Well, today marks the beginning of the second half of Nanowrimo. It is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. To paraphrase Winston.
Despite a wobbly patch last week, I have managed to keep up with my word count and last night, I beat 25,000 words to mark the beginning of the end of The Bootleg Boys.
Except it's not. Based on my 11 page plot plan, I'm about a third of the way through.
It's been an interesting experience. I've noticed my writing style seems to have deevolved with Nanowrimo. I've left the pretty nice style I'd developed during Adventure Eddy and have returned to the quick-fire dialogue heavy prose I'd tended to sink into during my previous writing. My inner critic is screaming in frustration - surely what I'm writing is crap - but the whole idea of Nanowrimo is to silence that voice and just keep writing.
The goal is to write 50,000 words by November 30th. I will achieve that, but I imagine it will take slightly longer to actually finish The Bootleg Boys. And when I do, I've worked out that the story fits neatly into a three story 'arc.' So God knows if it's publishable or where it would go!
But still. I'm writing and that's always good.
Recently, I was reading Ian Hocking's website, This Writing Life: (American) National Novel Writing Month or 'Exploding in a Shower of Blood' and he directed us to a page somebody had written about Nanowrimo. And it made me angry!
You can read the post here. It's on a site called Metaxucafe and written by Mark Leahy.
The reason it made me angry is because it's a post written by a writer. And there's nothing worse than a writer who thinks they're qualified to write about writing.
I'm a writer. I've been a writer since I was twelve years old, when my parents gave me an electric typewriter and I hammered out Kid Rockson: Private Eye.
It's only been within the last six months that I've been officially paid to write. But does that elevate me to some higher level? No. It just means I've got the experience, ability and luck to have found a job where my passion for assembling words is appreciated. But even if I never managed to become a paid writer, I'd have kept on writing. If I don't write, those words build up in my head and some day my cranium would have exploded, showering people with half digested sentences.
However, it's evident from Mark Leahy's post that he feels superior to those other poor, passionate people who decide to write a novel in 30 days. He thinks it sullies his art. Unqualified people, it's apparent, shouldn't muddy the waters with their amateur literary efforts.
Perhaps Mark has forgotton how he entered the writing industry. Unless he was an idiot savent (although he's apparently half there) he must have scribbled and typed an awful lot of crap before something good came out of it. He did his groundwork and now he's snootily looking down at everybody else trying to do it.
He's a member of the growing Snoberati, as I've titled them.
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