swimming about bicycles

There is the whole synchronicity issue. I've lost a lot of my sentimentality over the past couple of years, having been put through the wringer, but I've maintained my belief in synchronicty. I hit "play" on iTunes this morning. It's set to randomize 2,355 songs. And we start with Los Halos. It seems so much of my life starts with Los Halos. Samezvous said to me, "Inspiration is like a cat. It'll come eventually, but only on its own terms." (Point taken, especially after a weekend of being treated to the temperamental affections of miss Delia.)

Anne Lamott says, "Thinking about writing is like swimming about bicycles." Then what about writing about writing? Is that doubly-exclusive?

The moral of the story is: today is day one of National Novel Writing Month.

Here's the gist for those of you who did not witness me going through last year's insane November. There's two elements.

1. 30 days
2. 50,000 words

That's about it. NaNoWriMo makes you sit down and put words on a page whether they suck or not. It's about quantity, not quality. Because you can edit 1,000 crappy paragraphs. But you can't edit a blank page.

NaNoWriMo becomes engrossing, as you can imagine. Last year that's pretty much all I did in November. If I wasn't doing it, I was thinking about it (and swimming about bicycles, too).

I finished the novel last year and celebrated with some fellow NaNo'ers in Boston. There's a huge online forum for it. This guy Chris Bady started it as a stupid challenge among 5 of his friends in 1999, and now there's 40,000 people around the world signing up to do it every year.

I wasn't going to bother this year, because of the aforementioned writer's block. Nano is supposed to get you past the writers block. It happens too fast and furious to allow your inner editor to keep up, so you write ahead of the criticism. But it seemed like such a ludicrous undertaking for me right now. Then I received a random email two weeks ago from Samezvous of Los Halos, one of the few people to have read a chunk of my novel from last year. He said he enjoyed it and encouraged me to continue. His album For Ramona wrote my novel last year. I played it over and over while I was writing and it just put the words down for me. All 50,023 of them. So after his email, I was considering doing it again this year. I checked the NaNoWriMo web site and it turns out Chris Bady, the founder, was speaking at the Washington University Book Store three days later.

I went to see him speak. Also with him was a woman who completed National Novel Writing Month and published the resulting book. I was pretty jazzed up by the occasion.

So here I am beneath this undertaking once again. I don't know if I'll finish. Last year I knew I'd finish. It's insane if you think about it. 2,000 words a day every day. I've got the words in me. It's just a matter of getting them down.

Chris Bady recommends calling up old schoolmates, relatives, co-workers, and friends. He tells you to brag to everyone you know: not only are you doing this, but your book is absolute genius. Then you'll be motivated because they can shame you if you start slacking.

I'm doing this and my book is absolute genius.

Let the shaming begin.