The Summer Writing Season Begins

I am a teacher, and all school year I am frustrated and kicking myself because I don't spend more of my time after school every day writing and reading. However, school has all but ended for the year, and the lightened work load has brought an immediate flow of creativity. I realize I don't have to be so hard on myself: my job is simply exhausting eight months out of the year. I work at a private school. The commute is long, rarely are there breaks during the day, teenagers take a lot of energy to manage and I am on all morning and afternoon, I teach more than a full load and always have to take work home, and so on. Bottom line is, thank goodness this round is over.

I'm mainly writing this for closure and to set my course for the summer. The plan is simple for the next three months: write (draft stuff) one to two hours per day. After that, sketch, draft, outline, read and research to my heart's content. Relax and enjoy life. Rinse and repeat.

Whew! It is good to have life be relatively simple again for a while.

Status Update: Moving Again

I am coming out of a two-year Ice Age. As you can see from my previous posts, the last time I was active here was back during the 2008 NaNoWriMo. I managed about 10,000 words during that year’s event before I got sidetracked mid-November. In 2009, I managed to accomplish even less writing during the event. It turns out that November is a terrible month to pound out an entire novel. I know, I know – the point of NaNoWriMo is to be the master of one’s circumstances, but my job has peaks and troughs, and November is a nasty, chilly, windswept, barren plateau that also begins a sharp ascent to an early-December peak. I am a high school teacher. By November, weeks of school have ground me down so that I am just trying to survive until Thanksgiving Break. After the break, I immediately begin the race to review for exams in December so my students don’t fail my classes. Seriously, why did they choose November for NaNoWriMo? Why choose a month leading up to the holidays, a traditional time of high stress? Why not choose the summer, when people have more free time and less stress on average? Would it be so tragic to let go of the idealism and try to set people up for success?

But I digress (already, in the first paragraph). Some historians might mark the true beginning of my personal Ice Age more like about ten years ago at the onset of a long bout of clinical depression. Before long, it felt like everything in my life was a glacial struggle. I was productive only in fits and starts. I finally started to receive treatment for the depression a couple of years ago, but my recovery was complicated by a new addiction to World of Warcraft, which I eventually broke away from, and am now in an overall much improved state.

So now I’ve been “sober” for a while, mostly depression-free, and I’m off work for the summer vacation. It’s time to start writing again. “Movement and Moderation” should be my new slogan. I have a tendency to be extreme and try to take off running, only to burn out quickly. I intend to instead focus on small steps and on steady progress. Blogging is a great way to get things flowing.

I’ll end for now on a note of triumph: several years after a first wrote it, the other day I finally brought myself to revise a poem modeled after Mark Doty’s “My Tattoo” from his Sweet Machine collection. Although there is more work to be done, the poem is much improved, and the revision process was refreshing. How satisfying to witness a song find shape!

NaPoWriMo

Why is National Poetry Writing Month (April) not as big a deal as NaNoWriMo? The latter has a much larger presence, and an official one. NaPoWriMo demands participants to write one poem a day. I think I should be doing that anyway. I think I will give it a try, starting today. Hopefully it will get things moving. Right now, I need a break from writing to exercise and prepare for work tomorrow.

The Real NaNoWriMo Kick-Off

I woke up this morning with the resolution to not only write my quota of 1,250 words for the day, but to make up for missing yesterday, as well. It took me a couple of hours of procrastination to get started, but once I did, it was amazing how quickly my fingers flew. It seems to take me only an hour or an hour and a half to meet the daily quota. I had somehow thought it would take hours upon hours each day. This just goes to show that most of the barriers to succeeding at writing have been in my head. I have quickly discovered that I am completely ready to write my first draft. That is, I have only the bare bones of my plot laid out, but I am perfectly capable of making the rest of the details up as I go. It will be a shitty first draft, but there will be plenty of time to revise it.

I will definitely be donating some $$ to NaNoWriMo. I haven't felt this productive in ages. I can actually picture myself completing the rough draft of this novel in the next couple of months, after a couple of years of fitful progress. I just wish their website was a little faster.

NaNoWriMo Kick-Off

Yesterday evening (it's now late at night) I noticed it was the first day of National Novel Writing Month and decided to join in, despite the lack of forethought regarding the decision. Committing myself, giving myself an actual deadline, and participating with a community to write the novel I've been dinking away at for - what, two years now? - seems like an empowering thing to do. So I joined NaNoWriMo, and only just realized that means I will be writing on average 1,250 words per day for the next month! Talk about going from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds. I no longer have the luxury of not feeling like writing, of wondering whether I should outline or research a little more before writing. This is quite likely one of the best decisions I have every made. I am telling everybody that I am writing a novel this month so that I will be publicly humiliated if I don't finish. It's all about incentives, isn't it?

Since I started in the evening, I am a day behind already! I'm going to have to sit down first thing and start writing tomorrow.