Election season, man.  What a week it's been.  Trying to reclaim my brain from the polls and the news sites is a challenge. Toasted Obama's victory with friends and family, and then the tears over Prop 8 started, and they haven't entirely let up yet.  People can be so wrong-headed.  My neighbors get to stay married.  I hope the people who voted for that evil thing choke on that.

 

 

However I'm really having a rough time discovering the story. The parts that already formed in my mind, the "candy bar scenes" as Holly Lisle has been known to put it, are far in the future, probably somewhere past page 70.  I should know by now that beginnings are total agony for me; they are my weakest point, and always have been.  I need to just acknowledge that the first three chapters are going to be cut. I probably haven't even written what will turn out to be the first page of the story yet. Knowing me, it's three days worth of writing in the future still, and all of this is just prolonged throat-clearing. Also I've only written one love story in my life, and this one is on a much larger scale and I don't know how to do it effectively. I think what I've got so far is totally hackneyed and would send any good reader to the garbage bin with my book.  But I can figure out how to do that right later.  Right now I just need to move the story forward and get to the parts that I want to write.

 

I saw someone on Twitter today say that they're not sure what the point is when NaNoWriMo just feels like work.  It really does right now.  But I do remember how it feels once the story gets off the ground, and how when I wrote "The End" three years ago I cried I was so goddamn proud of myself.  (Unsolicited advice: unless you have super-supportive people around you who are going to be genuinely excited for you and think you're awesome and will let you know it, try to have that moment alone. It is much too painful to cross that finish line in the company of people who do not care, or care only enough to be patronizing. Twitter, Forward Motion, and the NaNoWriMo forums are good virtual places to be when you hit 50,000 and/or reach the end of your novel.)  

 

So. For now I've got some coffee and my NaNoWriMo 10th Anniversary t-shirt (which is awesome and make me feel writerly.)   Time to push ahead, a word at a time.  I'll shake this dust off eventually.