Naa-Nanny-NaNoWriMo

I’m foolish/brilliant enough to be more than halfway through the NaNoWriMo challenge.

Let me tell you, this is way the heck harder than a marathon.  At least you can train for a marathon.  You don’t really train for NaNoWriMo.  You may have an idea (as I do), but when you get 27,000 words in it is amazing how little of that idea remains, other than the basic premise… which I think I’ve revised on every page of the 60 that I have saved right now.

I made the decision to embark on this challenge on a sick day, to keep my mind off my aching shoulder.  I chucked out 5,000 words like nothing.  Now that I’m nine days to the finish, I need to chuck about 3,000 words a day to make the 50,000 goal.  It’s like writing a 3-page paper a night, every night, for nine nights. Yuck.

In fact, I should be inching toward that goal right now, but I feel like complaining.  Perhaps, if I were feeling cheeky, I could take the opportunity in my novel (which is compelling and ever-changing) for my characters to stop all action, sit down on the ground, and pound their fists for a bit while wailing.  In fact, I could be highly descriptive of this action, using several descriptive words like anguish, hatred, sadness, poopy-headiness, and blah-blah-wah-wah.

Ariadne sat down, having given up on the entire premise of being a psychic.  “Dr. Radius?” she said, hands beginning to ball into fists, “I don’t want to do this anymore.  I don’t wanna… don’t wanna… wahhhhhh!”  She laid down on her stomach, the coolness of the earth enveloping her pleas as she began to pound into the dirt.  Dr. Radius looked down upon the grown woman, wailing like a baby, and said, “OH GOD, YOU’RE SO RIGHT!  What on Earth are we doing!”  Then, his 80+ year old body full of grief joined her, fists pounding into the dirt, tuffs of brown soil puffing around their fists as they screamed and screamed.  “What’s all this?” said the evil twin brothers whose names I keep changing. “We can’t continue the plot!” screamed Ariadne, who had thusfar been mangled, strangled, beaten, drugged, kidnapped and may or may not be in a relationship with one of the other characters in the book.  “You know what, I’m not really sure if we need to be introduced at this time!” One of the brothers screamed, “I don’t even know why I’m actually evil!”  The other brother screamed.  “Ariadne! Dr. Radius!  Two evil dudes!” screamed a gaggle of characters who have come and gone and may have left without me actually writing them out.  “It’s you!” screamed Ariadne, briefly stopping her fist pounding to point at several male and/or female characters who have had some if not important bearing on the story written so far.  “Why are you here?” screamed one of the evil brothers.  “We don’t know!” screamed all of the random characters. And with that, the two brothers lay down on the ground and joined the other two grown adults, followed by several other characters, and together they pounded their fists, screaming why over and over, until eventually all 50,000 words were used up and/or they may or may not have caused an earthquake based on the possibility that there could be quite a few characters in this dirt room. (Please note: they would scream why in several different languages, thereby not breaking the rule of repeating the same word over and over 50,000 times.)

No, that wouldn’t work so well.  But maybe I should copy and paste this into my current draft…

PS: This is true: