Back from the Hiatus (I Wrote a Novel)

I know it’s become the biggest blogging cliché, to blog that one has not blogged in a while, but I don’t care, because I haven’t, and I want to again, so this is as good a start as any. It’s been more than a month, and my excuse is the NaNoWriMo. That stands for National Novel Writing Month, an effort by writers all over the world to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

That’s 1667 or so words per day, give or take. If you stay on track, which I did not. Out of all of those days I think I had a few in the 1600 ball park, with some days approaching 5000, and most days sitting at zero. The last day was a herculean 10,000 words, and I say Herculean because one of his labors was to muck out a horse stall, and you know what those smell like.

Not that I’m saying my novel (which I did finish, ending at 50,080 words) is bad. It might end up being okay. And maybe in a few months, I’ll shop it around to some agents. Who knows. Hey, maybe you’re a fan, going through the archives of my old blog, the one I sometimes wrote on before I got uber famous thanks to my best selling novels. Hi, how’s it going. Welcome to dream land, a fantasy world of silly ideas and absurd notions.

The point is, explaining the word counts and all, any spare moment I happened to have for writing went not to the blogs but to the novel. So there you go, my lame excuse. Not that NaNoWriMo was the only thing going on. We went to New York for a wedding. We moved. We’re still, of course, unpacking and moving furniture around, putting up hooks in the bathroom and taking down knick-knack shelves. Also, I had a birthday. Also, we got a DVR. That last one alone would be enough to quash any writing effort, novel or blog or otherwise.

I got to tell you, though, wrapping the damn thing up last night at 11:30 PM, it felt pretty good. The ending was sad too, well, not sad like tragic, just a bit melancholy I guess, so, sure, there were a few tears. Not out and out weeping, you understand. But you know. And here, less than 12 hours later, I’m already getting wistful about the thing. But I must be strong. Not allowed to look at it for a month at least. No editing till 2010. I need to get some distance, regain some objectivity. Then I’ll poke my nose into it, see if it’s worth working over.

But if it’s not, that’s okay, because as an exercise, the NaNoWriMo is very empowering, so I got a lot out of it, even if the novel never gets touched again. I’ve done NaNoWriMo a few times, but a trip to India kept me from finishing in 2007, and the 2008 effort was meager in that one of my characters ended up sharing his short-stories with everyone (and can you guess where the text for those came from). There was no real ending, whereas this time, I have a real ending. I am awful at endings. That’s why I end up sticking to short stories, usually—they don’t need plot resolution, or even plot, for that matter.

So I’m feeling good, looking forward to next year already. I also learned about myself that as contrived and ham-handed as my damn book is, all of the outlines I came up with and rejected where way worse. I’m just no plot architect. I had to make it up as I went along, and it wasn’t until about 75% of the damn thing was done that I even knew what was happening. So there’s a reward too: it took me 30 days, but I just got done reading a silly little novel by some dude from Seattle.

Hopefully, the “discipline” that was supposed to be instilled in me by the exercise will translate into writing more regularly in this blog, and Antipundit, and Wiffli, and whatever other hare-brained blog I feel like starting. Have to get the wife back on her cooking blog, maybe I’ll do some guest spots. I was thinking about starting something dedicated strictly to running. Or video games. Sigh.

Why do we write? No one reads this stuff. I guess we just do it for the hell of doing it. Like climbing that mountain, or walking on the moon. That’s me, I’m not a hack, I’m an explorer.

(See? Told you I was bad at endings.)