11/06/13 6:37p
The wrimoer had again stopped writing for a few days. Now she would have to make up the same amount of writing, at one sitting if possible, as she had on her first writing session, that writing marathon that ended up being 5000 words. She had tried that next evening to do some more writing but found herself falling asleep. From that she was sure she wanted to give up. So she had given up. But now she was just getting done with the first day of the week back to her unstructured schedule. The urge to continue with the challenge had returned a bit. Perhaps not the urge, but the sense that she could do it.

She had been so clear the morning after that marathon writing session on why it would be a good thing for her to continue with the challenge. She had wanted to write down the reasons that come to her. But then she lost her momentum and motivation for that. One had to be so careful about indulging in distractions. The distractions were so often about delaying that which one had set out to do. They were also an expression on behalf of a part of one's self of rebellion against something one had determined one 'should do', that one held an expectation of oneself to fulfill. It became an obligation instead of a true commitment. Was that what was the problem with doing the Nanowrimo challenge? It was such a rigid structure. She wished for a happy medium.

If one was doing it for the experience of writing in that atmosphere of submersion writing, with its accompanying satisfaction of spending so much time writing. It gave such an altered mental state. That seemed to be more the reason she was doing this challenge. But then there came the letdown of ending the project at the end of the month. In a way that seemed foolish. On the other hand, the first time around she could hardly wait until she reached her goal so that she could be rid that yoke of  obligatory writing.

She had such a sense that doing this was just a game to take part in, a kind of intellectual exercise. She had not yet cut ties with the organization. She was receiving communications from it. She needed to cut such ties if she did not want to have this challenge continually waved in her face, and so that she need not feel guilty about not participating in it.

At least today she had completely forgotten that there was a write-in meeting at the local library. It was to be some time around mid- day. She felt a bit guilty about not going to it.

She had spent several hours writing longhand in her daily journal. She had had a long story to tell about the kids' drawing class she taught once a week. She could write the whole story over again to  use in her Nano project. No, she did not want to start that.

Here was the whole reason she did not want to continue the Nano thing. She was avoiding getting involved in telling any specific stories and was just writing over and over about what was going on with her thoughts while she sat writing. This was the same stuff over and over again.

7:01 pm.

Not even she would want to read that in the future. Then could it just be a form of meditation? No one need read it afterwards. But she knew where that led. Or did she. She thought it lead to feeling depressed about spending so much time writing - about nothing. Writing about something that was of no interest to anyone, not even herself.

She had determined that she could probably sustain writing about nothing for a long time. One just had to keep writing the thoughts as they came to you. One had to find many ways to say something., (or nothing). She supposed this might be a lot like what it meant to do a fillabuster in the Senate.

She had just changed the size of the type she was using so that she could see it better. That meant her eyeball gauge of how much she had written would be all off. She was reaching that phase where she was aching to asses how much she had written.

She knew it could take about 3.5 hours to write 5K words. If she did this by keeping an eye on the clock to see how much time she might have spent on it, to see how far a long she might be, she had not gotten that far into the time it took. By this time she had not even done a half hour yet.
7:12 pm.

When she tried writing that little bit the other day, when she had fallen asleep and then stopped her writing, she had not even noted at what time she had stopped. Perhaps the 'last modified' info on the file could tell her this.

There were lots of things she could tell about here. She did not want to though. Perhaps that was ok. For right now this writing seemed to be strictly about the practice of just writing.

She had the radio on, first listening to the news while she wrote, and then listening to an interview show. This was not a good atmosphere in which to write. One's attention was too divided. She was trying to listen and keep her writing straight at the same time. It was so hard to write that way. She could tell she was only half writing because she wanted to hear what the radio was talking about. The same happened when she did her walking in her apartment. It was just so hard to keep track of her step counting while she tried to listen to the talk on the radio.

But the compulsion to keep the radio on and be ready to hear any tidbit one found interesting was just too strong. She was sure her writing had to be quite distracted writing under these circumstances. No wonder it were possible to fall asleep while writing.

She ached to count the words. Could one call this writing 'ad lib'? She did not think so, again, because it was not about anything. She wondered what it was like to be given a subject to 'ad lib' about. An earlier radio program had mentioned having to do a bit of 'ad libbing' as part of one's radio broadcasting training.

She thought with ad libbing, one needed to have a topic to ad lib about. Was that not what she did every week in her kids' art class? Perhaps she was not ad libbing so much as she was eliciting some kind of exchange between herself and the participants about the day's subject. She did this first by trying to get them to guess what the topic was. If they already knew because they had seen it on a poster on the front door, they were not allowed to tell the answer. She chuckled to think of how often they did not know the subject even though they had seen the poster.

She could make this a project about writing for the challenge, on nothing in particular, and seeing if anyone wanted to buy a book that resulted out of this effort. Oh God.

She had gotten herself formally re-enrolled in the program. She had made up a name for her 'novel'. It was something like 'Another Novel Attempt'. She had called her first effort 'A Novel Try'. All just to get herself properly enrolled in the challenge.

7:30pm

She had had to write a summary about her 'novel'. That had been fairly easy. Then was to include an excerpt. She had left that blank. She forgot how one was supposed to put one's words in to enter the session's word count.

She was getting sleepy. She would indulge in a bit of word counting.
7:34p 1348 words

There she was almost finished with one day's quota. It was an hour later than when she had sat down to it. She could either try to get all caught up in one day again, or she could stretch it out over several days. She remembered from past experience that it had always felt like a problem to have that hanging over one's head.

She longed to get.... she had just forgotten what she meant to say because she was listening to the story on the radio.

And then she remembered that she could try the same strategies she used for her walking. She could do small section reward systems for herself just to give herself a boost for meeting a certain target goal. One problem was that she preferred writing in the simple text editor instead of the more complicated word processing program. It was the latter that did the word counting. All this made her focus much more than she liked on how many words she had written.

This reminded her of when she used to swim laps. She could focus on counting laps as she swam or she could focus on swimming for a certain amount of time and assuming that by doing so, she was fulfilling the distance goal. Presumably she had done some kind of gauge of distance to time. If she were to do this by the clock, she already had a rough idea of what time such writing took.

The problem with the time method for writing was that one never knew when would just suddenly sit there and just think, daydream, listen to the radio story, or just fall asleep. It did not matter though, or rather, it should not matter. This was no longer about telling any kind of a story. This was for now, simply about keeping one's fingers moving and capturing the thoughts as they came up.

Oh but even then of course she was editing. She was not letting everything on to the document. And she was backtracking to fix any typing errors she saw as they rolled out. That was a pretty constant thing.

This kind of writing could be a lot like the continuous line exercises she often gave her art class students to do.

Ooh she felt queer, as if she was suddenly getting one of those weird dizzying spells she had been subject to. But the heater had also just come on and she was wearing a heavy sweater, had her arms propped up on the armrests of her chair. This all made for bad ergonomics she knew. The heat especially affected the air pressure or something in the room. It was not good for her inner ears.

This should be the sign it was time to stop writing. For now at least.
8:00p 1821 words

At least she had just over a daily quota done.

To be only one day behind she needed only c. 635 words.
Could she try this now? She knew she should not continue sitting and working given her head symptoms. But now there was the compulsion to at least get that little bit done.

If only she could remember all the thoughts she had reached that other morning after the marathon stint. But that would mean having to get up to get the notebook and look up what she had written down there. She was stubbornly not wanting this writing to even be anything about recording things from another time. Just record what was going on right then.

Another time or this time - were they not really the same thing? The current vogue was to hold that there was only 'now'. There was no past and no future. She could see that to a point. What was being missed in this idea she thought was that the 'Now' included the past and the future. It was not that the past and the future did not exist - it was all the same. One could only act in the present moment. That was how one affected one's future. Was it not possible that one could also thereby affect one's past from the present, the Now?

There, at least she'd written one of the ideas she liked to think about. She was not writing up a point of history, a point of the history of her days, her daily life. Right now that was something she did not want to go into.

She longed to be done with this writing. Again she had forgotten about using that reward system to make this practice more fun. It would not work though because there just was no easy way to keep count as she went along. She could perhaps keep count of every 5 minute writing section she completed. Right now it seemed better to just try to write away for a bit more on whatever thoughts arose.

The chair she sat in was not good for her though. She could feel the numbing tingling rising up the left side of her neck.

8:30pm 2203 words

She had been way off in her math. She was trying to include the word count of the brief entry but somehow got the math all mixed up. At this point she still needed over 600 words to get be only one day behind. This was torture now. Such a foolish effort it seemed. What on earth could it possibly be achieving?

She was not experiencing the doubts that apparently most of the writers went through - ie. "i'm no good, no one will ever read this", at least not in terms of that inner judge that supposedly always through doubt in one's path and tried to knock one off one's mission. She did not think it was that kind of doubt and judge operating now. It was simply the questioning of why was one doing this? How could one possibly get a novel of any consequence out of this effort, this challenge. It was not impossible to write that many words in 30 days. But it certainly seemed like it was an impossible mission to write a novel in this kind of a schedule. No, if one was following the rule of just writing without editing and write as fast as you can. If you allowed yourself the time to write as you needed to - to tell the story, think it through the way you wanted to, do the proofing you needed to.

She wondered again about Charles Dickens, even about Winston Churchill. She thought he had said in that movie she saw about him and his wife, that he was writing as fast as he could. He was writing 2000 words a day with the articles he wrote. Was he writing them daily? She knew he was writing both speeches and articles. Did both these writers have others to set the type and do the proofing?
8:47pm - no word counting yet!

At least the radio was now playing music so she did not have to keep track of stories and ideas that she was hearing. There were bits of talking between the pieces announcing what the musical pieces were and who the composers were and who the performers were. The wrimoer knew the parents of one of the performers. They had been together for several years in a foreign language reading and discussion group.

The wrimoer did not want to start telling about the foreign language reading and discussion group. She had reflected only briefly over whether to say what language it had been. She wanted to keep it vague though. She did not want to reveal too much just then. It did not seem as if she wanted to share anything much this whole writing session. It seemed like she really just wanted to write about nothing. What a ridiculous thing to be doing. Was she done yet? Could she peek to see how many words she had done?
8:52p 2689 words

Was this possible? The word count seemed to be just creeping along. She wondered if she had lost some somewhere, perhaps accidently cut off some writing by miscopying and pasting over. The math just did not feel right. No, it was probably ok. She had forgotten about that small section sitting in another document. Now she wanted to get this writing up to a full two day quota so that she could stop worrying about including or remembering to include that extra little section. That was messing up how she thought of it.

In this next flow of words she had only to worry about doing 600 words. Such a boring effort. How lovely to treat a reader, whether that be herself as reader or a true and valid reader, to such inane, mundane, boring details. Even worse perhaps to sit around describing these thoughts as inanities.

How could one at least be funny in one's writing? She could be a little bit funny with her classes, but there it was because she caught sight or heard a bit of funniness in whatever she happened to be trying to explain or describe to the class. She just caught sight of it in her mind. She did not set out to be funny. It was also simply to amuse herself. It came about because she heard it. Whatever she happened to have just said, she also heard as having another meaning and so she could point out to others that she did not intend for this point to have the other meaning. And everyone would seem to get pleasure about the bit of humor.

To be funny like some people were funny was unfathomable. How did people sit around writing jokes, writing funny lines?

This was not a practice she was going to be able to keep up she thought. It was just going to get too boring to be writing the same things over and over again. Perhaps the practice of writing about nothing for such extended time period helped one's creativity in general. That was why she had thought yes she should go ahead to doing this - because she thought it was a good creative game or play or brain exercise. It seemed like such wasted effort to have nothing really to show for it. It was not really that much fun. Yes, one could print out a stack of paper, but had not really created much more than if one simply ran one's fingers over the keyboard so that they played different rhythms and made different sounds.

She knew she was holding back on saying anything of real consequence to herself because she was not committed to continuing with the challenge. She did not want to do it but could not bring herself to outright say NO. She was caught in a limbo land about it.
9:14pm 3170 words - still not done. God this was torture, but almost done for at least a two day quota.

If she were going to get truly back on track, she would need to add an extra 600 words to her next two writing stints. It sounded interminable. How could she ever have imagined sitting down to write 5000 words at one sitting? She supposed it would be a completely different matter if one actually had something one wanted to write about, something to communicate. This was more like an idle killing time.

What were the two ideas she had switched from that morning she had gotten up after the writing marathon. No, one idea came after she had investigated what 'literary fiction' meant. She had entered her challenge as being in that category, though she had no idea what it meant. The research for that led her to a website that not only explained that but had a lot of other advice about writing fiction in general.

After having read extensively in this material, it came to her that she might want to write about family as a theme. But then that morning she had heard a radio interview with someone who was discussing a kind of heroic quest and the kind of affect such stories had on one's beings. Now it felt like she wanted to write that kind of thing.

Then she had fallen away from wanting to write, at least under the constraints of the one month project, in particular the one month being November.

9:29 pm 3428 words at last