I have done NaNoWriMo every year for over a decade. Except maybe 2021. I don’t think I did it that year, but I have a handy excuse*. That was a month-and-a-half after I got home from the hospital from a life-threatening medical situation. I think I can be excused for missing that year. I tried the next two years, but could not get the fiction to gel. I have all these great ideas, but the execution is not so good.
I want to emphasize that I consider it a fair trade-off for still being alive. I would like to be able to get back to fiction one day, but if I can’t, well, I can’t. (I will. I just have to find my way back to it.) Fortunately, I’ve been able to write posts with no problem. I have several ideas for posts in my head at all times. I do have ideas for what Iwant to write, fiction-wise. I just can’t get it from idea to written words.
If I do NaNoWriMo this year, I think I might actually use it to get back on track. In the past years, I did not need the 50,000 word count because I wrote 2,000 words of fiction a day. I haven’t been able to do that in the last year or two. I know it’s because of the medical crisis, which is why I’m not beating myself up over it.
But.
However.
I would like to be able to write fiction again. I have an idea for a trilogy (I always do trilogies), and I think I want to tackle that for NaNoWriMo. However, I want to start with the second book. Or rather, the second story chronologically. I’m not sure that will work, though, because all the pieces need to be set up before I can jump into a story proper. In that case, it would make more sense to start with the first book, but that’s not what I want to do.
I wonder if I could write a novella as the intro, jump to the second book, then go back to the first. Oh, this would be a mystery trilogy, by the way. That’s what I used to write before my medical crisis. I also wrote standalones, but I preferred to write trilogies. Only trilogies because I have the belief that series should not be longer than seven, whether it’s TV, movies, games, or books.
But I digress.
I have two discrete ideas for NaNoWriMo. By the way, that is one of my linguistic pet peeves–mistaking discrete and discreet. Usually people using discrete when they mean discreet.
There is no harm in trying. That’s what I wished I had learned at a younger age. My brother is very much a no-fears, try anything kind of guy, and I admire him for it. He will just barge ahead and if it doesn’t work out, he’ll shrug and move onto something else. He has said that he does not regret anything in his life, which blows my mind. I regret everything. Well, almost everything.
I grew up being chastised for everything I did. My mother was/is hypercritical about how people should be have as was/is my father. It was so bad that by the time I was a teen, I had a voice in my head that told me what to do. It mimicked my parents’ voices (mostly my mother because my father was absent more often than not), and at a certain point in my twenties, I took to calling it The Dictator because he was so stern and unrelenting. And, yes, it was a him.
I had to unpack all that shit with my last therapist. A lot of the time, she patiently (or not so patiently) pushed me to really dig deep into myself to see what would happen if I just…didn’t do as The Dictator demanded. At first, it was a revolutionary and heretical idea. But then, I took baby steps to do as she suggested.
For example. I used to have this thing where if I saw the clock at any quarter of the hour, I had to quickly count to 25. No idea how it started or why. I just had to do it without a second thought. Now, I don’t do it at all. I have noticed that when I’m extra-stressed, I get the impulse to do it. However, I don’t do it and the impulse flits away.
I’m such a weird mix of rules follower and total anarchist. If a rule makes sense, I will follow it. Like traffic rules. I do not want to cause any accidents. If a rule does not make sense, though, I will ignore it. As long as it does not hurt someone else. This is why my mother gets so frustrated with me and thinks I’m oppositional–I don’t take anything at face value.
We have argued about this on and off all my life. Once, she told me a story she thought was really sweet, and I just picked it apart. At the end, she said angrily that I didn’t have to be so negative! I felt a little bad, but on the other hand, it was what I really felt. I didn’t think the story was sweet at all, but I probably should have kept it to myself.
That’s my thought most of the time. I just keep the shit to myself. There are very few people I am open and honest with. It’s one reason I really value my close friends because I can be real with them in a way I can’t be with the world at large. K and I can be really real with each other, and we have been known to say, “I can only say this to you.” We both know that we won’t take it the wrong way, and we are on the same wavelength 98% of the time.
Hm. That actually gives me another idea for NaNoWriMo.
Here’s the tthing. I’m used to being ahead of my time when it comes to writing. I’ll say it and sound egotistical. Back when I took a mystery writing class, I was working on a murder mystery that had a protagonist who was in the first person. An “I” character, if you would. And I had several scenes in which she was not present. My teacher was adamant that I could not do that. I was puzzled because I had clearly done it. What she meant, of course, was that it “wasn’t done” in the world of writing mysteries.
A few years later, one of her friends who also wrote mysteries published a novel in which there was an “I” protagonist and several scenes without him. Which just proves I was ahead of my time!