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jaeleslie at 12:56pm on 16/11/2002
jaeleslie at 12:56pm on 16/11/2002There was this noise, and by the time I woke up I already knew what it was. It was the sound of five pounds of onions falling in their net bag from a hook onto the basement stairs, and then released from the torn net, bouncing down the wooden steps each on their own, at two in the morning.
Instead of going back to sleep then, I was thinking over how to explain how it is that I don’t feel like a failure for giving up on my National Novel Writing Month project only halfway through the month. I have, near as I can tell, only a couple thousand words written, instead of the twenty-five thousand that I should have done by this point according to all advice and guidelines for the project. And the words I have are remarkably ill-organized and little thought out. But of course it was pretty silly to think I could tackle that at the same time that I was off to Britain for the first eleven days of the month. It is very likely that I am never going to be able to write a novel in the month of November if I want to go to Novacon too.
As soon as I started the first jetlag, on November 2, the days started to get away from me, as you might expect. Soon I was noting events that occurred to me on the trip, and making plenty of gallery notes in my journal at all the art galleries I went to, but every day that went by so richly without any further attention to the Novel, the number of words that I would have to write to get back on track went up. What had made it seem like such a possible project at all was that a couple thousand words a day consistently applied is not at all beyond my abilities. But twice that, and particularly the thinking around how to choose which ones, does seem well nigh impossible.
Writing a novel in a month is a brash idea, and I liked it from the start. It is not a bad thing to have several thousand words scribbled down, however confused, and a lot of ideas. Now I have a word processing document captioned on the desktop screen too, and the title "Twelve Dancing Princesses" does match serendipitously with the photo I have there (from the Medieval Baebes website, you could google that) of a gaggle of variously dressed ladies dancing across a parkland. Those ideas have apparently been bouncing around in unconscious process for some time. But I’m just not going to be able to do them any justice this month. I have lots of projects that I have started and never finished. This is nothing unusual for me. I have half-done paintings and publications and writings and more crafts than you care to hear about in every possible stage of process, mostly closer to beginning than finishing. Getting to the end of a project from time to time is a great triumph, but starting something and leaving it while I go on to something else is business as usual.
I have all these photos and notes from Britain, which I collected from the photo shop this week and have barely put into an album so that I could show them to my artists’ study group at our meeting yesterday -- and a zine to publish too, and a teeshirt to design, and so on and on. It’s always something. Really way more important than a lot of other stuff right now is that I have a stack of novels to read for the Tiptree award, and quite a number of friends depending on me to be able to discuss and consider those works intelligently as a member of the jury over the next couple of months. I like reading them too. It does mean that I have to buckle down to reading the next half-dozen in the stack this week, while I also write the business pages for Turboapa and collate that and mail it out and go to the gym every other day or so and write up our collaborative book/box project and put some gesso on the boards a friend Elaine kindly sent to me yesterday and think about what colors to paint them and which cookies to bake for the holidays and spare a thought for getting the duplicator working again and maybe, just possibly, write a journal entry and post some photos of Warwick Castle somewhere. If I didn’t have so many things going all the time, I wouldn’t get so many of them occasionally done.
Smells like bruised onions down here. I don’t think I have found and collected them all yet.
Instead of going back to sleep then, I was thinking over how to explain how it is that I don’t feel like a failure for giving up on my National Novel Writing Month project only halfway through the month. I have, near as I can tell, only a couple thousand words written, instead of the twenty-five thousand that I should have done by this point according to all advice and guidelines for the project. And the words I have are remarkably ill-organized and little thought out. But of course it was pretty silly to think I could tackle that at the same time that I was off to Britain for the first eleven days of the month. It is very likely that I am never going to be able to write a novel in the month of November if I want to go to Novacon too.
As soon as I started the first jetlag, on November 2, the days started to get away from me, as you might expect. Soon I was noting events that occurred to me on the trip, and making plenty of gallery notes in my journal at all the art galleries I went to, but every day that went by so richly without any further attention to the Novel, the number of words that I would have to write to get back on track went up. What had made it seem like such a possible project at all was that a couple thousand words a day consistently applied is not at all beyond my abilities. But twice that, and particularly the thinking around how to choose which ones, does seem well nigh impossible.
Writing a novel in a month is a brash idea, and I liked it from the start. It is not a bad thing to have several thousand words scribbled down, however confused, and a lot of ideas. Now I have a word processing document captioned on the desktop screen too, and the title "Twelve Dancing Princesses" does match serendipitously with the photo I have there (from the Medieval Baebes website, you could google that) of a gaggle of variously dressed ladies dancing across a parkland. Those ideas have apparently been bouncing around in unconscious process for some time. But I’m just not going to be able to do them any justice this month. I have lots of projects that I have started and never finished. This is nothing unusual for me. I have half-done paintings and publications and writings and more crafts than you care to hear about in every possible stage of process, mostly closer to beginning than finishing. Getting to the end of a project from time to time is a great triumph, but starting something and leaving it while I go on to something else is business as usual.
I have all these photos and notes from Britain, which I collected from the photo shop this week and have barely put into an album so that I could show them to my artists’ study group at our meeting yesterday -- and a zine to publish too, and a teeshirt to design, and so on and on. It’s always something. Really way more important than a lot of other stuff right now is that I have a stack of novels to read for the Tiptree award, and quite a number of friends depending on me to be able to discuss and consider those works intelligently as a member of the jury over the next couple of months. I like reading them too. It does mean that I have to buckle down to reading the next half-dozen in the stack this week, while I also write the business pages for Turboapa and collate that and mail it out and go to the gym every other day or so and write up our collaborative book/box project and put some gesso on the boards a friend Elaine kindly sent to me yesterday and think about what colors to paint them and which cookies to bake for the holidays and spare a thought for getting the duplicator working again and maybe, just possibly, write a journal entry and post some photos of Warwick Castle somewhere. If I didn’t have so many things going all the time, I wouldn’t get so many of them occasionally done.
Smells like bruised onions down here. I don’t think I have found and collected them all yet.