An Update

Well, my friends, needless to say sometimes life does not go the way we plan it. 

The past week and a half-ish has been rough. First of all, I’ve been struggling with my mental health something fierce (but I’ll touch more on that in another post, I think!), and everything that could go wrong seemingly has. 

My computer fizzed out on me, and I’m the idiot that never backs up her work*, so I lost EVERYTHING for my NaNoWriMo project this year, as well as the half-finished draft of Awake.

*Or at least I used to be. I certainly won’t be anymore! 

I’m honestly heartbroken, but I’m trying my best to get back on track — though I certainly won’t be finishing NaNoWriMo with 50k this year now, and I probably won’t have the rough draft of Awake done by February, I know I did my best. 

And it taught me a valuable lesson: BACK UP YOUR WORK EVERY TIME YOU QUIT! To several places. Just saving it to your computer isn’t enough. 

And maybe it’s for the best. Maybe I’ll write a better story now that the old draft is gone. Or at least that’s what I have to tell myself to keep from getting too discouraged.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

Love you guys, 

Paige

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Pretty Words

I wrote you in ink because I wanted to preserve you,

Even though I knew that words would never do,

All of the poetry in the world could never touch you, or what you meant to me.

Still I tried, and I tried, and I tried,

Writing line after line after line,

I wrote dozens of pages of pages of lyrics and rhymes,

But pretty words mean nothing when you run out of time.

 

I wrote you out when I realized what a mistake I’d made,

You were a coward, and a fake.

You told lie after lie after lie,

But I wrote line after line after line,

And I tried, and I tried, and I tried.

I wrote dozens of pages of lyrics and rhymes,

But pretty words mean nothing when you run out of time.

 

I reluctantly penciled you in when you came back,

But I kept my eraser close at hand,

Somehow knowing that I’d write you in just to write you out again.

 

Time after time after time,

I wrote line after line after line,

And I tried, yeah, I tried, and I tried,

But you told lie after lie after lie.

 

In the end I made a choice and I left you in,

But if it’s pretty poetry you’re after, you’ll have to ask her.

‘Cause I already wrote line after line after line,

Because I fell for lie after lie after lie,

I wrote dozens of pages of lyrics and rhymes,

But pretty words mean nothing when you run out of time,

And pretty words mean nothing when you stop believing the lies,

And I’m all out of pretty words.

The Drive

I can’t see the lines but I’m pretty sure I’m crossing them,

There were no clear boundary marks, so I kept driving, and no one said stop.

I didn’t feel the rumble strips, heaven knows I might already be a goner,

But there’s no guard at the border,

So I’ll keep driving ’round the corner,

And I’ll either drive to glory or smoke out on the way,

But that’s the drive,

And it’s better than it is to stay.

How to Win NaNoWriMo (+ A Personal Update)

Let me start by saying I’m afraid to make this post, but it’s been a few weeks, and I owe you guys an update.

There are several reasons making this post scares me:

For starters, I’m afraid you’ll judge me for jumping ship on Awake for the next few weeks. I’m about halfway-ish through it, and I’m going to finish the rough draft at least by the end of January, you can hold me to that.

But more than that, I’m afraid to write this post because I have some kind of performance anxiety. As soon as I tell people “I’m doing [X]” I start to panic about doing X, even if I’ve been doing it well up until that point.

That’s the case with this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’m a few thousand words behind where I’d like to be at the moment (though technically I’m still on target!), but I’ve written every day so far and I fully intend to finish with 50,000 words at the end of the month if it kills me.

Anyway, Arrival is in full swing, and as much as I want to bang my head off my coffee table (because I don’t work at a desk) and scream, there’s also a huge sense of pride that I’m creating something new again.

The feeling of writing a novel is slightly intoxicating to me, and that’s why I write.

NaNo’s been difficult this year because I’m working 35-40 hours a week, and so I’m trying to keep up with that, plus trying to keep up my relationship (thank goodness she’s ALSO doing NaNoWriMo this year, so she understands) is kind of exhausting, but it’s been good. I haven’t felt this Alive (pun intended) in a long while.

NaNoWriMo is always kinda hard, though. You’re writing an entire novel in 30 days, for heaven’s sake! But it’s totally possible with a few key things to help you along the way:

GETTING OUT OF THE HOUSE

Up ’til this year I’ve always novelled at home, but this year my fiancee and I have decided to get out as much as possible, and it’s helping SO MUCH.

I was always against the idea of novelling anywhere else, thinking it would be distracting or I’d feel too much pressure, but honestly, just finding a Starbucks and settling down with a caramel brulee frappucino and some good music in your earbuds is where it’s at, my friends. I wrote 2000 words in a McDonald’s yesterday, too. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be anything fancy, it just has to be somewhere outside of your house that you can sit down and focus.

CAFFEINE

I understand that caffeine isn’t for everyone, but for ME, caffeine is a lifesaver. Like I said earlier, I’m working 35-40 hours a week, which isn’t really that much, but it’s enough to make me want to come home and nap for eight hours, and then go to bed for another eight hours. (I guess the depression doesn’t help here, but that’s another story for another day!) So anyway, my caffeine consumption has at least DOUBLED since I started NaNo eleven days ago. Whoops.

SLEEP

On the other side of caffeine there is my other best friend: sleep. I already mentioned that it’s something I want to do far too much of, but human beings really do need to sleep to repair our bodies and refresh our minds, so during NaNoWriMo, allow yourself to get some sleep. I don’t know what your schedule is like, but try to make sure you’re getting at least 6 hours of sleep. I’d recommend more, but then I’d be a hypocrite.

HARD WORK

This is the one most people don’t like, but it’s important. The fact is, you won’t succeed in anything, especially not NaNoWriMo without putting the effort in. If you think participating in NaNo will be a cake walk, it won’t. But I promise you, it will be worth it in the end.

And this is not something you ‘need’ per se, but something you need to DO, rather: ditch your inner editor.

Of the 2000 words I wrote yesterday, I’ve already decided I’ll probably cut 1250 of them in editing later, but is that stopping me from continuing the story? No. Am I cutting those words out now? No. Because I still know where my story’s going, and I’m pretending those scenes/words don’t exist for now, and I still wrote those words, and they’ll be part of this story until the editing process, so I think it counts.

Because I’m working in Scrivener it’s really easy to just separate the scenes I don’t like and label them SEMI PERMANENT or [DELETE LATER] but if you’re working in Docs or Word or any other writing program that doesn’t separate your novel scene-by-scene, just use something to separate it for yourself like highlighting or [!]’s at the start and end of the paragraphs/scenes/whatever you want to delete and you can worry about it later.

If you get hung up on fixing and editing and tweaking right now, you won’t finish NaNoWriMo.

Anyway, that’s my ‘advice’ for finishing NaNoWriMo, do you have anything to add? Let me know in the comments!