I Am Doing NaNoWriMo This Year If It Kills Me

I do not fail well.  I think I realized this later than literally every person who has ever known me.  I actually came across this fact one day when I was in a particularly intense therapy session, and my therapist, after about four weeks of us discussing about what I wanted to get out of our time together, finally came to the conclusion that I needed to allow myself to fail, because otherwise I was never going to try and solve what we were working toward.  I was so struck by this observation, something that had literally never occurred to me, that I promptly called my friend Lindsey and said I'd made the discovery, to which she replied the most sarcastic, "no...really?" I think I've heard in my life.

The nice thing about my life is that for-the-most-part, I don't really need to fail all that often.  I tend to be good at pretty much everything I try, something that is part luck and part relentless, unyielding determination.  While I wasn't the best student in my school, I was always successful.  I tend to catch on to things at my job pretty quickly, and years of practice in my hobbies means that when someone brings up movies, politics, or Lost, I can rest assured that I will be coming away from the off-the-cuff trivia questions that they pose with my honor intact.

And yet there are three things in my life that I have never quite mastered, despite dogged determination.  One is dating, something I've chronicled quite a few times on this blog so we aren't going there again, and the second I talked about in great detail yesterday.  The third, though, I'm sharing not as a moment of catharsis or me needing to admit something welling in my heart, but as a challenge to myself.  I have been trying, with some great desperation, to finish editing and writing the same three books for 14 years, and 2017 is going to be the year where I finally, FINALLY bring this to an end.

The thing about writing a book that I've never quite gotten in this struggle is that unlike these other problems-I've done this before, and know I have the skills to be able to do it again.  I've never had a truly long-term, successful relationship with a man and I've never reached my ideal bathroom-scale-moment after having been overweight, but I've written two books, and it sure as yell didn't take me 14 years to do it the first two times (I haven't been alive long enough for that to be possible).  I wrote the first two books in an 18-month period, and then got stuck, for my entire twenties, trying to find a way to get through the third novel in the series, letting it literally sit for years on end, taking up a top spot in my New Year's or Birthday resolutions, but like clockwork never actually getting off of the list.

The stupid thing about this infernal procrastination is that I genuinely don't have an excuse for not wanting to achieve this, something I genuinely want to accomplish.  The cliches that frighten normal people away from writing a novel don't scare me.  I'm not petrified to know that I can't write-I know I can write, and quite frankly I don't know that I'd ever attempt to get the book published, not needing that sort of theoretical rejection in my life, as it's more about creating than anything else.  It's hardly about not being able to string together enough words to create a page or a chapter or a novel.  I don't know if you realize this, but, umm, this is a pretty loquacious blog.  One I have written in weekly, and frequently daily, for the past five years of my life.  It might not all be gold, but I'm immodest enough to realize that there are some solid gems if you click the links on the right.  I'm not in wont of the ability to write well, write often, or come up with a story, the things that deter most people from achieving this particular dream.

Honestly-it's hard to put into words what has taken me so long to start diving into my novel once again.  Perhaps it's a bit ego, compounded with the expectations of time.  I've waited fourteen years to edit and write these books, with little success.  I know that, in a perfect world, that there should be five more once I'm done with these three to tell the saga properly.  I'm also aware that, at the end of the day, these are probably going to be my life's work as an author.  I might write other things that go on my shelves, but after wiling away a decade and perhaps sinking in the next decade to try and finish them, I'll be north-of-forty with only this as my crowning achievement as a writing hobbyist, and that's assuming I don't take any other years-on-end breaks.  There is a voice in the back of my head, the voice that wouldn't dream of letting me send this to a publisher who is worried that what I'm writing may well be well-intentioned garbage, derivative of others more talented than I, or perhaps not worthy of that amount of time.

Or honestly, it could just be that I'm scared to complete something that I have waited so long to tackle.  I don't know if that makes rational sense, but it does when I say it out loud as an excuse.  I've waited so long, knowing that this project, something I truly adore (I love the little place I've created in those books), that it's scary to go back into their pages.  Some of my fondest memories are in writing those words, creating those details, crafting those characters.  What if I can't recapture that magic?  What if it only existed when I was a bit less worn, a little less aware of the world?

But like my weight, like dating again (eventually), I will only know if I can succeed if I try.  Failure may be imminent, but I need to prove that I am not afraid of it, and that means occasionally doing things where I'm not guaranteed at least a B+.  And so I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year if it kills me, and you are all my witnesses to hold me to this promise.  It might not be pretty, it certainly won't be easy, but 2017 has taught us we need to live for the now.  And so I'm ready to let fourteen years of build-up spill out on a page...in T-Minus 700 hours.