Nanowrimo...oh....ohhhhh

Hello all,

For the second year in a row I have spewed forth 50,000 words (this year it was 60,000 words) for National Novel Writing Month, nicknamed "NaNoWriMo".

For those of you who use words as purely the means to an end--that end most likely being to get/go/do/find/finish/achieve/communicate what you want--will probably rightly consider me to be insane.  There absolutely IS something a bit worrisome about a person who just writes for the sake of writing.

Which I do.

Which probably means I'm insane.

But I already know this.

The very nice thing about NaNoWriMo is that it gives me explicit permission to (nay, dare I say DEMANDS that I) write as if my fingers were on fire and the keyboard were made of water.  Type type.  Splash splash.  Ahhhhh.

Not that I need permission to write.  I ALWAYS have a notebook or journal with me.  Always.   I scribble away in all the free moments I can find, when I'm not inspiring/nagging Patrick and Aya to finish work, doing lesson planning, teaching, TED-ing, cooking....etc etc, ad infinitum.    15 minute coffee stop before a class? Writing.   10 minute wait for a train, sitting in the wind on the train platform? Writing.   Waiting for the pasta water to boil?  Writing.

However, inside my obsessive, responsibility-driven little pea brain, I do need some sort of compelling reason to sit and just write for hours on end.

Or maybe I just need to justify it to myself.

At any rate, NaNoWriMo gives me the justification/reason/excuse/permission to sit and write...and write...and write.     I can spend long swaths of stolen time letting a story fall out of my head and trickle through my fingertips onto the keyboard.   I forget to eat and I postpone stopping to use the bathroom.  The sun rises, slides across the sky and sets again and I'm none the wiser.

It's lovely.

Last year I wrote 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and was utterly pleased that I wrote that much and utterly fed up with the story.  

This year, however, I wrote something in which I see a glimmer---a tiny glimmer mind you--of potential.

So I am now editing the thing.  Or as I like to call it, "The Mess".

Where will all this NaNoWriMo madness take me?
Who knows?

For now I am enjoying the warm, full feeling of finally having a story move from my imagination onto paper.

Such a feeling is increasingly rare these days I believe.  People need NEED personal outlets for their inspiration and creativity, yet so many believe they have no creative spark to make it happen.

Newsflash folks:  You've got the spark.  I've got the spark.  We ALL have the spark.

But somewhere along the line someone told you that your skills followed another path.  Somewhere along the line  your drawing was laughed at or your poem was pooh-poohed and you walked away from nurturing something within yourself that might have added utter bliss to your life.

My 60,000 word mess may never be read by eyes other than my own. In spite of my last 40 years of writing pointless nonsense, I may never see my name on the cover of a book  (unless I write it there with a Sharpie pen).

And that's okay.

Because the joy is in getting utterly lost in the wilderness of my own mind. ....
Perhaps the best gift I could give myself.


Until next time....