About Learning and Moving Forward.

To those new to the support group, welcome to the most awesome party on the net! To the old timers, I hope you are closing the year with an upbeat spirit! This group is meant to offer a place to vent your insecurities and help heal other writer's insecurities and that's great. Let's all thank Captain Ninja Alex Cavanaugh for creating the group and keeping it together. How? Well, go visit his site and all other participating blogs!

I don't know about you, but November just flew and I didn't even notice. I hope those of you who participated in NaNoWriMo feel accomplished; in one sense of another you all are winners. Such a tough challenge! Though I did not join the NaNo train, I did set my own challenge for myself: Finish my novel before Christmas. Many of you pointed out that 3000 words a day as a goal was a bit ambitious. And you were right! Believe it or not, there was a moment in my life not too far ago when I could churn up 3K/day no prob. Sadly, I'm not there now. Yet.

How's the project going? Fffine... I guess??? 

Here's the deal: I write short stories ALL of the time. To me, short stories are easy. When I conceptualize one, I see it almost like a cube that I can rotate in my mind to see where it came from, where it's going, and how many events are in between those points. Novels, on the other hand, are harder for me to picture. I can't see the whole of the story, therefore, I have a really hard time going from one event to the other without knowing my destination. Sorry, just not the way my mind works. To complicate things even more, too much time has passed since I came up with the idea of this book. 

At this point, I'm not even sure what was it that I set out to write. Sometimes I feel like I just lost the story somewhere last year. But despite these set backs, I've been writing constantly. The first week of the project I barely managed a hundred words a day. Last Friday I did the happy dance with about 1500 words for the week. No where near the goal, but I'm moving forward. Writing these days is frustrating, annoying, baffling, and encouraging all at the same time. 

But I'm moving forward. 

Why do I keep putting myself through this when I could be much happier writing short stories, you ask? Well, first, because I'm too damn hardheaded to allow a set of stupid characters I made up win the battle. But more importantly, because I'm learning. I'm developing my own way to write a novel and when the next idea for a long story comes, it'll be easier. 

I'm pretty sure Deliverance will be unpublishable even after extensive rewrites and editions (but who knows, right? A writer's gotta dream), however, it'll have served a purpose. Stopping right now and letting it go is to admit defeat. It'd mean that all those moths I dedicated to this project were a waste. But learning is never a waste, so I'm choosing to see this through the end.

It'll clearly take longer than until Christmas, though. *Hangs head in exhaustion*

On the happy news front: (Just to end up upbeat) I managed to write a short story and submit it to the DoubleDay/Bloomhouse contest. Wish me luck!!

To you all, I wish a happy season full of satisfactions and love. See you on 2015!!