could just be paranoia, but I don’t think so.

National Novel Writing Month Update

I’m 5000 words into my novel, and I still have no idea what it’s about. Actually, that’s counting about three or four separate beginnings (all in the same document, all labeled Chapter One). In fact, it may end up I have 50,000 words worth of chapter ones if I don’t get on the ball about it. But I’m doing it, and I’m proud of that much. I’m not rehashing old ideas, I’m driving blind. It’s kind of a thrill. There’s part of me (a big part) that wants to write a really great novel someday. Another part that wants to write for the fun of it, however mindless that ends up being, that part is all about the freedom and the big bird to the rules. And maybe another part that wants it all to be the same thing. Like, to have fun writing a novel I don’t worry about sucking, just to find out later that really, it’s not great, but at least could be. I’ve heard nothing is great on the first draft, at least with novels, and I believe that’s true because I want to believe it. It justifies sucky first drafts and fun and freedom, and all the other f words you can think to throw in there. Anyhow, the point is, I’m doing it, by God, I’m ignoring my history exam tomorrow to do it, but I’m doing it. I hope you are too, or at least that you who are doing are having as much fun and freedom as I’m swearing to myself right now that I’m going to have.

Oh, yeah, that idea that I was stoked about. I’m not writing it. Or not in the way I plotted in my feeble mind. I over thought the bugger and wrecked it, so it was back to the drawing board. I like stories where people have to find something. I think this may be one of those.

Important thing to remember? All those rules you made for the world your writing that are bound to trip you up later? They’re not rules, really, because you made them up. And you have the grand fantastic power of editing later. If you’re like me and tend to get so wrapped up in that nonsense that you can’t move the story along.

Good luck!

Winning Whidbey Student Choice Award

So, I knew a little ago, but I didn’t want to announce it before they did. “The Mourning Star” won for October. Whidbey Student Choice Award. I didn’t think I was ever going to win that thing.

In other news, it’s two hours into November and I haven’t written a first sentence yet. What’s wrong with me? Oh. I’m procrastinating. That’s what. Okay, now that I’ve stuck the badge in here, it’s time to get to work.

I know. I’m hooked. Just wait out the kind of slow part in the beginning. Such a great beat. Try not bobbing your head. I dare you!

Flashshot

So, today, well, yesterday now, Oct. 29 anyway, “Backyard Eulogy” was in Flashshot. I think my bio is longer than my story. And for some strange reason the search for putting jell-o in a tub has led people here. I have no idea why, or why so many people are searching for tub jell-o. Anyway, two days now until November. I’m trying to get as many of my papers done as I can so I won’t have to worry about it during National Novel Writing Month. I tried to do up a nano widget, but it was beyond me.

Counting Down to November

Four days. Are you ready to write that novel?

Acceptance

This sounds stupid, but sometimes, acceptance makes me want to cry, especially after you hear back from a piece that’s been held. See, for me the submission process goes like this, bright beautiful hope for about five minutes. Until I hit send. Then it’s doubt. Did I forget to attach the story again? Did I format right? Oh crap, did I forget to close my edited quotations? Is it good enough? Was I stupid to think it would be? Then, why did I send that? This leads into a period of indifference where I almost forget about it. I have stuff out and I know that, so I check my email obsessively, but I expect nothing. Then impatience and more doubt. And a certainty that you were wrong to send it, that it’s rejected, rejected already maybe and they just haven’t got around to the form, or maybe they don’t send the rejection letter, just let you assume it. Then it’s over and the emotional investment in it despite all of this is minimal.

Unless they let dangle maybe.

Then it’s expectation which, in a few hours, days, becomes a sort of desperation, the quietened voice of doubt returns, insistent, nagging even. The waiting resumes. The email comes and you see the sender and your heart races, you’ve exposed yourself as much as if you’d run naked down the sidewalk. And here is the response. It’s no and that voice is right. Doubt knows best. Next time, doubt says, I’ll edit better, make sure my legs are shaved before doing the run. Doubt is no enemy, you see. I don’t know where I’d be without it.

But if it’s yes, it stuns. It doesn’t matter, really, where it is, whether they accept one hundred and four percent of submissions. Somebody stopped to look. And for that minute, Doubt only whispers softly, and that’s when his voice is sweetest. The make-up for the in-spite-of gesture of exposing yourself.

But enough mixed metaphors. I’ll update when it comes out.

I’ve also just written my first sonnet. No, it wasn’t like I just got bored one day and said, “Hey, you know what I think I’ll do? Write a sonnet.” Because who says that sort of thing when there’s television? It was for an assignment, but I’m still really proud of it. It proves not only that I can count to ten, but all the way to fourteen. I still have to write another one, but I can’t think of a topic for the life of me. My first one is probably actually dumb (but with the proper meter) but it seems like it has a double meaning, something I have trouble doing intentionally. And now what I’m doing in comparison reads like Dr. Seuss Does Verse. That’s always been my trouble with poetry, it sounds too contrived when I write it, and I’d prefer to say it plain. And it’s a bitch trying to avoid the obvious rhyme.

In the crook’d corners once lived a sly cat

Fur black as char, he wore a tall red hat.

Power Lame.