2007 (c) - A Fall into Madness

In October, the writer went insane. He was tired of being at home and accomplishing nothing. He was tired of feeling sorry for himself. He was tired of making more angst than he needed to. In short, he went through a midlife crisis at 21. It was informative. It was existential. It would have provided great entertainment for both sadists and masochists alike, in entirely different ways.

He got up and found himself a job. That was a plus. Jobs aren't great, but he found something he didn't hate. He discovered that not all day jobs had to be terrible, even if they were just day jobs. This was a surprising revelation that greatly reduced his stress level.

He also had a creative revolution. If he wanted to write books, it wasn't getting him anywhere to not write. Feeling sorry for himself was great and all, but in the end it didn't gain him anything. Words weren't appearing on the page because of it. Writing was hard, but he was making it harder by indulging his writer-whining. So he swore to himself he would stop that, and turn it around.

Boy did he ever.

He began what he had always claimed he wanted to do--write every day. He wrote every day that he could, and when he couldn't he didn't get angsty, just made it up on the back end somewhere. And he stuck to that throughout October. Suddenly his novel was firing on all cylinders and it roared closer and closer to the finish line. It was amazing. It was wonderful. He felt successful and talented for the first time in a loooong time.

That's when NaNo hit. (NaNo referring to NaNoWriMo.org)

NaNo was a golden opportunity to write more and more. He could take one of his old ideas and run it up the flagpole, so to speak. It would get him to write every day, to force it done. It would make him focus on the work. It would keep him from giving up on writing for another few months when he finished MS. There was only one problem: MS wasn't done.

And so, with two weeks left until Nov 1, the writer picked up the pace. His five pages a day became seven. Then they became ten. Then they became a bone-crushingly hard fifteen for the last three days. He was a fireball. He was a bullet train. He was unstoppable. And in his blaze of writerly glory he flew through the end of MS and before the high had worn down he was neck-deep in a new novel. A novel so complex and challenging and demanding that it tore him into pieces as he tackled it with the same fury that he had brought with him from the end of MS.

Somewhere along the way, near the end of November when the novel was shaping up to be a little over half done, I decided to start a blog. The energy that had built up didn't go away. It kept growing and growing. In fact, it's become a fierce tempest of hopes and dreams and wild imaginings. I started up the blog, as you can see if you're reading this, and last week I blew through the end of WTC only slightly behind schedule.

Now comes the hard part. Now comes the editing of MS. The work to take my drafts and make something of them. To be a 'real writer'. To make it the best thing I can and sell it and start living the life I've always dreamed of and am making real. But that's for another day. Right now, we're here at the end of 2007, looking back at the mess that's been made of the year so far.

It's horrifying.

It's satisfying.

Tomorrow: How do you measure a year?