Fear of the Blank Page?

Maybe what I have is the same thing. But that's not how I would describe it. That's just... woefully inadequate. The physical blank page or blank computer screen isn't that threatening. It's not a physical fear, it's the absence of ideas, or the twisting of ideas that are so like and unlike one's dreams, the blank story that is scary. It's much more like Fear of the Void than Fear of the Blank Page. A big, black, gaping nothingness that threatens to swallow us all. Or at least me, when I step out into it.

And maybe I have stepped out into it before, and supports appeared for my feet. Maybe I even grew confident enough to run laughing through the void, ground always appearing underneath me. Still, it doesn't matter. Every time I come back to the void it's stressful again, being asked to jump. And I might have to crawl from stepping stone to stepping stone, only to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere and crawl back. Poor story. Is it any wonder that when I'm stressed I write less?

20,747 for now this evening. Only 30,000 to go in 10 days! Piece of cake! Ikes.

I can do this. That's just 3000 a day. It's manageable. It is. Time to run laughing and skipping through the void, wind in my hair. I wonder if bikes are allowed out there? If so, do I need a helmet?

Was this what they meant when they said NaNoWriMo can make you go insane?

If you have a blind girl stuck in a cave in a new world for a day or two, no one else around except a stranger who's also stuck in the cave, what do you do? Why, have them talk and talk and talk and talk, of course. What else are you going to do? Say, "And they were the most boring days of her life, the end." Oh no, not "the end." "And then, the next day..." That's what you do. Yeah. But think of all the words you would waste, doing it like that! Why, thousands, down the drain! And all that interesting, easy-to-write dialogue, just gone, poof! It'd be like... like drowning a kitten. Yeah. A perfectly good, cute kitten, just because you don't want it. A valuable, word-count producing kitten. So sad.

=)

NaNoWriMo is... interesting. Especially when you've got about one known plot element left, after the current scene, and you have certain mysteries set up, and no answers to them yet. But it is good dialogue. Really!

7,675

Or 7,670 by nanowrimo.org's word counter. Either way, I haven't accomplished much else today, and I'm still tragically behind on this year's novel, but at least I did laundry and made progress today. Almost 3000 words. Not bad.

Not bad, not bad, not bad at all. I can do this, I can do this... ::Marcy talks to herself, trying to convince herself of the feasibility of 2009's NaNoWriMo::

That whole "show, don't tell" thing is really annoying sometimes. It can help pad wordcounts, but it can also really really delay the more interesting, exciting scenes. I have a feeling I've written some things I will be cutting later... Ah vell. (No, that's not a typo. It's a German accent.)

Um, so yeah, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. By the way. For info on my novel, go here. I was thinking this year would be harder than last year because it'd be easier -- that is, I've already proved I can do it, so I wouldn't have as much drive to succeed. Now I'm not so sure, though. It seems... well, I write as fast as I did last year, over a thousand words per hour generally, but it doesn't feel like I'm writing that fast. It feels like this idea is so much newer than last year's was, more strange, less exciting, and I'm just plain not prepared enough. But I think that's wrong. But that's my barrier, this year. I probably don't need my previous strategy--an even more ambitious goal, to kick my drive to succeed into gear. My thought was to not only try for a 50,000 word novel by the end of November, but also 8000 more words in my Aedhira novel and at least a few minutes a week editing The Miller's Granddaughter. I guess I'll still try. Meh.