An Update/Writing Rant

Greetings, all!

            Starting with a side note--Happy birthday, Boyfriend!

Sexy boy.

            My sincerest apologies to my invisible/imaginary blog readers for all of the delays lately, but adjusting to a new city, apartment, and lifestyle is challenging. Oh, and new job. I didn’t mention the new job. I think it’s time for a mini update. Or a rant. An update rant.

            My apartment is amazing. It’s been over a month now and I’m loving it. As I said before, this place has an in-unit washer and dryer, dishwasher, disposal, working fireplace, balcony, and skylight in the bathroom. It is gorgeous. The area we’re living in is a little…Ghetto Lite…but the neighborhood itself, the living community, is beautiful. And did I mention pet friendly? I don’t have to worry about the landlord forcing me to ship Stella Crüe off to my parents. Hallelujiah!

            Life in Columbus is fantastic, save a couple of things: I’m no longer walking distance to any bars or clubs. That sucks because I seriously miss drinking out at bars. When I drink, I drink socially. I have a rough time sitting around drinking at home, or really even at house parties. I love the atmosphere of bars, and I really feed off the energy that only they can have.  Another downside is that the goth subculture is…weak…down here, despite there being a thriving fetish clothing/gear shop right downtown. From what I’ve heard, the worthwhile goth-themed night is once a month. Once. A month. I’m going to die. Chris and I haven’t been able to check it out yet, but from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t measure up to my beloved Ination. Luckily, I’ll be celebrating my birthday at Ination this year, so I’m still in good spirits. It is hard not to have that weekly release, though.

            …what up.

I miss you, my darkling throng.

            The biggest news I have is that I got a full time job that is damn close to what I suppose would be a realistic dream job for me (my real one is bestselling author, and yes, I’m aware of the slim chances of that actually happening). Company policies tend to be very strict on employee-blog fraternization, so I will rarely mention my job here, but I will say it’s a retail store with a heavy emphasis on books and promoting reading and literacy in today’s world. If I ever mention it on Bite Me, I will lovingly refer to it as Booky Wooks. Working at Booky Wooks is challenging but utterly awesome.

            Actually, working at Booky Wooks has reawakened my love of reading, which I never realized had gone damn near dormant during my years in college. It’s not that I wasn’t reading…I was. A lot. I was reading practically every book that was assigned to me in every Literature, English, and general education class I took semester after semester. But reading for the sheer joy of it, something I used to do for literally hours at a time all my childhood, forget about it. I had no time. But now that I can read what I want again, and spending eight hours a day surrounded by fellow book nerds, I find myself just as obsessed with reading as I was when I was a kid, except now I’m frantic…I have years of neglected recreational reading to atone for! I’ve missed so much! My boss got me hooked on Goodreads.com, which has overtaken both Facebook and Pinterest on my list of websites that suck away my free time, and my To Read list on that site keeps growing and growing.

            And naturally, the more I delve into reading, the more I want to write. It makes sense. As Stephen King says, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” You can’t be a writer without being a reader. Demetrius and Chloe is (slowly) progressing, and I keep having to take notes at work because ideas keep springing to my head. I am so hot on writing right now that I’ve actually decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo for short. For those of you who don’t know, Nanowrimo is a challenge where you write 50,000 words—the size of a semi-short novel like The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye—in 30 days; traditionally the month of November. It is completely insane. I’ve just moved to a new city, I’m adjusting to living with the Boyfriend, and have a full time job for the first time in my life. I am nuts for considering it.

            I am, however, trying to decide the extent to which I’ll be participating. I’ve never done the full blown novel-in-a-month thing. Rather, I’ve taken it as a kind of awareness month, a month where I try to work on whatever my current novel project is in November every day. But this time…I don’t know, I always regret that I never go balls to the wall and try to do the whole 50,000 word shebang. My original plan was to just give myself a word goal for adding to Demetrius and Chloe, nothing too stressful, just getting my butt in gear a bit and getting past the little speed bumps I’ve been hitting lately…but then I read something in the book that Chris Baty, the creator of Nanowrimo, wrote (No Plot? No Problem!) about the challenge:

            “National Novel Writing Month, one of the fundamental rules of the game is that you must start your novel from scratch on Day One of the event. You can bring as many outlines and notes and character maps as you like, but writing any of the book’s actual prose in advance is forbidden…it…keeps things fresh and exciting and helps prevent people from sabotaging their productivity by being overly invested in the outcome of their book…a state of exuberant imperfection is hard to attain when you’ve set yourself the formidable task of building a suitable extension onto an earlier creation. The writing will be slower, the pain much greater, and the output will likely leave you disappointed. My strong advice is to come up with something new for this challenge. You’ll be happy you did.”

            So…after deciding to participate more fully in Nanowrimo than I ever have, should I really begin by going against the rules?

            What he says makes a lot of sense. Nanowrimo is about quantity of words over quality of prose; butt in chair, words on page, 50,000 words in 30 days. I’ve spent an hour agonizing over a sentence in Demetrius and Chloe. If I throw this draft into overdrive with no regard for quality, it could be disastrous. I care too much about the story to put it in jeopardy, so I’m thinking I should do a new project and go all out for this year. I know I’ll regret not trying it out the minute November starts, like I do each year. I always have an excuse for just doing my half-assed version of Nanowrimo; I’m a student, there’s a big project due this month, I’m adjusting to this or that, blah, blah, blah. This time, it would be…I have a full time job. But mothers of five do Nanowrimo. Business executives, lawyers with huge caseloads, nurses with 12 hour shifts…people way busier than me do it each and every November, while I shield myself behind a wall of half-assery and excuses and never finish a single novel project, year after year. To tell the truth, I’m kind of sick of feeling like I never finish anything in my life.

This is my brain on this dilemma.

            I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about this for days. Should I truly leap in, or play it safe? There’s a lot going on in my life, and part of me is terrified that starting another project, even if it’s isolated to a single month, might cause me to abandon Demetrius and Chloe, which my history seems to indicate is a high possibility. I don’t want to abandon this story. Ever. I want to see it through. Buuuut I’m really feeling like Nanowrimo is something I should do, in full, this year. So I’ll be sitting at this dilemma crossroad for a while. Technically I have 16 days til Nanowrimo starts, so I’ll weigh the pros and cons as much as I can. Either way, I’ll be participating. I’ll either be working on Demetrius and Chloe every single day, a bit at a time, or I’ll be going for 50,000 pages with an idea I’ve had bouncing around in my head since 2006 but have never started writing; a retelling of the Adam and Eve story from the Abrahamic religions. I’d be ridiculously excited to have that story written. But at the expense of Demetrius and Chloe? I don’t think so.

            So…there’s my half update, half rant. Hopefully more creative blog juices will flow next week.