Divinely Crafty

This is why I don’t post very frequently – I have days that I feel accomplished if I get out of my bed and down the stairs. Today was one of those days.  I got up to get my daughter ready for school and was feeling rather shaky.  As soon as she left I came back to my bed and perched myself in front of my laptop with a cup of coffee.  I quickly felt even worse and decided to just lie back and close my eyes for a minute.

5 hours later….. I woke up to the voice of my PA coming in to start her work!

And such has the day been.  Knitted a few rows on a beaded lace scarf I am working on, watched some on demand television on my laptop and tried my best to pretend I was among the living. I was just about to go back to bed for the night when I remembered that I had not done a blog entry for the day. doh!  I would really hate it if my failure in NaBloPoMo was due to my brain fog. That would be just too much.  If I do fail it will be for good reason – like because I have something better to be doing, such as knitting or painting my nails – not because I simply forget.  I will not let the brain fog win! No way.

I really wish that someone would invent a way to have my thoughts (the thoughts I choose, more specifically) be dictated and appear in print.  So many times I am going about my day and I will think things that would make great blog posts or even great stories.  But then the thoughts disappear somewhere between my brain and my keyboard or pen and paper.  I tried once carrying a voice recorder around and spoke into it whenever I had a thought that I wanted to save for later.  That didn’t work very well because I could only do it in private lest someone call the men with white coats to take away that crazy lady talking to herself.  They can’t be expected to know that my talking to myself is not a sign of insanity but rather sheer brilliance.

Truthfully, I think that it is simply that I am too lazy.  It isn’t like I am usually doing anything important when I have ideas and thoughts, it is just that I don’t bother to write them down.  Either don’t take the time or convince myself that it wasn’t really that brilliant in the first place and why waste digital space with my chatter.  What I really need is not just a brain dictator, but a brain proofreader and editor.  Then I can just sit around having brilliant thoughts all day and have them appear, polished and prettied up for all to bask in my glory.  Someone get right on that, will ya?  The world is waiting to be dazzled.

Well, dark and stormy afternoon more accurately.  She sat poised over her laptop, palms sweating, and a lump in her throat.  Slowly, she started typing.  The first tentative words became sentences, and soon the sentences became a paragraph.    The disabled mother who sometimes writes a blog about stuff she makes and ramblings about life began to write her very first novel.

And with that I am pleased to report – I have begun and am in for the long haul!  NaNoWriMo is ON!  As is NaBloPoMo in an attempt to hedge my bets.  I will do my best to succeed at both!

Truthfully, not a start at all.  Good,bad,or indifferent.  I did get as far as poking around the NaNoWriMo website and found myself in awe of all the myriad authors and their ideas.  Such grand visions and inspiration.  Unfortunately none of it rubbed off on me.  Midnight was fast approaching and I had not written word one when an online friend of mine posted to her facebook status that she was considering doing NaBloPoMo instead of NaNoWriMO (type that ten times fast!) which I have to admit sounded like a very good idea to me.   I jokingly commented that since I wrote a blog post yesterday that I might write another today announcing that I was jumping ship to NaBloPoMo because it is the easier of the two goals for me.  I went to bed thinking, yep, that is what I am going to do.  I know I can do it.  Piece of cake.

This morning, however,  I felt a bit sheepish about last night’s revision of my goal.  If the true idea is to push myself beyond my comfort zone, then blog posting is not going to accomplish that.  Yes, it will be a challenge for me to post every day for a month, but aside from giving myself a swift kick in the bum each day it isn’t too hard.  I mean, a blog post can be rambling and pointless or a simple account of one’s day.  No plot and character development required.  The whole point of the novel writing was to do something that I have always secretly wanted to do but had no bloody clue how to go about it.  While not the most consistent of bloggers, I do blog and have done so for several years on a handful of different blogs.  Not much of a stretch in the NaBloPoMo in terms of exploring unknown territory, though the battle with lazy posting habits is definitely one worth facing.

I am undecided as of this moment which of the two events I am going to participate in.  This blog post keeps me in the running should NaBloPoMo be the victor in my deliberations.  While I have not written yet for my novel, I still think that if I set my mind to it (and used lots of long descriptive sentences and flowery language) I could still reach 50,000 words by the end of the month.  I don’t think there is any rule that says you have to write every day for NaNoWriMo, just that you accomplish the amount of words.  Right???   Today will be another day that I don’t do any novel writing no matter what I decide.  My tummy has been less than agreeable to day and my neighbors were destroying their stairwell and bathroom (both on the side of the house with our shared wall)  with loud power tools all day.  Neither of these things is conducive to creative writing.  Unless of course you count the colorful language  that were uttered when stuff started falling off the shelves in my bathroom due to the vibrations of whatever it is my neighbors are doing.  Grrrrrrr….