What's a Finish Line?

Ok blog - so I lied. In an endeavor to write daily - I made it to day two and then I saw a squirrel. The squirrel was metaphorical. I think.

I have no excuses other than these; firstly, habits be hard yo, and in conclusion, I don’t finish things. Let’s put on our “analrapist stockings” and take a look at this, shall we?

I was going to make a fat joke about the only thing I finish is a bag of chips, but EVEN THAT is a lie. 20 oz soda – always has two sips of soda left. Chips I frequently leave the last 1/4 of chips and crumblies at the bottom then throw them away. Burgers? Gabe gets my last bite. Seriously, is this a condition?

I have a bag of Christmas peppermint Hersey kisses, with about a quarter of them left in the bag sitting on my desk. How did I get my hands on a bag so early? I DIDN’T! I’m sick. It’s like a Depression era woman lives inside me and says, “Save it – it’s precious, you’ll be sad when there are none left”…umm, I can go to the store and get more – “No you can’t…limited edition, the store has probably already run out, and gone out of business, the zombies will come, and you’ll wish you had peppermint kisses to sooth you – just save these, you’ll thank me in July.” But did I eat them in July? No – because it’s old, and that shit is seasonal for a reason. No one wants peppermint chocolate in July. Thanks for nothing depression era voice in my head.

If you really want to rile Gabe up, asking him about the Rum Cake incident of 2010. It nearly tore us apart. I was just saving the rum cake for a special occasion…I know – I said I’m sick.

Let’s not even get to diets and health/self-improvement plans. I think we can all guess how those went. The first few days are always fine – hell I can even go up to two weeks of eating right and exercising. But then one day I will eat a muffin. That wasn’t part of the plan! Fuck it – let’s go to the Chinese buffet and buy bigger pants – weee!

These disturbing habits even dribble into media. I don’t finish video games. I waited a year to watch the last episode of Arrested Development because it was cancelled and I didn’t want it to end. I’ve still never finished Carnivale for the same reason. I KNOW – it’s dumb.

I started a painting of an apple when I was 7 or 8. I got the background done, and the lace doily it was sitting on painted. And that’s it. Where the apple should be is an apple shaped hole with shading lines of where the light was hitting it. The end. I have been on a quest to find a hobby. So I asked my mom to teach me to paint… it’s been decades since I picked up a brush.  She still has the empty apple painting, but that was too painful, so we started a new one. A nice North Shore landscape, but the paint eventually was still too wet to keep working with and we had to stop. Guess what still needs to have leaves added to the trees? Sure – that wasn’t my fault. The paint was too wet. I had to stop, it was getting muddy. That was four months ago. I could just cheat and say it’s a winter scape, but I know the truth.

I started interviewing my grandma last year to jot down her life story. We got through her middle school/high school memories and stopped. Why? Did grandma die? No. Did her life story end when she graduated high school? Nope – actually she went to Seattle and became a Rosie the Riveter during World War 2, but I don’t have that story yet because I’m a shithead.

Last year I set a goal to read 25 books. I met that goal in September– and shot it up to 30! And I did it! That’s it. That is my accomplishment for life people. I once read 30 books in a year. How’s it going this year you ask? Well – I wanted to beat it, so I said – 31 (I know – I’m a real spitfire). Around May we dropped that bad boy down to 25. I am thinking 15 might be more doable. 

Go me – said in a tiny, almost inaudible whisper.

So let’s talk about the giant elephant in the room. Nanowrimo. Oh Nano -- how you taunt me.

As you can probably guess based on the prologue to this blog – I tried it once. I think I hit 10k words? But I skipped a day, and then the next day didn’t make my word count goal, and then I missed another day. So I re-read what I had, and it wasn’t funny. It was SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY! So I quit.

About two weeks ago I got an e-mail from Nanowrimo that the forums were open for this year’s challenge. As I mentioned earlier, I am looking for a hobby. Two months ago I wanted to challenge myself to write for 10-30 minutes every day. Two days. That’s how long that lasted. So my sicko brain says – let’s do NANOWRIMO! That will be a good idea! So I reactivate my account. And look at my profile. “Participant” – 2006. Holy hell. I suck.

I have many voices in my head. I know I should get that looked at, but therapy is expensive. 

So this one little voice says, “It’s like jumping off a bridge. Just do it! Big gestures are a great idea, plus there will be support and encouragement”. 

Then another voice which is much louder says, “That is the dumbest idea ever.”

The tiny voice says, “Get Gabe to do it. That will help!”

Gabe is a writer and story teller. He just doesn’t know it.  He crafts Facebook status messages that are more elaborate, funny, and witty than some short stories I’ve written. Plus he is the inventor of Gabe Facts. No one can deny that man has imagination.

I had 47 half-formed ideas in my head none of them seemed very likely to yield 50k. Nothing was lighting my fire. 

I am horrible when it comes to choices. I have to research things to death, narrow it down to the top 4 choices and then agonize about them for a few days, maybe even do a couple of test runs to the store just to look at them all one more time, but then go home because today is not the day to make this choice. What is this choice? A vehicle? An  appliance? Oh no no no. This is socks. Which socks should I buy? 

Crippling indecision.

 Poop pants. 

Go home in shame with no socks. 

Start researching underwear.

In the buffet of life, I want a little of everything. So before me I had ideas of a YA novel, a Romance, a Historical Romance, a Quirky YA Romance, a Supernatural Thriller, Supernatural Romance, YA Thriller, Historical Fiction, funny personal life stories ...oh god was I in trouble if I couldn't even land on a genre. I was going to write them all down and draw one from a jar. I'm not kidding I think I had an idea of every type of genre out there except maybe Sci-Fi since I don't do space. I was creating new genres…Supernatural Historical Romance YA Steampunk*.*BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS GODDAMN STEAMPUNK!

I was feeling pretty down and stressing myself out. I asked Gabe if he would join me in Nano because I felt I needed someone to hold me accountable because I was ready to throw in the towel on October 28th. (If you're unaware, Nanowirmo begins November 1st. That's how sick I am).

He was skeptical he would be able to participate. So I was trying to offer him encouragement (a.k.a - get him to eat the apple with me).

 He says, "I've done no plotting. Don’t you need notes, research, don't you need an outline? I don't know what an outline is!" he was panicking as much as me at the mere thought. Awesome. I had successfully stressed out my writing buddy. This was a brilliant idea!

So we discussed the Snowflake Method (I actually think this is what I am going to use). How every story is basically a triangle. He is receptive. My inner Mr. Burns voice trills, “Excellent”.

The first exercise is to “Write your story summary in one sentence.”

Gabe takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

“You don’t have to do it now… It’s 11:30 at night…. This exercise gives you an hour to do that…”

15 seconds have passed, he opens his eyes, opens Notepad, because he is adorable, and never uses something as fancy as “Word”, and tappity taps out a sentence.

“Got it!” he beams.

My jaw drops.

“What’s next?” he smiles.

Angry bitter voice in my head: “That sonofabitch. This was not part of the plan!”

Positive anything is possible voice:  “Yes it was.”

“Umm – no! He is supposed to suffer and hate this as much as me!”

“We’re not going to hate this – this is going to be awesome!”

“I hate you!”

“No you don’t!”

Gabe says, “Send me the link to that snowflake thingy – I’ll do more tomorrow!”

It’s now midnight and I am staring at the darkness of my ceiling pondering a coming of age story about a little girl…set in a circus, no… set on the 1860’s prairies of Minnesota, no…in a dystopian future where children hunt each other…no, at a wizarding school…shit.

So I confess to Gabe that I don’t know what I am going to write.

“Lay them on me!”

But I can’t, because my internal editor who shares the stage with the angry bitter voice says, “They’re all crap, and it doesn’t matter because you don’t finish things anyway.”

But there is one idea, that’s bubbled to the surface more than the others. So I blurt it out, and then quickly elaborate, “But I don’t know what to do with that. I can take it in three directions from there. Do I do option A. But then there is option B, and then finally I could take it the direction of option C. So it’s dumb, and I don’t know what to do, so I…”

“I like it. What if you did option A and B that could work really cool together, and be unexpected.”

Holy shit. My husband is having some kind of Rainman moment, and he doesn’t even know it. A ten minute conversation with an actual human, outside my head, has yielded me my idea and central plot structure.

And while I can’t see the finish line yet – I have at least gotten in the car to head to the track. [Insert more sports metaphors here – I can’t think of them myself because I don’t do sports].

Today we went to lunch – and bounced more ideas off of each other for each of our respective stories. And it was fun. And I felt creative juices flowing that have been frozen for a long time. 

And I realized, I have a pretty awesome person to talk to about this stuff, who is far more objective than the nagging voices in my head. 

And I was so jazzed I wrote this blog. Which is about 1900 words. And if I write roughly 1700 a day, that will put me in at 50K in 30 days.

So yeah, my track record is not good. I don’t typically finish things.

But I might.