Why Thirty Days

Everything's done on company time, don't you know? Napping included . . .

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When JLS and I first talked about starting a blog together, we were thinking of the high we'd gotten from doing our first NaNoWriMo last November. No spliffs involved, just good old-fashioned bliss from thirty days of fast writing, of moving our work forward and out of the ruts they'd sat in for the last couple of years. Me, I rebooted my excruciatingly horrendous MFA thesis, and JLS drafted an entirely new work from scratch. By the end of November, we both hit the 50,000-word mark---me, barely---and I decided it was one of the best writing experiences I'd ever had. I'd suspended my cable and Internet service for that month, and conscientiously stayed up almost every night to clock in the daily 1,600+ words, and I even attended a couple of write-ins at a nearby Cosi cafe, where I was surrounded by mostly teens and twentysomethings writing about vampires and Manolos.

"What's your novel about?" one kid asked me.

"How a village survives the Three Gorges Dam."

"That's nice!"

My novel moved forward even as the writing was unpardonably redundant, cliche, and graceless. My characters forced themselves into new situations even as I found myself writing around similar themes from other stalled projects. I was ecstatic. Nice indeed.

I ran into JLS at one of these meet-ups. We hadn't seen each other in a year (or two?), and I don't think I'd ever been so happy and relieved to see a normal person. She doesn't write about normal things. But she's normal, you know? Then she kindly invited me to join her small writing group, and ever since, we've been talking about finishing up the damn novels we'd been working on from before we lost touch. She suggested we do our own version of NaNo every other month or so, and I suggested we blog about it to each other, and we agreed that these intense months should be considered our own writing residencies. And then I blabbed to a few of my friends whom I haven't seen in ages and who are brilliant writers, and invited them to participate, because the more the merrier, and the more diverse the better, and the hungrier the brillianter. And here we are.

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I turned off my cable this month, as I'd done last November. I have to say, I'm feeling much more zen this time around without television. Last December, when the cable came back on, I watched an old episode of America's Next Top Model, and I was immediately hooked again. I hope to resist come May, and will count on Viet to fill me in on Tyra's shenanigans, but meanwhile, I've got three stories to finish for the rest of this month, and I already have projects lined up for our next two residencies. This year is turning out to be one of the good ones.