Archive for November, 2009

Somewhat random pep talk

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

I just sent this out to the participants in National Novel Writing Month who are members of the Miami region, and who are thus fated to receive such emails from me twice a week. May it motivate you as it is supposed to motivate them.

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A friend told me a story the other day about her time on the high school track team. She and her teammates would run for miles every day, each keeping her own pace. Some people were able to move ahead of the group, some kept a steady pace throughout, and others would fall behind. Sound familiar?

Well, one day she was running next to one girl in particular, the two of them trekking side by side through the neighborhoods around the school. My friend got very tired and wanted to stop for a rest, but she looked at that girl next to her and told herself, “If she can do it, so can I.” To her surprise, she found reserves of energy she hadn’t known were there. When they reached their destination, my friend told the girl, “Thank you for motivating me to finish the run. I was so tired I almost dropped out, but you kept me going.” The girl laughed and said, “I was about to tell you the same thing!”
That is the beauty of NaNoWriMo. We are all running separately, but we are on the same path headed for the same destination. Look at the word counts of your fellow Miami Wrimos and let them motivate you. Pick a NaNo buddy and try to keep pace with him or her. If you’re falling behind and feeling discouraged, know that you’re not alone and that we all feel the same way sometimes. At those times, we look to that person next to us and think, “If she can do it, so can I.” And who knows: someone may be looking at you for that encouragement!

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Mid-NaNo Update

Monday, November 16th, 2009

When you are trying to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month, you generally do not want to use them up on blog posts, no matter how vital the information you want to convey regarding your current eating habits and bowel movements. Twitter becomes the ideal method of dispersing that kind of information, as it requires brevity of its users and thus also encourages levity by virtue of the transitive rhyming property.

But I digress. I wanted to update everyone on my progress with this month’s novel, tentatively titled The Lamanai Codex. First, I think it is a splendid name destined to capture the DaVinci Code crowd and become an international bestseller. Second, I am keeping pace with my outline, having just surpassed the 30,000-word mark with a little under half of the novel remaining to be written, meaning that I am likely to actually finish the damn thing this month.
Third, as I am one of the two Municipal Liaisons for my region, I have the honor of facilitating the novel writing experiences of some hundred-odd people, most of whom prefer to toil in obscurity and probably delete my emails without reading them. Some of them, however, are toiling right out in the open and I am usually right behind them yelling “Sprint!” in a soothing yet menacing voice. Often I have bread in my mouth because most of the write-ins (as our get-togethers are called) are held at Panera Bread, which has the finest chicken salad sandwich in all the land. The secret is grapes of the red seedless variety.
This year I’ve been writing in the third person instead of the first person, and it has been an interesting experience to say the least. I apparently lack the ability to smoothly integrate descriptive information into the action of the story and have resorted to conveying nearly everything through dialog. I sometimes feel like I am writing an unformatted screenplay instead of a novel sometimes, but I keep telling myself that I’ll fix it in December.
And so, once more into the breach, dear friends, and no I will not look up the actual quote in order to get it just right, I have more writing to do. See you all in December.

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