Or Fail Publicly.
I wrote most of my last three books while sitting beside various beds in various hospital rooms. On one long memorable night, I wrote 10,000 words while shivering and going mad from the continual beeping in the Emergency Room. So, yeah, I take my writing seriously.
But sometime in March (in which month my husband was hospitalized twice), something broke. Stories still ran in my head, but they were disjointed and disconnected, and they wouldn’t come out through my fingertips as they were supposed to. You know the rest of the story . . . he was hospitalized in April and did a circuit of hospitals and nursing homes until his passing early this month.
Grieving him is like being cooked from the inside out, but I still have to work. I have two children to support, a house note, and many thousands of dollars of debt thanks to the fact that in this country, medical problems will ruin even the most fiscally responsible people. Anyway, I don’t think it was accidental that after all these years, I finally sold a book in April. And then again in June. And then again in August. I think God was showing me that he already has the next stage of my life planned out.
So, as you may also know, I need to write the sequel for Whither, which is about to be released. I’m making bits of pieces of headway, and I think it’s going to be that way for a while, until Sally finally sucks in a real deep breath and starts to move and talk for me (I think I saw her twitch a bit last week, so I’m getting optimistic).
Meanwhile, to get my brain to kick in, I’ve decided to do NaNoWriMo. That’s National Novel Writing Month, if you don’t know. From the website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Since I’ve already started on the Sally’s book, my NaNoWriMo book will be something different (them’s the rules; you have to start fresh). If you’re a writer or have the aspiration to write a book, I invite you to join me on this heinous quest for brain function. This shall be our anthem:
I’m just going to sit down and write a freaking book.
