I’m pleased with how NaNoWriMo is treating me – or perhaps, how I’m treating it – this year. As of right now, I’m behind, but I’m so much further along than I’ve gotten in the past several years that it isn’t even funny. Well, maybe just a little bit.
By the end of the day today, if I wanted to be all caught up, I ought to have 15,003 words written. That’s nine days, 1,667 words a day. I told myself I’d write 2,000 words a day, since I knew I’d probably miss a day here and there (starting with the first day of the month, wherein I felt too ill and tired to do anything but read); at that rate, I ought to be pushing 18,000 tonight. I’m sitting comfortably at 11,197 words. It’s not unrecoverable. (Is that a word? I feel like it ought to be irrecoverable, but I’m thinking of irrevocable, which is the – well, no, it isn’t the opposite of what I mean. I must need a nap.)
Still – I’m past the 20% mark. I’ve earned my multi-colored arm warmers of wonder and joy, and if I can write 1,303 words this evening, I’ll get to have a champagne nightcap. (I figure, why not have a glass of cheap bubbly every 25%? Since they’ve been so accomodating as to start selling it in tiny, overpriced, one-serving bottles…)
The point of all this is to bring up something I read today. But first, a confession: I’m the sort of person who did mental backflips of sheer unadulterated joy when I was the 42nd person to initiated into a marching band fraternity. Yes, I’m that sort of a NerdFighter. I admit that I carry a towel rather less frequently than I ought to, but I’ve got Babelfish in my bookmarks and think Wikipedia is pretty much the Guide-iest thing ever.
Plus, I have an intellectual crush on Neil Gaiman. I won’t admit to an actual crush, because that would just be too cliché, wouldn’t it? I mean, who doesn’t have a crush on Neil Gaiman?
So naturally, I’m reading Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman. I worried it might be dull; instead, it’s the sort of book that makes English teachers snort out loud during Silent Sustained Reading. What a perfect biographer for this particular task…
Gadzooks. The problem with NaNoWriMo is that you start to say something relatively simple, and 400 words later you still haven’t managed to get around to it. You lock up your inner editor for a month, and what do you expect to get?
What I’m still trying to say, is that I read today that The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was written in (wait for it) four weeks.
If Douglas Adams could write The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in four weeks, then I think I can write the second half (part?) of Wyrd in four weeks.
And with that, I leave you with a paragraph from the opening scenes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – a book I first read at an entirely impressionable age, and a paragraph which, I fear, may have forever colored my philosophy on life, the universe, and everything:
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Recent Comments