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Sunday, November 25, 2007

 

0 to 20 in 50,000 words


New Mexico vacation
Originally uploaded by marytsao
I'm going to finish NaNoWriMo today. I'm at 47,551 words, and there's nothing that's going to get in the way of me writing the remaining 2,449 by day's end. Mike and the kids just left for a fieldtrip involving a train ride so I know the house will be empty for at least a couple of hours. The quiet is beautiful.

Finishing NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row is going to feel good. Heck, it already feels good. More than good, it feels like a habit. And from the advice I've read, the key to writing is to make it a habit.

That's not to say that I won't be grateful when NaNoWriMo is over and I can kick this habit and begin to think about preparing for Thomas's birthday, whether or not Baskin-Robbins can make an ice cream cake with a pirate motif, decorating the house for Christmas, which cookies I want to bake this year, what craft projects would make good gifts for relatives who are under obligation to like them, how to get through the holiday season without gaining ten pounds, and other very important things. Anything other than the minutiae of my life and the chronological order in which these precious moments occurred.

At this point, my memoir could be titled "All plod, no plot." I'm just trying to get down as much as I can remember without embellishment or thematic leanings. And that means that after writing 50,000 words--roughly 85 single spaced pages--I will end up about 3 months shy of my 20th birthday. In other words, not done. In fact, only about halfway done since I now am almost 40.

But I will be done for this year's NaNoWriMo, and happy to have gotten down on paper as much as I did. Because really, who knows what child rearing-induced brain damage will occur between now and the next time I want to think about how I once got an F in a college sociology class because the night before the final exam I went to a Grateful Dead concert and didn't make it home until 4:00 A.M.? Ah, good times, and a true spiritual journey filled with hard knocks of the mostly self-inflicted variety.

Until it's Monday, Happy Sunday.