Wednesday, October 04, 2006

I think it's time we blow this scene...

..get everybody and the stuff together.

Okay, three, two, one... let's jam.

[cue music]

I blame NaNoWriMo for this latest foray into the blogosphere. I'm terrible at these things - I never keep them up, half the time I forget I have it, and then when I do remember, I just blow it off. I collect empty journals, my blogs lay unattended with a half dozen - or less - entries scattered at random over a period of months, and I never finish what I write.

Last November, I wrote 52,000 words in a month. The novel is still unfinished - for all that I reached my targer number, I still have a long way to go before I can call it a rest. Since then, two people have read my story. Both of them liked it; both of them think I should finish it. I think I should finish it, though I seem to have a curious block when it comes to actually sitting down and doing so.

You might be curious as to what this has to do with my inability to keep a blog.

See, I used to have a writing journal, online at Diary-X. Don't bother googling for it - it's dead, victim of a dramatic hard drive crash that managed to erase four or so years of intermittent creative writing. A lot of what was posted to my D-X account was the sole copy (a mistake I intend to never, ever make again) after my laptop's external harddrive crashed. Since then, my online presence has been nil.

Sure, you might ask, but what does this have to do with this blog, and what does this have to do with NaNoWriMo?

See, thing was before D-X crashed, I'd started posting my NaNoWriMo 2005 novel, Yon Lonesome Road, to my writing journal. Part of it was to share what I'd sweated, cried, and bled for over the last thirty days - part of it was an attempt to create an audience that would pressure me into finishing the story, for good or ill. It showed promise - and then D-X went down in flames.

So, with NaNoWriMo 2006 almost upon us, I figured it would be an excellent warm-up - not to mention a way to keep my friend Danielle from killing me - if I went ahead and finished Yon Lonesome Road. But I still have that curious block...

So, what better way to slip past then by facing the possibility of shame before a possibly enormous audience of invisible strangers?

It's also a lot more convenient to direct people to my blog than it is to print out the 80+ pages of the work-in-progress. Maybe I'll see about getting it published, whenever I finish - not professionally, of course (my hubris goes only so far), but through an online printer like Lulu. Who knows? It would make a nifty gift for others, at least. ^_^

3 comments:

steve said...

hey what is that song you quoted in the beginning of this post?

i ask because. . .
http://ffffound.com/image/7b5dee424d877f02f6aeb315f772104f59fe1cd1

i like the way this looks.

cheers

Anonymous said...

cowboy bebop's opening (Tank!), duh.

Last Knight said...

The Anonymous poster has it correct, it's The Seatbelts, "Tank," which is the opening theme to Cowboy Bebop.