Here is my plan for the month of Mai or more my absence of plan.
I wanted to do the 6 week challenge again and Read More Or Die.
But this time, the 6 week challenge is a special Esperanto challenge to prepare a 5 minutes presentation in Esperanto in 6 weeks. And I don't want to do that so I'll be studying Japanese on my own or maybe I want to do that, I mean the new things people are throwing at me always look like candy. So I might think about it a bit further (and discuss it with my "coach" lol)
And the Read More Or Die contest happened to be in April and not in May so I just missed it, which hopefully doesn't mean I won't read next month, I'm just not going to go totally crazy about having my daily 40 pages.
Camp NaNoWriMo's Impressive Win.
In April, I wrote
100,715
words and finished on the 25th before leaving for Hong Kong. That's impressive not only because of the huge word count but also because I managed to finish Blue Angel and write the complete draft of Dark Druid in less than a month.
The main reason why I wanted to go up to 100k words was because I'm not feeling the thrill anymore.
There are a lot of people participating to NaNoWriMo who can't make it to the basic 50k, people who chose ridiculously small goal during camp because camp allows word goals as small as I think 10k and they still can't make it. Here are the stats for November.
I used to be a nice person, I used to think it was just hard and that people were busy and that people were having writer block and a life and well, I'm not a nice person anymore.
I too have a life, a full time job, a boyfriend in a different city, a trip to plan and to go to at the end of April, a daily photography challenge, blog hops and daily blog posts, and writing and editing and learning Japanese and other stuff when I feel like it and an Etsy store, and so much more. I too have feelings about not being good enough, thinking that my novel is a crappy idea, that my draft is awful and not worth finishing. I used to sabotage myself with feelings. This time winning was overwhelming and when I hit 80k and started to think that I wouldn't feel the thrill this time around again I thought: "What the point, if the thrill isn't there?" I wrote 6000 words to be able to get something on paper because looking at the screen and the word count was scaring me.
But when you win nobody is being nice to you and telling you that you'll do better next time. You've got a "congrats" and others bitching that you did it again and they didn't. You go through the same problem and all you have is the win, you made it, for yourself and screw the rest of the world. And you didn't take the win from anybody either, they took it away from themselves. Accepting other people excuses while I'm not accepting mine is like
saying yeah I did it because my life is easier than yours but that's not
even true, so screw it, I won't be nice to people making excuses
anymore.
If you didn't make it, you can tell yourself everything you want, give yourself as many excuses as possible. If you didn't win, it's your own fault and seriously you won't even win the next time around without a serious change of attitude.
Let's call a cat a cat and a loser a loser.
Here is a quote from Rounders (1998):
Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table...
at the World Series of Poker every single year?
What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?
- It's a skill game, Jo. -
And this is so true, it's a game, writing is a game and it's a skill game.
I wrote 77k in November, it was hard but it was nothing unachievable. I wrote 100k+ this time around and in not even a month.
Winning
NaNoWriMo has nothing to do with being lucky or having time. You only
have the time that you want to have. Winning NaNoWriMo is about telling
to yourself: "I'm going to do this."
Here is another quote from Rounders (1998):
Listen, here's the thing.
If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table,
then you are the sucker.
Guys around here'll tell ya... you play for a living.
It's like any other job. You don't gamble. You grind it out.
Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it.
So what about not feeling the thrill? Well, I thought there was something about me that was broken but in fact it's quite the opposite. I thought that because a lot of people can't make it, I should be over joyed about verifying my wining word count. But the fact is, I'm not telling myself every time I solve the Schrödinger equation that I'm such an awesome person because very few people in the word can do it. I'm not telling myself every time I write a post in English that it's freaking amazing because it's not my native language. In the same way, winning NaNoWriMo style contests has become an habit, it's something I do and I'm freaking good at it. I won't be pushing anymore to feel the thrill, I'll get the thrill with something else. I'll just continue writing novels for people to enjoy, because that's just what I do. That's it.
