I am participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but not as a novelist–I am what they call a NaNo Rebel. Someone who is breaking the rules. In this case, someone who is writing short stories rather than a novel; because I need to finish a draft of this dang thesis by sometime in December, and I’m about 60 pages away from the minimum.
My problem is that I have several short stories in the works–three or four or five–and haven’t been able to settle down to finish any one of them. I’ve moved between them in a shiftless sort of way, dropping one for another whenever I got stuck, and not making much progress on any of them.
And I’ve been discouraged. About the amount of writing I’m getting done, and about its overall quality. It’s a vicious sort of cycle, feeling discouraged because you’re not getting anything done, and not getting anything done because you’re feeling discouraged.
Well, NaNo has a way of kicking writers in the butt, and I guess that’s what I need.
The story I’m determined to finish first is mostly there. I have most of the pieces–fragments of scenes half- or three-quarters finished–and the general shape of the story, but now I’m figuring out how exactly they all fit together. Which is slow work. Not exactly NaNo-paced, but there you go.
And here I go.
