After a frantic National Novel Writing Month, I return to the Not A Blog™ feeling a little strange. Again, I feel like I’ve betrayed my website and my readers, never mind that Dave said, “oh, we’ve all pretty much gotten used to you disappearing for a month.”

Nanowrimo was very different for me this year. They’re all different from each other, but this one was especially so. As I mentioned last month, I endeavored to write non-fiction this year, eschewing traditional crutches such as characters which write their own dialogue, and plots which go off in their own directions. It went, well… It went. Not well. Not poorly, but not well, either.

That pretty much summed up Nano for me this year: it went. There was really no challenge and what I did to try and make it challenging—that is, write non-fiction rather than fiction—didn’t, either. It was very much like a long Not A Blog™ entry—too much like a long Not A Blog™ entry, to be precise.

I like the freedom this Not A Blog™ gives me. The freedom to write about new topics every day, for one thing. With the “novel”—which I put in sneer quotes because it’s not really—it was more along the lines of: Writing about politics, day four. Begin Chapter 7, in which our Hero [me] decides that politics is really dumb, and is going to move onto the next chapter for no good reason except that it is NOT politics. Yeah, I know; I write about politics all the time here, but not that much.

The other problem I had with the book is that it wasn’t very much like a Not A Blog™ entry. See, when I down to write these, I generally go straight through them and edit them on the fly. I’ll write a few sentences, then go back and fix one word in the first sentence. Then write a paragraph, then rewrite the fourth sentence. I had always been taught in school that you must go in order: write the first draft. Stop. Rewrite the draft and call it the second draft. Stop. Repeat as necessary until you get to the final draft. Stop. Rewrite the final draft and then publish it. I’m sure that works for the one librarian who made up those rules, but that’s not anything like how I write. When I finish my Not A Blog™ entry, you generally read the same thing I was left with when I signed my name at the bottom. (I read back through it to fix grammatical errors, which doesn’t help much as they’re still too frequent.) The editing does happen, but it happens along with the writing.

The thing with Nano, though, is that you’re not “allowed” to edit. Well, sure, you’re allowed too, but everyone says not to because it slows down the rapid-fire pace of the novel which, after all, you only have 30 days to finish. The problem is that all the wacked out writing I do—you know, the stuff that is almost interesting to read—this is not the sort of stuff I do on a deadline. When I write, I write one sentence, then immediately highlight the entire sentence and delete it, and rewrite it. I just did it with the previous sentence. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. The sentence was messed up. It’s now deleted and rewritten into the sentence you just finished reading, four sentences ago (not counting this one). Anyway, that’s the on-the-fly editing that I do.

It’s also what I didn’t do in Nanowrimo. Subsequently my book is not only poorly written and constructed, it’s boring as well. My regular readers will now inform everyone else that my writing is usually boring, so you have nothing to lose. So, even if you say that me being boring is nothing new, my “novel” is still not good.

Evidently, I’m very bitter. What I wrote was a rant, yes. But it wasn’t a well constructed rant. It was barely coherent. It mostly focused on me (for entirely too much of the book), and what didn’t focus on me was just incredibly angry verbiage spilling from my fingers, via the keyboard. I think it was a combination of the short deadline and the high required word count. Because when material is nothing more than a blog entry, I don’t really worry about how long it’s going to be. With a deadline, I’m looking at the fact that I’m 300 words short today—which isn’t a lot—but it means I throw in a retarded paragraph about something only tangentially related to the subject at hand, just to pad the word count. It works, but it also makes for a really stupid book. What I really need to do is stop trying to get quality out of Nano each year. I said last year I wasn’t going to try to, but I was still mad when I didn’t. If I’m not getting quality out of it, why the heck do I keep doing it? Nothing gets accomplished.

Or doesn’t it?

Maybe I’m looking to accomplish the wrong things. Maybe what is important about Nano is not the manuscript which one produces, but all the other stuff one produces. The things which arise from the procrastination.

The first two years of Nano, I was still in college. November always turned out to be that month where all my assignments were not just well done, but also completed ahead of time, which is unheard of with me. Last year, it was during the month of November that I started to learn to play the piano. That was a pretty good method of procrastination.

Well, this year I was able to procrastinate with more things than ever before. The main reason for this was due to the fact that since I was essentially writing Not A Blog™ entries all month, I knew exactly how long it would take—and subsequently I just kept putting everything off. I didn’t get mired in any sort of plot points or character drama, so I was able to ignore the book for longer periods of time.

As I look back over the month of November, I not only have a book of dubious quality, I also did the following:

  • I bought and assembled a third book shelf. I have so many books in my room that for the past few years they’ve been in stacks on the floor—ten or fifteen high—just because I have no surfaces on which to place them. I finally bought a bookshelf, assembled it, and organized my books one evening when I should have been writing.
  • I bought and assembled an office chair. This was a Black Friday special, so I was pretty happy, not only with the price, but with the fact that I actually had a real chair to sit in while using my computer. Again, for at least three years, I’ve been sitting on a flismy folding chair. It’s not high enough to reach the computer comfortably since I have it on my art table, so I sat on a pillow to compensate. It was, quite possibly, the worst solution ever. Well, now I’ve got a really nice leather office chair which I put together while I should have been writing my book.
  • I taught myself how to play two more songs on the piano. The first is Für Elise by Ludwig Von. The other was a ragtime arrangement I worked out for one of the songs in the old DOS game, Commander Keen. That one’s not really an entire song; it’s just a little riff that repeats. But I did figure out the arrangement—when I should have been writing my book, of course.
  • As I wrote just before Nanowrimo started, Graham got me hooked on Mr. Rubik’s Cube. During Nanowrimo I kept the thing on my desk. I would start to write my book—but then I decided I had plenty of time and picked up the cube instead. I can now solve it from a scrambled position in about two minutes—a skill I would not have picked up had I actually spent the time writing my book. (Note: this knowledge is completely useless.)
  • Another Black Friday special I saw was a really great deal on a 20″ widescreen LCD monitor, so I picked one up. Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of dealing with multiple different monitors knows where I’m going with this. The new monitor was, of course, completely different from the one on my laptop, so I spent an evening calibrating and color balancing them. They’re not exactly the same; that’s pretty much impossible without specialized equipment. But they’re pretty close—and it took me a good hour and a half of tweaking when I should have been—well. You know.

So it was a productive month. It just wasn’t productive in the sense that good novels were being written. And maybe that’s the point. That is why I should continue to do Nanowrimo every year. The novels suck, but the rest of my life improves so much that November now seems like it’s the only time year when I actually get things done.

-Ted