NaNoWriMo Blues

I bailed from National Novel Writing Month today.

When today dawned, I was about 15,000 words behind where I ought to be in order to make the 50k word count by the end of the month. My dog needed a run. My horse needed exercising. Lunch had to be made. I had to go to the store or else we wouldn't have lunch. I needed to write a letter to my mother. I looked at what I had written the night before and was ashamed of how downright shitty the writing was.

I know that NaNoWriMo's motto is "No Plot? No Problem!" and back in 2001, writing my first novel was a joy, even though about 40% of it had to be scrapped later. It was my first effort at writing a story, and I loved my pieced-together heap of words like it was a cuddly rag doll. However, over the next year of trying to edit the heap (and leaving editing by the wayside because it was so depressing) and then being invited to write a weekly piece for the Piker Press, I learned so much about writing that when NaNo rolled around the next year, I finished my project in 21 days. The next two years' NaNovels took 25 - 27 days.

This year, I was reluctant to start. I had three ideas for a book, and just before it was time to start, found a fourth. I started one, paused for a short story, fretted that I wasn't doing justice to the book I wanted to write, switched to another idea. That idea quickly turned into a quagmire of stupid, repetitive paragraphs and pointless digressions. I spent more than 2000 words describing stairwells.

Now that could be a great word-count-padding exercise. But is padding word count how I really want to be spending my evening writing time?

So I bagged on NaNoWriMo, and instead wrote the letter I owed my mother. If I wanted to cheat, I could have added it to the novel and made the day's word count. I could have added this entry to the word count, and the posts I made on various forums, too. But that's not writing a novel, that's just word count. The scenario I had ended up writing for NaNo was word count, nothing more. Not. Acceptable.

Maybe next year I'll have a story to tell.

Or not.