The post that started off about New Year's Resolutions and Took Its Sweet Time Getting There

Once again the end of the year is approaching. Or if you're like me, it feels like the new year is screaming towards you on failed brakes and about to mow you down. Although since leaving retail the holidays don't stress and fill me with a sense of dread like they used to. And the last five years have been amazing holidays actually--all because I have my husband and now our son to share them with. The thing that has always bothered me is the whole New Year's Resolution bit. For a long time I gave them up, because I never stuck to them. It seemed pointless to come up with something on New Years Day. It was also depressing to realize I had failed to do something else. I've joked about enjoying prolonged adolescence, but there were a lot of times where I saw other people, people younger than me, who had accomplished so much more and it made me feel like a failure. I felt like I was still a kid somehow and nothing I did would enable me to grow up.

Then about six and a half years ago I had an epiphany. Or more likely, my biological clock realized I wasn't paying attention to the ringing, turned itself off and said fuck it, go do what you want. I'd graduated college in 1999 (after taking 10 years to get there) and failed to do anything with my English degree (stop laughing) or the criminal justice degree. I was still working in retail at a job that was going nowhere. I'd tried to lose weight and get myself into the navy's officer program and that all fell through in the end. I had lost the weight, passed the PT stuff and passed the entrance exam. In the end they decided I was too old--too close to the cut off age. I had also fairly recently come to the end of a relationship that wasn't going like I thought it would--it was a mutual decision after we both realized we had two completely different ideas about what we wanted out of a relationship, marriage, and family. Neither of us was willing to settle, so we called it quits. It may have been at that point, with that decision, that I realized I was more mature and had more of a backbone than I thought I had. I'd come to the decision I wasn't willing to settle just to have something, anything, to pass as normal and have people's approval. I decided then that if I was meant to be alone, I was fine with that and I could be happy. I also realized no one had ever accused me of being normal to begin with, so why the hell was I worried about looking normal now. 

At that point I decided to start looking at what I really wanted to do with my life. I'd been writing all along, it's something I've always enjoyed and I knew it would be a good thing to keep that up. I also wanted to finally have something finished to share. Now here's where my abnormal mind got to working at full steam. I'm the Queen of starting off at Point A, heading towards Point B and ending up at Point Q--and then not seeing anything wrong with ending up there. In some ways my mind is a Kender. I had been reading a lot of fantasy and decided to focus on writing some stories in that genre, which led me to start thinking about how much fun I had playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid with my brother and our friends. This then led me to go online and look up Dungeons and Dragons, where I found out it had been purchased by a new company (Wizards of the Coast), who'd released a couple updated versions of the game. Which led me to go buy the three core books for the newest edition (3.5) because, you know, that would be a great setting for fantasy stories, so it's not wasting time, it's ...RESEARCH! Oh, and then I decided I wanted to start playing again. 

Getting back to gaming introduced me to my future husband--he joined the same group I'd found a few weeks after me. Although, and I'm not trying to sound corny, it was love at first sight for both of us, it took us about a year to actually come out and admit to each other that we were interested in being more than friends. We were married in 2006 and in 2008 bought a house and had our son. And now we're all responsible adult type people. Except we're still holding on to a healthy dose of  that prolonged adolescence. And I don't care what you say, there's nothing wrong with that. So there. For the last four years I've realized some things about myself. I've learned to be more confident in my abilities and that got me back to writing seriously. 

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month in November of 2008 as a way to seriously get myself into some sort of writing habit. And then I proceeded to not do a damn thing other than write down some plot points and character ideas. Although, in my defense, picking less than a month away from having a baby as a starting point for a novel might not have been such a good idea. There was a tad bit of pessimism about the whole growing up, buckling down, I can do anything idea--which was quickly replaced by HOLY CRAP WE'RE RESPONSIBLE FOR A WHOLE OTHER LITTLE PERSON! Once things settled, I made a belated half hearted semi-New Year's Resolution to participate in NaNoWriMo in 2009 and continued on with the year. 

When October rolled around last year I remembered a short story I had written in college and decided it would be easy to expand to novel length.I spent the month outlining and expanding the story and went in to November feeling pretty confident. I had a few rough spots, but at the end of the month I was shocked to find I had a 50,000 plus word rough draft to a novel. And then I kind of put it away longer than I planned to and it's still not completely edited so my wonderfully patient husband can read it like I promised him back in November of last year that he'd be able to do. But it's close to being ready. And once I have this year's National Novel Writing Month under my belt, it's getting finished and finally shared with him. Finishing the novel though boosted my confidence. It also got me to reconsider the whole New Year's Resolution thing (I bet you thought I forgot about what started this whole post--remember the A, B, Q thing!?)

For 2010 I made a real New Year's Resolution to lose weight this year--usually the weight lose resolutions have failed miserably for me, the trailing flames on the way down kind of failure. I'm not sharing where I started, but I'm happy to say that over the course of the year so far, I've managed to lose 26 pounds. And considering that we've made changes to our diet I don't see any signs of me not being able to keep losing more weight. This pleases me greatly. I consider myself a realist with a pessimistic streak, so stepping on the scale and watching reality bitch slap my pessimism is always a pick me up. I feel pretty confident that New Year's Resolutions can work and might be a useful tool for getting things done.

And that, finally, lastly, brings me to what I originally intended to do with this post. Set up a list of potential New Year's Resolutions and weigh the pros and cons on them. The problem is that I've spent so much time on this one, that I think I'll save the little list that's begun to form in my mind for another entry. 

             

Everyone repeat after me...

...National Novel Writing Month doesn't work for everyone.

Gearing up for NaNo this year I ran across a number of blog posts from both published and unpublished writers who had their opinions on NaNo. Maggie Stiefvater has a blog post on why NaNo doesn't work for her here. And Laura Miller of Salon has an opinion piece up on Salon. And I think they're both full of sanctimonious horse hockey.

Stiefvater very clearly states that NaNo doesn't work for her writing style, fair enough, but she then goes on to say it "encourages crappy writing and superficial novel-ing." And Miller has fixated on the NaNo website's own proclamation that you'll be writing some "crap" in order to meet the goal. My first reaction to that was, ouch. But then I can see their points. I imagine some people come to NaNo expecting to have a publishable manuscript at the end of the month. And I can picture, sometime about December 1st, editors and publishers becoming inundated with poorly planned and written novels. It's going to happen I know that. But not all of us who participate in NaNo are those people. Posts like these lump all NaNo participants into a very generalized category and come off as sanctimonious and elitist. If you're a published author who has never participated in NaNo, congratulations on getting published, but please don't make assumptions about everyone else because a particular process didn't work for you. Please don't tell me I'm waisting my time and should go read some books and support already published authors. I don't really believe they intended to insult NaNo-ites, but it's how it came off to me. The high and mighty published author looking down her nose at those of us who aspire to be published. And it apparently came off that way to others, judging by the comments left on the blogs and popping up on my twitter feeds.

I came to NaNo falling somewhere between what Stiefvater calls rebuttals 1 and 2. I needed to know I could get to the end and I needed a deadline. I'm a horrible procrastinator and up until last year's NaNo, I'd never finished anything more than a short story that I didn't do anything with. Every idea I'd had for a novel I'd shelved, I really began to doubt if I was capable of finishing a novel. I also felt like I had all the time in the world to do something. NaNo gave me 30 days to come up with a minimum of 50,000 words. I took that as a challenge to myself to come up with a workable rough draft in those 30 days. I never expected to have a publishable novel. I've spent the last year editing the novel I completed and it's still not quite finished. I'm nearly at a point I'd like to start having it read so I can see what I still need to do to it though.

I disagree with Stiefvater that 30 days is a "patently ridiculous deadline." She doesn't feel she can write a novel to her standards in 30 days and that's fine. I know I can't write a publishable novel in 30 days. But I'm sure there's someone out there who can. I also disagree with her that the NaNo timeline turns writing into an unenjoyable chore. It doesn't feel like writing a term paper to me. I enjoyed every bit of the process, it was exciting to have an outline for my novel set up, to be able to follow it, and to see everything fall into place. She believes NaNo ties you to a word count goal and forces you to do away with "pretty prose." Did I pay attention to word count? Yes. Did I feel like I was a slave to it? No. I skipped days. I wrote a lot on others. I've seen people freaking out over the word count. Break 50,000 down over 30 days and you've got only about 1667 words a day to get to the minimum. That's about two pages, which really isn't all that much. If two pages a day is too much or too forced and you're freaking than maybe NaNo isn't what you need to help you. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Miller at one point says that she doesn't write novels and then in the next paragraph complains that NaNo is geared towards writers. Is she a sports fan? Can we expect anti-sports event articles about how much of a time waster they are and that those attending could better spend their time reading a nice book? She also complains about NaNo geared events in bookstores as "yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing." That doesn't come off as snotty and elitist at all. So her basic argument, as it feels to me, is: I don't like to sit around and write fiction, how dare some wanna be writer invade my precious (and open to the public) bookstore to do something that I don't want to do. Or as "softdog" said in the comments section of her article: "Shorter Laura Miller: 'I'm not going to your party and I'm telling everyone it's stupid.'" I'm sure every hobby and form of entertainment you can name, will have someone who doesn't enjoy it who will complain it's a waste of time, money, etc. Have you ever heard of the phrase, to each his own? It applies to NaNo.

These are just two examples of the anti NaNo articles, posts and blogs I've seen the last few weeks. I read them and try to stay impartial, but it never happens. Every article I've read has some nice points, but I get the overwhelming feeling that the author believes they're somehow better than me because they are published, or have a column. I feel like they're looking down on people like me, like a Queen looks down on the peasants. How dare we aspire to be "like them." Honestly, I hope I'm never like them. I hope I stay open minded about new ideas that come along and encourage people to be creative. There are a lot of things out there that I'm not in to. I've never belittled people who do get enjoyment out of those things. Well, OK, except for Twilight fans.

Because something isn't right for you and you consider yourself some sort of authority on the matter, doesn't give you a license to knock it for the rest of us, or more appropriately to belittle us and make assumptions about us. You can't/won't/just plain don't want to do it and I get that. That's your right. But some of us do want to do it. Some of us will spend post November editing what we've created in hopes of having it published and sharing it with others.

But I will agree with Stiefvater on one point. Anyone who can write a novel in 19 days and have it published with no revisions is an alien.