I've
been gone for a while, I know. And I'm
going to jump right into this blog like I haven't been missing. That's what life is all about, right? Jumping into things without a plan?
Sometime
in May, I decided that I wanted to attempt the June Camp NaNo. I was going to rock it, I was going to hit
that word wall like a rocket and blast it apart. Even better, I was going to take a story idea
that was not my own and pants it like a fourth grade bully. It was going to be epic.
And
then life happened.
I
wrote twelve thousand words and just...stopped. I didn't have a good reason for it. I certainly didn't have any excuses. One day, I just didn't sit down to write and
the motivation died. It wasn't even so
much that I lost my motivation, it was...something else. There was no love. There was no passion, no desire to sit down
and write. It wasn't my story and I
didn't want to do it.
Don't
get me wrong, I learned something. I learned a lot of somethings. I learned that
I, the machine, have limits to how much and what I'm willing to do. I learned
that I am not a pantser. I need an
outline, I need history and background and a big world to work with. I learned that occasionally, life gets in the
way and that GASP! sometimes there is something more important than shooting
down wild words and fitting them together.
I
also learned something else, something more important than all the other things
combined. Don't start something you have
no intention of finishing. I've
committed the worst authorial crime ever: I've left a story half-written and
unfinished. And that's bad.
So,
I learned something. About myself, my
habits as a writer, my future in the literary business (oh, it's there, I know
it). I failed the goal of Camp NaNo, but
it wasn't a total waste. And someday,
I'm going to go back and finish that story.
