NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 1
So, today started NaNoWriMo and I was quite happy to get started. Or so I thought in theory.
What actually happened was this: First I woke up and didn’t really do any work right away, because I wanted to read something first. Then I thought, well, first I need some breakfast anyway and fried myself some egg and bacon and gobbled down some avocado as well, all while listening to a podcast. When I looked at the time it was already 12.30! Now I really had to get started! What did I do though? First I restarted my computer – I do that about once every few months, but a few days ago something crashed and since then it has been acting up. Once it booted up again I remembered that I hadn’t done any software updates lately, so I fired that up and another 15 minutes went down the drain. Then I saw the state of my computer desktop and decided to de-clutter that a bit. Once I was finished with that I realised that I was hungry again and got myself some yogurt. Oh well, if I eat something, I might as well take a little break, so I watched an episode of X-Files.
By now it was 3.30 pm and I was starting to get annoyed at myself. Stupid procrastination! Finally I sat down and started with the work. However, quickly I realised that I was utterly unprepared. I hadn’t read what I had written before and after all, that had been months ago! While I was reading through that stuff, I was smoothing things out a bit here and there, adding a few words, a couple of sentences. When I reached the end I thought … well, fair enough, I can work with this, but immediately I drew a blank as to where to go from here. No planning, no brainstorming, well, I had done nothing. I pressed about 300 words out, but then I was just at a loss as to where to go from there. It was a couple of hours later and I decided to take a break and have some more food with another episode of X-Files, before continuing with the work. Since that episode was a “to-be-continued” one, I got sucked in and one episode turned into 4. Suddenly it was 9pm and I was tired already!
No, no, no, I thought, this is not how this should be going! So, I finally sat down and did the leg work. I looked at the structure and scenes I had so far and then started to collect ideas. The problem is that the part of the story that I have already, came about pretty much through associative writing, drawing on actual things that happened to me a few months ago. Of course I put an entirely different spin on the events, by completely changing the interpretation and now it’s as far away from the actual events as it could be. Still, it was somewhat born out of a specific situation. Continuing this fictionally was the idea, but really, there needed to be a red line, a story, and not just some ramblings that connect by mere chance. It took quite a bit of staring at the blank page to finally get into it, but in the end I collected quite a number of interesting ideas for scenes.
So, all a bit of a difficult start, but I think tomorrow will turn out quite a bit better, now that I have actual scenes that I can just write down and see where they lead me! I really should have done this stuff yesterday, but oh well, you know how these things work!
bearable is barely enough 