So, National Novel Writing Month kicks off tomorrow, and I realized that the only way I was going to be able to carve an hour of writing time out of an already-overbooked schedule was to forfeit an hour of sleep. And since I'm usually a tad tipsy by the time I hit the hay, I decided to get up an hour earlier starting 11-01-07. Which means today was my last day to sleep late (and by "late" I mean until 6:40), so what did I do? Got up early.
And I got up early because I realized I had no idea what I was going to write about on Thursday. You see, I was sort of planning to . . . well, not really cheat, more like use all my resources. About 20 years ago I wrote a couple of young adult books, and I was planning to finally get back to one or the other of them and see what I could do with them. They're not publishable as they are, but I figured it was better than starting with a blank white page. But which book? Maybe I should combine the two. Or chuck it all and start fresh. So I got up to write an outline and got as far as a list of characters. I won't be combining the two books but I am going to steal the female protagonist from one and insert her into the book I've chosen to work on. I think she'll be happier there.
But I still wasn't sure where to start, so I went for a walk at lunch, cuz I remember from the days when I used to be in the habit of writing that good ideas come when you're doing something else -- washing dishes, shaving, walking around by the harbor. And it worked. Tomorrow I will start writing on a section of the book that I have never worked on before. I still don't have an outline, so I'm not sure where this scene will go. But in reading over some of the stuff I had stashed away I wasn't satisfied with some aspects of the main character's "voice." So I want to write him fresh and then see if I can incorporate some of the best stuff from the original version.
One bad thing about walking around and thinking of something else especially if you live in Charleston SC where you can't walk a block without hitting some colonial-era, lumpy-ass cobblestone street, is that it's easy to fall down. And I did, I fell and bruised up my right knee pretty good. I wanted to include a quote about writing in each blog entry during NaNoWriMo, and the one I've selected for today is not about writing, but it is from Hemingway, it's one of my all-time favorite quotes and it seems apt, and hey, technically it's not NaNoWriMo yet.
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."
One Halloween note, my boss hated the Superman shirt, of course, and we did the dialogue we do -- word for word -- every year on All Hallow's Eve.
Boss: Where's your uniform?
Me: It's Halloween and I'm Superman.
Boss: Oh, I didn't know we were playing Halloween this year.
Me: I play every year.
He can't do anything about because the corporation allows its wage slaves a chance for levity and self-expression this one day, so he has to find something else to get upset about. And I guess it shows what a model employee I am that the only thing he could find was a few rubber bands hanging off the gear shift in our company truck. Here's how that conversation went:
Boss: What are these rubber bands doing here?
Me: (entirely innocently) Nothing. Just hanging around.
Boss: Yes, I know, but why are they hanging here?
Me: No idea.
I don't know. I think I probably need to polish up that last line iif this conversation's ever going to become an annual tradition too.
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