A Promise is a Promise

October is on its last gasps, set to go out with a boo as usual. For many writers, aspiring and otherwise, this has a special meaning: NaNoWriMo is almost upon us.

This will be the 14th National Novel Writing Month. A challenge for some, an indomitable task for others. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that I never gave it much serious thought. I’ve been a writer in one form or another since grade school and have only just recently have had prose published for the first time. So for 25-ish years I’ve been a hobbyist writer (and in the vein of honestly, still mostly am).

There have been years in the past where I thought to myself, ‘A hundred thousand words in 30 days? I think I can do that.’, and even a couple where I believed it. But never before have I attempted it. Well, by Dog, this year I’m… still not gonna do it. But I am going to do something.

V has been an amazing (and talented) friend for close to a decade now. She’s had this hallucination for most of this time that I’m something she calls a “great writer”. There’s even been times where she’s hallucinated this so vividly that others start to believe it too, including me. We’ve collaborated on writing projects in the past, but in the last couple of years we’ve put serious talk into taking our combined talents away from what is tantamount to fan fiction and focusing them on something more tangible, i.e. a novel.

I’ve dragged my feet on this for as long as we’ve been talking about it. V has the patience of a saint (and a pretty packed schedule of her own) and has put up with my procrastination both in the past and for our latest collaborative work. I admire her for that. But getting to the point of this whole thing, I recently made her a promise: this November, I would write.

The NaNoWriMo goal is still way too much for me to wrap my cringing, lazy brain around. But what I did promise is that every day of November, I would write something—whether it be a paragraph or a chapter. Something. Anything.

This isn’t to appease anyone. This isn’t about getting motivated, or finding my inner potential or anything like that. It’s a plain and simple kick in the ass. And so I will write. Not for V, not for the others who believe in me, not even for myself. I will write because it’s long overdue. And what kind of friend would I be if I broke a promise?

And So It Begins (Again)

Truth be told, this isn’t my first blog. I’ve made several attempts at one before, from the days when LiveJournal was relevant to my own long-defunct web page to other aborted attempts at an author’s blog.

 

I’ll be honest, part of me still doesn’t “get” social media, despite having been online since the BBS days. I have some of the more modern trappings at my disposal—Facebook, Twitter and now this blog—but I’ve never truly embraced the idea of telling millions upon millions of total strangers all the boring minutiae of my life (in the words of Mario and Fafa, “I do not care that you spent three hours making almond-crusted sturgeon … And I think it’s stupid you took a picture of it.”) and my only Facebook friends are—brace yourself for a radical concept—actual friends that I’ve interacted with long before I was on Facebook.

 

But despite all of that, I do understand the importance of social media in the new millennium. It’s changed the way we interact with the world around us, how we gather information and how we conduct business. And it lets us distribute lolcats at the speed of thought.

 

So with all that in mind, I chose to take another stab at making an author’s blog. What’s different this time around is that I’m actually a published author now and have this crazy idea of doing it more than once. To that end, I’ll be using this blog to post various things I think relevant to that end—whether it be writing exercises, thoughts on people, places and things that affect my work or stream-of-conciousness ramblings. You never know what might turn up. I don’t either.

 

Don’t expect too much of it, either. like I said, I suck at this social media thing. But I’m getting there.
No, really.
—Zen