30 Days of NaNoWriMo – Day 1: The Worst Possible Start

I’ve been contemplating doing daily posts for a while now; partially because I wondered if I could manage them. But also because I’m getting tired of the article-styled posts. I’ve never been keen on getting very personal here, likely because my personal life totally blows. But there’s a way to write about my life that doesn’t mean wasting breath on things that aren’t worth it, I knew. A way to relate how I feel about writing every day. At one point, I was all, “Maybe I’ll experiment and do like… a week of daily posts?”

And then I learned about NaNoWriMo. And, instantly, all of the puzzle pieces fell into place; I could not deny the challenge to be more diligent and the chance to do daily posts and the excuse to go write in new places every day.

So that’s what you’ll be getting for the next 30 days. Every day I will go somewhere, write there, update my NaNoWriMo page, and post about it all here. I know that this is extremely sudden, but I promise the Progress Sidebar will be back in December; I just couldn’t pass up this challenge.

Now that you’re up to speed, let’s get started.

Where I Wrote: Home (unplanned–see below)

How I Feel About What I Wrote: Pretty Good

The Mood I Brought to the Table: Horrible

The Experience: There are just those days. Days when you’re exhausted because you stood up late last night organizing your old comics for sale. Days when, despite being tired, you still awkwardly haul those comics out in the pouring rain and onto the New York subway. Someone eyes your weird, duplo comic book brief case and asks, “Selling some old comics?” and you smile and answer, “Yes,” because the day still isn’t that horrible.

Not until you get to the place where you’re supposed to sell them and find that Open Buying Day is not, in fact, a full day. And you know immediately that it’s your fault that you’re going to have to haul your awkward collection of comics back home in the pouring rain because you didn’t check the hours for Open Buying Day. You absolutely know you should’ve. You maybe even thought to check before leaving but didn’t.

It does not help that, as you leave, the people behind the counter let you know that, “Man. You missed it by like… ten minutes.” That’s the point at which your brain goes into “Thanks” mode. Maybe, “Really? Thanks, asshole,” mode is a better way to put it. You’re angry at yourself and now just determined to at least A) Not let that make you a jerk to anyone else and B) Not let the day get more screwed up. Because you expect the irony now–a bad day just can’t end well. Bad days generally follow the layout of a story with an Exposition, Rising Action, and a Conclusion. So you just wait for that Conclusion. Will a train hit this stupid pile of comics, somehow? Sounds really goofy, but hey, maybe; I mean, if I believe, I can achieve new levels of failure, right? Will the duplo lock on my duplo comic book brief case shatter because it’s not meant to stand up to 30 pounds of Silver Age pressure? That totally sounds like the one.

But then you get home without the hammer dropping. You carry your duplo case in your arms to make sure it doesn’t explode. You sit down with plenty of time to regroup and not let the Conclusion be failing on your first day of NaNoWriMo (because you just know that the day wants that to be your felling blow). If only to prove the world wrong, you sit down and get to work, find that 1,667 words is way, way more than you usually write and buckle in anyway.

And then you meet your goal. And you realize that, again, clearly now, it really was your fault you missed Open Buying Day. Because what we do with our time is always up to us–we pick and choose our victories and our failures by not being careful and not prioritizing.

I wonder how many days I didn’t prioritize my writing.