Day 12: “There’s No Crying In NaNo!”

Posted by Lady Tam Li on November 12, 2011 · 7 Comments 

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It’s day 12.  I sit in the Starbuck’s on Atlanta Highway (for those of you who know where that is) with other NaNites of the River Region.  We’re all writing, with some talking, and trying to get somewhere with our novels.

I have had one large passion shaken iced tea.  And now I’m having a cup of water.

I also just went into the bathroom, locked the door, and pounded my head against the wall.  Literally.

The problem isn’t story.  I know EXACTLY what I want to write.

The problem isn’t wordcount.  I’m actually doing very well, considering; by this point, if you believe in graphs, we’re supposed to have about 20,000 words.  I have 22,000+.  And that’s by NaNo’s counter, which calculates things differently than writing programs, it seems.

So why am I frustrated?  Why did I just go into a public bathroom and privately display a behavior more often associated with insane asylum inmates?

I don’t rightly know, there, good sir!  I just know that I look at my story now….and I hate it.

Not the characters, not the plotline, not any of that.  My motor skills and brain functions are simply rebelling against writing any more.

I could probably use a good cry.  Maybe a baseball bat and a junkyard full of cars.

For my in-between descriptions…short descriptions that I put in brackets so that Future Me will know what Past Me wanted to remember to write later….I put “BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH”.

I got confused in my writing and wrote the end of a chapter instead of the first.  I was two paragraphs in before I realized it.  I got as far as I could stand, and then just stopped.  I couldn’t take it any more.  So, I wrote the following, in all caps, just to make myself feel better:

“AND THEN RAPTORS RAN OVER THE GRAVESTONES RENDING NATURAL AND PRETERNATURA FLESH ALIKE. NO ONE KNEW WHERE THE DINOSAURS CAME FROM, BUT AFTER THAT DAY, EARTH WAS KNOWN AS ‘PALENTARIA’. PALENTARIA, PLANET OF THE REALLY SMART DINOSAURS.

HUMANS WERE THEIR SLAVES AND THEIR FOOD. THE HUMANS AND THE VAMPIRES TRIED TO COMBINE FORCES BUT IT DID NOT WORK BECAUSE THE DINOSAURS WERE TELEPATHIC. SO ANY VAMPS OR HUMANS WHO WERE GOING TO KILL DINOSAURS WERE KILLED FIRST, THANKS TO TYRANNASAURUS, THE SMALL-ARMED DINOSAUR KING.”

It makes no sense, has next to nothing to do with my story, and sounds like an outline for a particularly bad ’80s Saturday morning cartoon show.

But it sure has made me feel better!

I’ll save the crying for later.  Right now, I need to fix this mess I call a ‘novel’.

Have you ever been driven crazy by the thing you love to do?

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