No no NaNo

I've thought of lots of witty things to write about in the past week or so. I've forgotten all of them, which is especially sad, because I think one of them could have been filed under "funny medical stories."

But I would like to confess, as much as I am a champion of National Novel Writing Month and as much as I intended to participate this year, it just didn't happen.

This would have been my fifth straight year. How disappointing to break such a streak. Am I sad? Truly, not really. I mean, I do enjoy NaNoWriMo as much as the next deadline-drive procrastinator, but that's a fix that's being filled by my projects and papers this semesters. I would like to blame it on the October 30th death of my beloved iBook laptop, I really just didn't make time for it in my schedule. I think the thing that perplexes me the most, in a mildly concerned sort of way, is that when it came time to sit down and write a piece of fiction, I balked.

The last time I wrote fiction was for last year's NaNoWriMo, and even then I remember having qualms about it as I had been focusing on screenplays for the past year or so. My aunt said to me once a few months ago that she missed reading fiction pieces, that screenplays were all well and good, but that there was something she missed about the language of straight of fiction. And I can see that and miss it too, in a sort of detached way, but I have no driving impulse to go back to fiction writing. Which doesn't matter, until you attempt it again.

It's another aspect of Paranoid Writer Syndrome. I've forgotten how to do this, the prose is coming out stilted, what should my descriptions be like. It's difficult to overcome when you first sit down and stare at the blank page, but luckily, it's also easily to vanquish. It, like every other genre of writing, takes practice, and soon those white flashes and spells of breathlessness as I squeeze the pen tightly in your hand and blink furiously will disappear, and I can find fiction writing a comfortable place once again.

I look forward to Script Frenzy in the summer. Congratulations to all who will be NaNoWriMo winners - make sure you get your free book from LuLu - and I hope to be typing furiously with you next year.