Dog, my muse, thinking, can you please finish this fricking novel so I can get back to sleeping in?!I feel a Dog Blog coming on...
Apologies to the three or so regular readers of the Dalai Dog Blog who have expressed their discontent with the dearth of posts recently.
Dog and I have had a lot on our minds.
What with the broken toe, and school starting, and me, stupidly volunteering to be a room mom again, and the incessant watching of CNN during the election, and the evil opposing twins of puberty and perimenopause invading our formerly happy home—we are all out of whack!
Plus, November was National Novel Writing Month and I decided, pretty much impulsively, after a couple of glasses of wine at my Writers’ Group meeting, to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, which proved to be an excellent and timely exercise in creative abandon and testing my aptitude for writing Crap. And, let it be known, that writing 50,000 words of crap is the goal!
We all know that Nobody, not even Stephen King or Danielle Steele or John Grisham, can write a good novel in a month! So the whole idea of the month is to give aspiring writers explicit permission, even encouragement, to write badly, which is exactly what all writers must have in order to squash their inner critic and get a first draft actually written instead of just imagined.
It’s a quantity versus quality type of thing, which is such an awesome challenge for a crazy, Type-A, perfectionist, self-flagellating workhorse, like me. For one month, I could just write and write, as fast as my fingers could type, which was an absolute necessity in order to fit this novel into the rest of my life and keep the family from starving and in clean underwear for the duration of the month.
As usual, Dog was my muse. He contributed greatly by entering this weird new phase in which he would sit beside my bed and whine and cry at 5:30 am (or sometimes earlier!!!!) until I relented and got up with him. After I let him out to pee and fed him some kibble, and made myself coffee, I decided I might as well write since the house was quiet and I was up anyway! The moment I sat down at the computer, Dog curled up in his bed in my office, snoring away, content in fulfilling his purpose as my Doggie-writing-coach wake-up call.
And I did it!
50,111 words! And, just as they predicted, I think I actually wrote a few gold nuggets in the mound of crap that is the rest of the novel. Right now I have no expectations, but in January, I may read it all through and make some edits and see where it goes. Or not!
Stay tuned. There will be more tomorrow or the next day about Thanksgiving with Dog and Cameron and Speedo (oh, yes, and the rest of our families!) and the incident that will forever be known as The Day Dog Bit the Groomer, and Dog's ongoing saga of searching for true love.
