NaNo 07: Don't hate me for my wordcount.
Chugging my way towards 30k, with extreme reluctance. One minor benefit of being as OCD as I am is that when the word count reads something like "28998", I just absolutely have to make it a nice round number, and damn the padding. Adjectives I never knew existed spring out of my keyboard, like Athena fully-born, albeit I've always wondered if the myths had been completely mistaken about which head of Zeus was being referred to.
I will probably be able to make the 50k wordcount. I will also probably be able to actually finish the story by 50k... but the problem then becomes that it will be an unsatisfying ending. It will be an ending something akin to a whole lot of nothing happening, interspersed with the occasional rambling about the meaning of life, before suddenly wrapping everything up in five thousand words. It will be an ending as unsatisfying as Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. All the elements for an actual story will be present, but it will be as though Acts I and II were each thirty hours long, and Acts III to V were five minutes in total. Some serious compression, decompression, and defragmentation will be necessary before this will be even remotely readable.
And, you know, I don't feel like it.
Really. I have basically a two-week attention span for most things, and for a month-long enterprise like NaNoWriMo, I overcome the obvious obstacle by doing it all in two weeks. Certain facts of life like procrascination, other responsibilities, and sleep, however, dictate that I will require all two weeks to write those 50k words. And after that, I'm done. I never want to see the story ever again, because I've simply lost interest in it, and it becomes work. The Internal Editor, which we are told to abandon for the month of November, comes back in full force, and hacks away at the mass of writhing story like a magical girl faced with a tentacle monster but armed with a particularly sharp cutting implement. Post-castration, the story may become readable, but it will unfortunately also be much reduced, in all sorts of ways.
Add all this to the tendency of The World In General these days to start really piling on the crap. And by this I do not mean the usual complaints about work or life, but a more specific problem of just about everyone everwhere suddenly deciding that I am a completely worthless and useless person, and then telling so. I have been called a "loser" no less than seven times in this week alone. I like to think that I try to be inoffensive and try to see everyone's point of view in cases where I don't really care all that much, which leads to both sides yelling at me for not agreeing with them. No, not for being a fence-sitter or indecisive, but for actually not siding with them.
It has come to something when I find myself yelling back "so what the hell do you want me to do?" and then feeling horrible because I lost my temper. I have a short temper, I know that I have a short temper, and it has been a never-ending struggle for me for my entire life to try to keep that temper under control.
Life has apparently decided to test the limits of that control. It is not a fun thing.
I will probably be able to make the 50k wordcount. I will also probably be able to actually finish the story by 50k... but the problem then becomes that it will be an unsatisfying ending. It will be an ending something akin to a whole lot of nothing happening, interspersed with the occasional rambling about the meaning of life, before suddenly wrapping everything up in five thousand words. It will be an ending as unsatisfying as Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. All the elements for an actual story will be present, but it will be as though Acts I and II were each thirty hours long, and Acts III to V were five minutes in total. Some serious compression, decompression, and defragmentation will be necessary before this will be even remotely readable.
And, you know, I don't feel like it.
Really. I have basically a two-week attention span for most things, and for a month-long enterprise like NaNoWriMo, I overcome the obvious obstacle by doing it all in two weeks. Certain facts of life like procrascination, other responsibilities, and sleep, however, dictate that I will require all two weeks to write those 50k words. And after that, I'm done. I never want to see the story ever again, because I've simply lost interest in it, and it becomes work. The Internal Editor, which we are told to abandon for the month of November, comes back in full force, and hacks away at the mass of writhing story like a magical girl faced with a tentacle monster but armed with a particularly sharp cutting implement. Post-castration, the story may become readable, but it will unfortunately also be much reduced, in all sorts of ways.
Add all this to the tendency of The World In General these days to start really piling on the crap. And by this I do not mean the usual complaints about work or life, but a more specific problem of just about everyone everwhere suddenly deciding that I am a completely worthless and useless person, and then telling so. I have been called a "loser" no less than seven times in this week alone. I like to think that I try to be inoffensive and try to see everyone's point of view in cases where I don't really care all that much, which leads to both sides yelling at me for not agreeing with them. No, not for being a fence-sitter or indecisive, but for actually not siding with them.
It has come to something when I find myself yelling back "so what the hell do you want me to do?" and then feeling horrible because I lost my temper. I have a short temper, I know that I have a short temper, and it has been a never-ending struggle for me for my entire life to try to keep that temper under control.
Life has apparently decided to test the limits of that control. It is not a fun thing.