A friend returned to work today after taking a 10-day meditation retreat at nearby Dhamma Mahavana in North Fork, CA still reeling from everything that she had experienced there… and I don’t necessarily mean in a good way. Her description of what she went through pretty much terrified me. Correct that, terrifies me. Present tense. She was talking about pain – emotional and physical. Nearly beyond endurance.

So, after talking with Tom this evening, if I can get the days off, I’m going to sign up.

Maybe it’s a birthday challenge appropriate for a milestone birthday.

Maybe it’s something that deep inside I know is just what I need – even if it is excruciating to get there.

OK – but this can’t just happen in isolation, right? Time to start meditating now. Tom suggested 40 days of 40 min of meditation just prior to the retreat in a sort of birthday challenge style, but I feel like I would need to build up to even that.

Begin.

According to some of the things I’ve read, one of the most enjoyable parts of NaNoWriMo is the sense of community and the pleasure of sharing the experience with other WriMos in the area. Perhaps I’m missing out. I know I haven’t talked much about NaNoWriMo this year – not on the blog and not to many people IRL either. Still, it was an interesting experience for me, and I’m proud to say that I’ve managed another 50K words of utter rubbish in under 31 days. No, you will never see any of it.

If I’m feeling honest I would admit that I had a much more detailed plan this year, and that the result of that was a marginally better story than last year’s story. That makes sense. At least this year when I hit 50K words, I still felt like the story was going somewhere. It’s not done yet, the story, I mean, but there are so many other things to do in the world, I’m not sure if I want to finish it, or just declare victory and move on.

I had a harder time finishing this year than last year, that’s for sure. I had thought that planning a relaxing trip to Hawaii would give me plenty of time to type away, but instead, it was harder to make the decision to write rather than explore, and by week three, I was at a huge deficit. More than anything else, this year taught me that I will probably never write a publishable book. When I think of the time investment that author friends have put into a single work – I get the itch to go snorkeling, surfing, hiking, skiing, just about anything. This exercise certainly gives you some appreciation for the sweat and determination that goes into creating books.

Speaking of books, I’m dying to tell you about a book that hasn’t come out yet, but which I’m really looking forward to. Now that I’m done with the WriMo stuff, it will soon have a post all its own, but in the meantime, check out author, Greg Crouch’s blog about China’s Wings, the pilots who flew over (through, really) the Himalaya during WWII. Tom and I got to hear a preview of some of these stories over dinner one day years ago at Hans’ Basecamp, and given the teasers in the blog, I can’t wait to get my hands on the published result!

I had one of those realistic, vivid dreams a few days ago, that leave you wondering if the thing in the dream really happened or not. In the dream, I was trying on jeans, which I hate doing anyway because nothing convinces me that I’m a completely abnormal shape than trying on pants, even when I’m fit. In the dream, when I looked in the mirror, I realized that I had a huge balloon butt. I mean, giant, where did this come from and why haven’t I noticed it before, booty. Naturally, in the dream, the pants didn’t fit.

When I woke up the next morning, I realized that, yes, indeed, it was long past time to get back in shape. I tried this last October, and then promptly injured my shoulder by crashing my bike when I took a corner too fast. When that injury healed, I got taken out by a wobbly kid on a bike who swerved into me, and injured myself again. All that is finally (knock on wood) in the past, and I’m having dreams of being fat. Tom has put a moratorium on stupid minor injuries (and major ones too), and I’m ready to go.
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I know, everyone else starts this game in January, but now it’s May, which is really a time of beginning things, and I can’t even remember if I made New Year resolutions, much less what they might be, so I’m starting again with a couple of goals for myself.
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I finished!

During the month of November, I and more than 32,000 other people around the world each completed 50,000 words of fiction. This was just over 19% of the people who signed up. Collectively, according to the NaNoWriMo stats, the word count of everyone who participated and uploaded their writings to the NaNo web site is 2,427,190,537. That’s a lot of words.

It literally took me years to decide to take the NaNo challenge. Tom and I picked up the No Plot? No Problem by Chris Baty a long time ago during one of our random book store wanderings. It’s a fun book, and it suggests all kinds of fun indulgences you can expect to treat yourself to during your novel writing month – like a handy stack of snacks next to your writing spot (for energy), getting your spouse to do the dishes, etc. It also promises strange and crazy things like, if you write enough, your characters will start to do unexpected things. I wanted to know how that worked.

Only a few days before November, I was thrutching through a list of possible ideas for a novel, with no particularly appealing prospects, when Tom suggested that I write about a society that doesn’t sleep. He’d started a short story along those lines some time ago, although he had little more than a character and a set up.

I took that idea and over the course of a month developed it into a dreadful, going nowhere story with flat characters who I ultimately didn’t like that much. It’s not that the idea didn’t have potential, (I still think it does) but hey, I haven’t written any fiction in years, if I ever have, and it sucked. That’s OK, and I learned a lot.

I learned that a 50K word novel isn’t really that long, and I shouldn’t have been afraid of running out of story before I hit my goal. I learned that it’s easy for me to make things difficult for my characters. I enjoy it. I learned that I have a nasty habit of qualifying my speech/writing – as in “I learned that I might have a tendency to qualify my speech/writing a little” – which is great for word count, but makes for crappy writing. And I also learned that they weren’t kidding. My characters really did start to do some unexpected things. It works like this: you have this idea for what you think your character is going to do in the next scene, but by the time you get around to writing it, you realize that he/she would actually respond in a completely different way. So, then off you go, shooting down some previously unplanned avenue. It was wonderful.

For the most part, I held off on the snacks, but I did reap the benefits of having my spouse take over many of the household chores… I mean the ones that he usually does anyway. I’m generally terrible at domestic chores. Have I mentioned before that I’m crazy lucky that I married Tom?

So, now that I’m done, I’ve decided to simply close the door on that particular story. No, you can’t read it. I still like the idea, and maybe certain elements will find their way into other NaNo projects in the future, but this particular effort falls into the burn-it-now category. I’m not committing to doing this again next year in any way, but I also wouldn’t say for certain that I would wait a whole year before starting up some other little story. As experiments and projects go, this one was sheer fun.

There. I did it. I pushed the little sign up button on the NaNoWriMo page and now I’m basically committed to writing a 50,000 word novel next month. Hoo boy.

Part of me is really excited about the challenge, and another part is wondering what the hell the first part is thinking. First of all, it’s not like I don’t have plenty of other projects on the table, or more productive things that I could be doing with my time. Second, 50K is a really big number. Big enough that I can’t really picture it in my head. Third, I’m taking a week off in November to attend a conference, and I’ll be too busy absorbing conference stuff during that week to write much, so I’m already missing a quarter of the time that people have to write. I went to the NaNo forum, and unlike (it seems) many of the people posting there, I don’t feel compelled to write all the time (unless you count journaling, and I don’t). I don’t have a story bursting inside me that needs to be told. In fact, I don’t relate to ANY of the items on the “Are you a serious writer” thread. “Would rather write a scene with two main characters having sex than have it” – are you NUTS?

Wait, what is this about?

National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to devote the time to write 50K words that all point in the same direction. 50K words amounts to a short novel, but apparently, it’s a good goal to shoot for. According to the website, last year, in 2008, they had an all-time high completion rate of 18%, of a total of 119,301 participants from around the world, so it’s difficult, but not impossible. There’s a website where you can enter your word-count, and if you make it to 50K, you win. There aren’t any big prizes on the table, so even though it would be impossibly easy to cheat, there isn’t really any point to it. It’s all about personal satisfaction. And bragging rights, if you’re into that.

That said, I was surprised to find out that the National Best-Seller, Water for Elephants, started out as a NaNoWriMo novel, and the media kit has a decent list of published authors who participate. With nearly 120K participants last year, and growing, at least I have a lot of company in this craziness.

So, why am I doing this?

Well…

Tom and I picked up the No Plot? No Problem! book a few years ago, and there were two things about the event that caught in my head, and have been rubbing around in there since then. The first is: that it’s all about word count, not quality. No one ever has to see what I’ve written (don’t even bother asking to see it – the answer is no), so it’s a great opportunity to try to shake my somewhat overactive personal editor and just type. That sounded like an interesting exercise. You could even take it as personal development, if you wanted to.

The second thing is that these writers talk about having characters come to life and direct the story. That seemed like an interesting experience too. One that might be fun to have.

That’s it. I’m not sure that these two things make up for the vast array of reasons to do something else with my time in November, but I pushed the little button. I might as well enjoy the ride.

So far we’re 29 days into Lent, and I’ve managed to get a blog post in each day. I’ve missed a few days, and had to back-date, but I’m still at one-for-one, and I usually get that nagging lagging post in the next morning.

It’s a lot more writing than I’ve really ever done before, and the great thing about it is that it seems to be getting easier with each day that goes by. Ideas for things to write about come at me faster than I can get them down. (Knock on wood that it continues.) The conservative part of me is saving those posts for use on later days when I can’t think of something else to say, or don’t have time to get something down, but the longer this goes on, the easier it is for me to build up a surplus of ideas.
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Sometimes themes crop up in my life. A while ago it was Gratitude, and all the things I have to be grateful for. Lately, it seems to be ‘measure to manage’. The idea is that once you have a way to measure something, it becomes easier to figure out how to attain it.
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I don’t really know too much about Lent. We never observed it when I was growing up, and although I knew it was that period right before Easter, I didn’t really even know how long it was until pretty recently. My in-laws observe Lent, and I think my brother’s family does, and I’ve even tried it once, in the traditional way.

We were visiting my in-laws one year during the beginning of Lent, and my father-in-law was giving up “all the stuff he loved” meaning desserts and sweets. I felt like I’d been eating a lot of desserts lately, and on a whim decided I’d follow suit, having no idea how long Lent was. I was shocked and horrified to find out that I’d committed to 40 days. 40 days!?! In the end, it didn’t really matter, because my dessert-loving father-in-law had a favorite bakery on his morning circuit, and since he wasn’t eating them, brought a pastry home for me. My good intentions lasted just over (or maybe just under, I forget) 24 hours.

But, 40 days is a good number of days to challenge yourself with – long but not eternal, so I thought that maybe this year I would try again to do something for Lent. I’m going to try to publish a blog post each day for the duration of Lent.
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