Sat 11/01/14 12:23p
Another try for the NaNoWriMo project
To give the main character a name felt too much like …. She did not know what it felt like. It just was not a commitment she what willing to make yet. This whole challenge never seemed to be a commitment she could make. She had to go about it ‘one day at a time’. The problem was that to do this challenge, of writing a novel of 50,000 words only in the month of November, along with all the other would be writers and novelists, meant one probably needed to keep up with writing a daily quota of 1667 words. One, or, at least she, could not get behind in that schedule. Some people could sit down and knock out several thousand words at one sitting, but not she, at least not easily. There is a physical limitation in such time spent typing on a keyboard that one must take into account.
This year, because her old laptop computer had died that summer, she had replaced it with a similar old but ‘new’ to her laptop. It had a different word processing program on it. There were two things she was glad about this new set-up. The default font was one she was used to, so that did not require changing with every document. It showed the word count as one wrote along. In the past she wrote in a simple text editor, using the time as a progress gauge, and then when she could bear it no longer, she would paste that text into a new document of the proper word processing program, just so she could get a word count.
Why not write in it to start? It was more cumbersome than the simple text editor. She liked the minimalism of the simple text editor. She still felt that way and might return to that for the writing, but this was tempting to be able to see the progress as one went along.
All that morning she had been on edge because her cat was still out since the previous afternoon. He had not responded to her calls that morning. That was not too unusual. He often got breakfast from neighbors. But there was a storm coming in the afternoon, perhaps even to start around noon. It could be impossible to get him in by then. She noticed that the street was getting wet. The wind had been blowing strong and cold all morning and the sky was darkly grey. She would have to interrupt her writing to see if she could get him in.
12:51 p.m. - 581 words.
Resume? At 10:20 pm
She had delayed coming back to the writing because working in the new manner with the word count constantly showing had seemed so much easier. She felt it would be so easy to do the writing that she could afford to dawdle about with all sorts of other things. But by the time she finally did resume the day’s writing, she had also spent a long time reading through her longhand journal of the previous year’s writing experience. She had wanted to review how it had been for her then, and what she had concluded or decided about doing it in general.
The longhand journal did not give too much good reason to do it again. It seemed a lot of the time she just ached for the project to be finished. She used a timer as a strategy for accomplishing her writing targets. That had been a help. But it seemed she did not believe she had written anything of much consequence to herself even, let alone to an audience. So, for this first day, she would at least try to get the first quota done. If she were to continue, she would keep on with one day’s quota at a time.
She had had ideas of using this writing project as a way to write some of her little animal stories, though she was not sure how to tie them together as a ‘novel’. That would end up being more of a collection. She gave up that idea though because she was not able to make up that kind of story while trying to just write words like crazy. For that kind of story writing she needed lots of time to pause and think. She certainly wished she could make it up quickly. She was no storyteller in that way. She had tried bouts of trying to dictate writing. That did not work that well for her.
She had considered inserting photos of her longhand journal with portions blacked out and word counts of that writing, into the Nano project. And then there was all the writing in her Facebook activity. The past year she had finally found where one could access one’s activity. If one could collate all that, one might come up with a sizeable chunk of writing. But for the moment all of this seemed far too complicated and laborious to execute. Seemed so much simpler just to write fresh.
She still did not understand what she was writing for though. She might never. As she had pondered whether to do this again, she told herself this would be just for herself. Just for the type of experience it gave, as that it did do. But looking at her reactions from last year, she was believing she would not go through with it. She would at least finish the first day’s writing.
In the big interruption of the day’s writing, she had been able to get the cat in and was very pleased and relieved about that. The weather forecast had gotten worse. There was a storm watch for overnight, with a half foot of heavy wet snow expected throughout the state. Also 50mph wind gusts.
Her cat was in.
Her cat’s –rival cat- was out there though. She had been feeding that one regularly. He almost always came running when she whistled for him. He was a young cat, seemingly not full grown yet. She thought perhaps nine months old. He was much bigger than he had been when he first started showing up. Then her neighbor, who was also feeding the cat, believed it was just a small cat. It was a shorthaired tuxedo cat. He had nasty sores around his ears – perhaps abscesses that kept closing up and getting dug open. His coat was not yet thick. And he did not have a long furry coat the way her cat did. Her cat also had a tail like a squirrel’s that helped keep him warm wherever he curled up. She knew her cat would be fine outside overnight or even in nasty weather. She had gone through these situations before with him. That did not change that she wanted him in the house during a storm.
During her break she had thought of all the things she would write about in the day’s writing. When she finally got back to the writing, it seemed she was mostly writing small talk. She had forgotten most of what she wanted to write about. She was in that state of just wanting to get the writing over with. That was another reason not to carry on with the project.
She had almost been looking forward to the winter, as that was when she wrote the little animal stories. They did give her pleasure, just for their own sake. It had started the winter before the previous one. She had written a series of crow stories. They seemed to stop by the end of the winter.
The last winter she wrote stories about both crows and squirrels. She could not remember exactly. One had possibly been lost when her laptop had died. Now it was looking like she was most probably going to be able to recover all the things seemingly lost in that laptop. That had been a wonderful discovery the day she had somehow gotten the laptop back to a state where it looked like most everything on it was intact and could be recovered. She had not yet carried that out though, because she once she figured out just how to recover it, she did not know just where or how to put the stuff. The next task there was to get a clear idea of just how to do the job and where to put the stuff.
She was finding it so much easier to write with that word count showing all along. That made it so that one did not always have that gnawing question of how far one had gotten. It was very freeing. Made it much easier. It just did not change the question of what was the point of doing this challenge in the first place, if one already knew, or had decided one just could not make up a story, not by writing in that ‘write as fast as one can’ manner.
Perhaps that would come with time. She wondered what kind of exercises she could give herself to practice making up stories fast. She would have to make up a list of ideas for that. And there she had reached her target.
11:11 p.m. 1687 words (1106 words in 51 minutes).
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