This looks like the end, quoth Bugs Bunny
Mar. 8th, 2004 02:03 amI think I can probably say at this point that I've given up on EdMo.
It's not 100% my fault, really -- I started the month with a wicked cold that hung around for an entire week and made me miserable, not to mention tired enough that for a few days, I didn't even check my e-mail, let alone try to open up a long Word file and tackle some major rewriting.
So I did an hour on the first day, as midnight ushered in March 1, and in that hour, I went thought the first couple of chapters, but I was feeling too lazy to actually try writing in things and rewriting/expanding things, so instead, I just wrote notes before each paragraph, "DESCRIBE MORE HERE," "MAKE THIS PART TAKE A LOT LONGER," "TIME SPAN NOT REALISTIC, ADD DETAILS, SLOW DOWN." And then I'd done an hour, and I thought "eh, I have a whole month to do 50, enough for now."
And then I got sick, and I haven't opened the file since.
And at this point, 50 hours looks a whole lot bigger than it used to, 'cause now I have 8 less days to do it in. Two hours a day wouldn't even work now -- I'd have to do three a few days. THREE HOURS, yipe.
Really, what it comes down to is that I'm kind of a shitty writer. Sure, I can do essays and stuff, but prose fiction just escapes me. I managed to crank out more than 50,000 words back in November, but I'm fully aware that a lot of it sucks. I'm lacking transitions; I jumped from plot point to plot point, but between those little scenes, I either copped out and did a line of *** to imply a skip forward, or I rushed ahead with a paragraph of "over the next few weeks, they grew closer until one night when he came to pick her up for a date," or something awful like that. To fix this heap of words requires a lot of rewriting, and I think a large part of me is aware that this is something I haven't done before, and definitely my biggest writing weakness needs to be dealt with to make the thing not suck so much.
And even then, even if I could fix it up, which, despite my strenghths in other types of writing, I'm highly uncertain I'm capable of doing, I know that what I'd end up with, I wouldn't like. I wrote a Danielle Steele-esque novel, a tale of self-discovery wrapped up in a too-neat love story where you can see the events coming a mile away. I felt that I should write it at the time, and it's really very autobiographical, which isn't helping things -- I pretty much took people I knew, experiences I'd had, and sorta mixed them together into a semi-fictionalized account of a year or so in my life.
Part of me had wanted to try to fix it, try to salvage a month worth of writing and make it into something that I could actually show other people or even think about trying to publish someday, but at least something I could actually show people, even if it was just a friend or two. I think that's the worst thing, knowing that I've produced this large written work, the longest thing I've even written and my first try at prose fiction, and while I'm proud of the effort, proud to have completed the draft, I can't show it to anybody. It'd just be too embarassing, such a crappy work coming from someone who's supposed to be good at these things. I wish I could show off my accomplishment, but it's mostly awful -- and hell, a fair chunk of the parts that probably aren't too bad are the sex scenes. Not only would that be WAY too embarassing to let people read, but even that would be weird, 'cause I wrote sex scenes without having any actual experience to draw from -- that's the only thing I pretty much pulled out of my ass, so it feels kinda fake, a reality-based book with scenes involving things I've never done, but everyone else has.
Part of me thinks that I'm never gonna be able to show it to anybody. Truth be told, I'd've been better off just compiling my OD entries from that time period if I wanted to tell that story, just put them all in one file and do it as a journal-format book. But that wouldn't've been actually writing, so it wouldn't've counted for NaNo.
I developed a book, gave birth to 50,000 words, but it was deformed and stillborn, and probably no amount of effort on my part could give it real life. I hate to quit things, leave them unfinished, and I suppose as long as I keep the file, the door's always open for me to try to tackle it sometime down the road when I can get up the courage to face it again. But for now, my EdMo effort is over. I just can't quite face the mess I've created -- even though part of me is still proud for having completed the draft, the rest of me knows that it should be swept under the rug, hidden from view.
It's not 100% my fault, really -- I started the month with a wicked cold that hung around for an entire week and made me miserable, not to mention tired enough that for a few days, I didn't even check my e-mail, let alone try to open up a long Word file and tackle some major rewriting.
So I did an hour on the first day, as midnight ushered in March 1, and in that hour, I went thought the first couple of chapters, but I was feeling too lazy to actually try writing in things and rewriting/expanding things, so instead, I just wrote notes before each paragraph, "DESCRIBE MORE HERE," "MAKE THIS PART TAKE A LOT LONGER," "TIME SPAN NOT REALISTIC, ADD DETAILS, SLOW DOWN." And then I'd done an hour, and I thought "eh, I have a whole month to do 50, enough for now."
And then I got sick, and I haven't opened the file since.
And at this point, 50 hours looks a whole lot bigger than it used to, 'cause now I have 8 less days to do it in. Two hours a day wouldn't even work now -- I'd have to do three a few days. THREE HOURS, yipe.
Really, what it comes down to is that I'm kind of a shitty writer. Sure, I can do essays and stuff, but prose fiction just escapes me. I managed to crank out more than 50,000 words back in November, but I'm fully aware that a lot of it sucks. I'm lacking transitions; I jumped from plot point to plot point, but between those little scenes, I either copped out and did a line of *** to imply a skip forward, or I rushed ahead with a paragraph of "over the next few weeks, they grew closer until one night when he came to pick her up for a date," or something awful like that. To fix this heap of words requires a lot of rewriting, and I think a large part of me is aware that this is something I haven't done before, and definitely my biggest writing weakness needs to be dealt with to make the thing not suck so much.
And even then, even if I could fix it up, which, despite my strenghths in other types of writing, I'm highly uncertain I'm capable of doing, I know that what I'd end up with, I wouldn't like. I wrote a Danielle Steele-esque novel, a tale of self-discovery wrapped up in a too-neat love story where you can see the events coming a mile away. I felt that I should write it at the time, and it's really very autobiographical, which isn't helping things -- I pretty much took people I knew, experiences I'd had, and sorta mixed them together into a semi-fictionalized account of a year or so in my life.
Part of me had wanted to try to fix it, try to salvage a month worth of writing and make it into something that I could actually show other people or even think about trying to publish someday, but at least something I could actually show people, even if it was just a friend or two. I think that's the worst thing, knowing that I've produced this large written work, the longest thing I've even written and my first try at prose fiction, and while I'm proud of the effort, proud to have completed the draft, I can't show it to anybody. It'd just be too embarassing, such a crappy work coming from someone who's supposed to be good at these things. I wish I could show off my accomplishment, but it's mostly awful -- and hell, a fair chunk of the parts that probably aren't too bad are the sex scenes. Not only would that be WAY too embarassing to let people read, but even that would be weird, 'cause I wrote sex scenes without having any actual experience to draw from -- that's the only thing I pretty much pulled out of my ass, so it feels kinda fake, a reality-based book with scenes involving things I've never done, but everyone else has.
Part of me thinks that I'm never gonna be able to show it to anybody. Truth be told, I'd've been better off just compiling my OD entries from that time period if I wanted to tell that story, just put them all in one file and do it as a journal-format book. But that wouldn't've been actually writing, so it wouldn't've counted for NaNo.
I developed a book, gave birth to 50,000 words, but it was deformed and stillborn, and probably no amount of effort on my part could give it real life. I hate to quit things, leave them unfinished, and I suppose as long as I keep the file, the door's always open for me to try to tackle it sometime down the road when I can get up the courage to face it again. But for now, my EdMo effort is over. I just can't quite face the mess I've created -- even though part of me is still proud for having completed the draft, the rest of me knows that it should be swept under the rug, hidden from view.
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