NaNoWriMo Day 10: Meeting Mo

I love your comics, but where do we vote?!

These are great and I liked your book review too.

I love your Twitter-related articles, and I am addicted to your cartoons. I can soooooo relate…..

Thank you! Thank you SO much for including Mo! I’m one of those overachievers, currently at 82,964 and ready to start my second Nanovel — this year’s High Goal is to write three 80,000 word novels before December, a goal I’ve never reached but came close to in 2004 when I got two of them. A new roommate moving in took up about half of the second twenty days but I knew that if I hadn’t been interrupted that year, I’d have done three.

I’ve been trying to beat that every year since.

Here’s some plot ideas. I still do Nanowrimo every year even though I’ve got no problem reaching 50,000 with an entire month to do it and write Three Day Novels because I’ve also been discouraged and picked on for wanting to become a novelist all my life. My family, teachers, the clergy in the church my family went to, grandparents, even friends, everyone was dead set against my becoming a science fiction writer. In retrospect, I think there were some reasons for it that had to do with the sixties and serious political and social differences — Catholic teachers do not want eloquent heresy in the classroom coming out of the one non-Catholic kid trapped in the school. Everyone who discouraged me had reasons of their own to hate the idea of my growing up to be a novelist. Blue-collar grandparents honestly disapproved of books and reading and thought it a waste of time and money.

Even though I worked it out, looked at every discourager separately to understand the reasons for their opinion and recognized most of them at least believed they meant well and thought I’d be happier doing what they wanted me to do with my life — that built up an enormous insecurity and a dread of social penalties for success.

Nanowrimo turns the world’s loneliest art form into something like the Boston Marathon. I’m out there slamming keys with tens of thousands of other novelists who understand from their own experience that it’s not insane to be crying your eyes out after killing a character you loved or whooping in joy because two people you just made up fell in love and are walking on air. Or giggling in sadistic maniacal glee as the villain comes up with something clever to shaft everyone in the book and get his way.

It’s when I’m among my peers, neither the best nor the worst, able to just cut loose and do my best and get cheered on when I reach a personal goal. I’ve been doing it since 2000 and it’s ended the years of being blocked, the years of being stuck, the years of procrastinating and not doing my writing. I can count on writing in November even if I get distracted by creating webpages or doing my hobbies the rest of the year.

But people get jealous. I post over and over that it’s harder for a new writer to get that first 2,000 words than it is for me to knock out 80,000 in the first nine days. People get intimidated because I did it, because my green bar is still rising, they sometimes get pretty nasty about that and it hurts. One night a bunch of my friends in a chat started in on “I hate you” after I announced my count and it just froze me solid — threw me into a deep and wretched block where I couldn’t manage to get in another word.

The overachievers are human. That can happen to Mo. He can fight his way through it too and get going and keep going. I explained to my chat-friends that I come in for support just as much as any new novelist and that my monster counts are the result of having over fifty trunk novels, only one in print self published and pathetically few novel submissions — I’ve only ever sent two novels to publishers and one of the two that I submitted wound up the self-published one. It would’ve benefited from an editor.

I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, it lets me type faster. I used to go about 80 words a minute, now I’m guessing it’s closer to 100 to 120 words a minute when I’m on a roll. It also means anyone borrowing my keyboard gets completely lost and types icxx.pcoh if they input anything on it. Nice for keeping it to myself.

It also helps prevent carpal tunnel. The time to start learning Dvorak, best time of year is December after finishing Nanovel, so that you have a year’s practice before Nanowrimo rolls around again. It takes a couple of months to reach “usable” but will save wrists and improve output.

I also put in long, ludicrous hours at the keyboard. I do all-nighters if I get lost in the story. Mo might pull an all-nighter and still be there when they get back to the cafe. He might also fall asleep in the middle of a word war because he did keep writing all night at home and drinking too much coffee and not stopping.

Caffeine overdose leads to heart-slamming jitters, literal hallucinations as dreams break into waking life, snappish temper and an inability to sleep that just digs itself in deeper. I did that to myself on one novel and limited myself to no more than two pots a day after that, and no more than two all-nighters in a row. Mo could get pretty funny if he went off into it and started talking to his characters while he’s working on the book.

I love your cartoons. Thank you for showing every aspect of Nanowrimo and putting in at least one character who’s got the Overachiever habits — and still shows up every year to keep going and pushing their own goals. When I do Nanowrimo, being a novelist seems no weirder than people who take up a sport or people who build cars for a living or people who start their own businesses — it’s one of the cool things someone can do in life and doing it for years on end can make you very good at it.

The real lesson of Mo is that this isn’t his first year writing, whether it’s his first Nanowrimo or not.

Happily, someone called Kateness went so far beyond me that even though I’ve so far beaten my best, I’m way behind her and not hanging out lonely at the head of the field. There always will be someone like that. I’m very relieved. I would not want to be the biggest-fastest-bestest and have nothing but unanimous “I hate you” coming from the rest.

I think that Ed should accept the challenge, cause he’s trying to impress Moxie. He obviously can’t win against a pro like Mo, but he’s going to type so furiously that Moxie can’t help but be impressed. In the end, Moxie would kiss his sore fingers and tell him that she is going to name the protagonist in her novel after him. “My Hero!”