Challenge Accepted

I've been a poor correspondent lately, but with good cause. After a dry spell so long I don't even want to calculate it, I've been writing again. Really writing. Not journaling or blathering stream-of-consciousness incoherencies into a notebook, actual structural writing.

I was struck with inspiration by an email I received from NaNoWriMo. That's an awkward, geeky way of saying "National Novel Writers Month." Every November, the organization challenges writers everywhere to write a novel over the next 30 days. Specifically: 50,000 words in 30 days. You sign up on the site and commit to the challenge... "Permission to Suck, Granted!" as they say.

My friend and colleague Mary Ann Roe, who runs the store at the museum, first introduced me to NaNoWriMo several years ago, but I never registered. Somehow, this time it just seemed right.

So I'm in. I have taken up the gauntlet.

Two days into it I've produced around 3300 words. Now all I have to do is stick with it.

I write for an hour after I put Grayson to bed each night: from 9:30 to around 10:30. Anne Lamott says that if you're having trouble carving out writing time for yourself, you should write when you would normally be watching the evening news. Because what's a bigger waste of time than local news? I don't watch the news, but I do spend that hour sitting on my butt, reading or watching TV. So I have surrendered that hour to NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck.

One of the entertaining things about taking up the challenge was getting the five chapters of a children's novel I started some 8 years ago or more into a modern format. The first chapter of the thing was written originally on the boxy old Mac I had in the early 90s. The subsequent four chapters were produced on a ten-ton Compaq laptop that I got from G. I guess he acquired it when it was retired from the place where he worked at the time, and I fell in love with the idea of having my own portable writing computer. As I said, it weighs a ton, it also takes forever to boot up because it is still looking for the old network it was hooked up to before I acquired it. It also has this funny old-school trackball mouse built into the frame of the screen. You work the trackball with your thumb, and the mouse buttons are built into the back of the screen - or the top of the computer, however you want to look at it. I've never seen that design before.

Anyway, Of course there's no way to download my writing from that computer to this one. The Compaq has a 3.5 inch floppy drive ) no USB ports. So I had to boot up the file and transcribe it by hand. It was actually a good way to refamiliarize myself with The Story Thus Far and get my mind into the idea of writing again.

Grayson was utterly fascinated with this old dinosaur of a computer... and with the idea of a story written by his mom, which he didn't know I could do. He hovered over my shoulder as I was transcribing, reading as I went and alerting me at each typo. He told me he could help me with a title, which I don't have yet, and with chapter titles as needed. I said I would call on him for help very soon. And I asked him if he wanted to read it for me and tell me what he thought. He said Yeah, it seems interesting. So I mean to print out the first chapters and let him read along. That should provide some incentive to keep going.