NaNoWriMo: 1, Me: 0

I don't know why I thought it would be easy. Writing a novel is supposed to be something every twenty-something considers doing. Well, twenty-somethings who have spare time or perhaps too much education ("I'm a 19th grader is something I often said while in my last year of law school."). I didn't have an aspiration to write the Great American Novel, and at no point was I delusional enough to think that I have lived enough to have anything to contribute to the Seminars on the Human Condition.

But there was something about National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Over the month of November, thousands of people huddle in their hovels and in cafes to type furiously to meet their daily quotas with the goal of writing 50,000 words by the end. I honestly was intrigued by the ability to say, "I wrote a novel in thirty days." This would be no big deal. It would be downright easy.

I registered for an account and as a title for my opus, I put down "A Thundering Herd of Cats." as a placeholder title. It didn't mean anything to me, but I liked the sound of those clusters of words. Let's not talk about it. On my first day, I wrote double the daily quota, which is around 1600-1700 words a day. "Ha! I thought. This novel-writing business is a cake walk, a veritable stroll while eating cake!" In the week after this, I would write on my phone on the MUNI, on the train, in the house with a mouse. Never mind the fact that I have friends who actually write for a living. And they would smile wryly at this and put scare quotes around "living."

 By the tenth day, my Bucket of Creativity hit the bottom of the well and I just simply had nothing left. I threw down some cringe-worthy prose involving a homeless woman riding the Jägermeister moose through a city made of bottles of the 70-proof digestif from Deutschland. Yeah, it was bad times. Needless to say, I'm now with the crowd that agrees that you really can't rush writing, even bad writing, even if your goal is to just dump words on a page. And yet somehow it was an empowering experience in many ways. I now have about thirty pages of material to bandy about for any projects down the line, and a lot of the writing were emotional experiences that I just needed to projectile vomit out of my headspace.

Maybe next year, NaNoWriMo, maybe next year.