Because I do (Vol. II)

Here, have a collection of incredibly disparate, random things I'm enjoying and appreciating this week. I'm calling it my list of...

Things I do like (today): --

• Sunshine -- I feel a little as if I've been in hibernation, but today the sun is out in full glorious force and I am determined to take myself down to the bay and soak in its warming loveliness.
• Camp Nanowrimo -- July is Camp NaNoWriMo: all the fun of National Novel Writing Month with less word pressure and more marshmallows! For the record, virtual camping is the only kind of camping I really like, and this sort in particular is the best. This is my first year participating in Nano Camp, and I'm mostly here because my infinitely more go-getting friend Laura convinced me to take part. During NaNoWriMo in November, the rules are simple but strict: write a 50,000 word novel (or 50,000 words of a novel). Nano Camp is a lot more flexible; you get to make your own goals. My main intent was to pull out the novel I wrote during Nano a couple of years back and actually finish it. I had reached 50,000 words but not "The End," and there were some plot gaps and sequencing issues I needed to go back and fill in. All breeze and bluster, I cheerfully filled in my Nano Camp goal of 20,000 words, which is what I figure this novel needs to reach completed first draft status. As it happens, we're seven days into Camp Nano and I've written all of 600 words. However, I have been spending time revisiting what I've written, rereading it in full (which I hadn't done since I'd finished), and making notes as I go. The exciting thing is that I still love my characters. Well, there's one I'd like to smack across the face, but he deserves it. And there's another that deserves so much more than what I've given him in this story. There are sentences that I cringe about, but that's par for the course. The cool thing is the story is still there and I don't completely hate it. I'm relishing this chance to spend a little more time making it somewhere closer to better.
• Force 10 International -- I randomly caught a news article last week talking about this Brisbane-based company. What they do is create flat-pack housing that's designed to be built quickly by non-professional labourers and is especially created to withstand nature's worst, in the form of cyclones, tornadoes, flooding, and termites. There is so much good that can be done with a resource like this. I'm super-impressed. Also, any company whose name calls to mind an Alistair MacLean novel has to be at least half-cool.
• Rhett & Link chat to John Green -- this week on Ear Biscuits, Rhett and Link chatted to author, vlogger, and social change inspirer (let's let that be a word, okay?) John Green. People love to rag on this guy, possibly because he's successful and people respect him (always motivation for some internet sledging, I find), but after this interview, I found myself liking and respecting him even more. John Green is neither the antichrist nor the second coming, but he is someone who consistently exhibits a lot of wisdom and grace in his thoughts and actions about life, creativity, and making the world better.
• Hamish & Andy's South America Gap Year -- my favourite real-life broship is back on tv for another season of Gap Year and I'm happy. I'm in the middle of writing a post entirely about Hamish and Andy, and if I can overcome my ultimate fangirl embarrassment, I'll have it up at some point. In the meantime, if you're unfamiliar with Hamish and Andy, just imagine Frodo and Sam with none of the hobbitness or the angst, all of the silliness, and a generous helping of dorky Australian. Then imagine them exploring/doing/eating all the craziest things that South America has to offer. Yes, it is a recipe for joy (and occasional squinty eyes when one of them is eating something gross and you can't look away).
• Beauty basics -- it's winter, which means most of my beauty regime is about not drying out so much that I resemble an old leather boot. At the moment I'm appreciating the Dirty Works hand cream, the Olay Regenerist revitalising hydration cream (a sample size that came in this month's BellaBox and which has totally won me over), and the ever-great Burt's Bees lip balm with acai berry. With the lack of heat and humidity, I'm also loving not having to wash my hair every day, and the VO5 Instant Oomph Powder is my new favourite thing. I actually was inspired to try volumising powder after watching a men's hairstyle tutorial (don't even judge me), and this stuff is so good. Breathes new life into second-day hair, which, for someone with thin hair like me, is super handy.

On that very girly note (I hope I haven't scared away the 18.7 men who read this blog): what are you digging this week? If we had an hour to meet for coffee, what current favourite things would you tell me about?

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Conversations:

• Asea -- "It all comes down to the choices I make. I choose not to have a car or house because I want to be in grad school, and that means a very limited income right now. I choose to embrace the freedom of being single and child-free and use my time to travel. I choose to study a thing I love and do a job I like, rather than go for the super stressful career that eats my soul. Being a grown-up really means making all the choices, and living with their consequences. And, honestly, I really like most of the choices I have made, and I definitely like where they have taken me." This. This is so great.
• Meaghan -- YAY! I'm glad someone got my incredibly vague reference! And you're so right: you cannot unhear her say it once you know her voice! 

DanoWriMo

I don't think I ever talked about how NaNoWriMo went last year. I mean, I talked about it while I was in the midst of it, but did I ever say how it ended?

It was amazing. As you know if you were reading back then, I'd wanted to take part in National Novel Writing Month for years. Finally -- thanks in large part to the prompting of the ever-inspirational Laura -- it happened, and I couldn't have loved it more. I was genuinely rather terrified about the whole experience (not least because I think I got the beginnings of a plot idea like one week before start date? It was so sketchy!). I'm not a fan of failure and if I was going to do it I really wanted it to actually happen. Well I got there -- I got to 50,000 words on the very last day or perhaps the last-day-eve of November -- and I had thought prior that I'd be limping to the finish line if I got there at all. Not so -- which is the part I was so excited about. I reached the word count and there were still words left in me and I didn't hate it and I hadn't had too many moments of staring at a blank screen in the wee small hours while my retinas burned out. There were definitely moments when I was like, WHA? WHAT IS THIS STORY? And there were times when I wrote the most melodramatic waffle just to keep my fingers moving over the keys. But one of the best tricks was one that Laura (again) put me onto: word sprints. Set the timer for ten or fifteen minutes, and write like crazy for that time. Add a word count goal (try five hundred words in fifteen minutes!) for extra pressure. It sounds simplistic, but I'd never written faster in my life. Since NaNoWriMo, I've tried the technique at other times when the writing is lagging but I need to get some words out quickly. It's quite the miracle.

"Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year?" my mum asked, as we drove somewhere together yesterday.
"I'd like to," I replied, "but I'm doing DanoWriMo instead."
"Oh, good!" she replied. She took her eyes off the road for a sec to glance at me. "Is it good?"
"Oh, DanoWriMo is where I spend a month writing Hawaii Five-O fanfiction. You know. 'Book 'em, Danno.'?"
She frowned at me.
"Just kidding," I said. "It's Danielle Writing Month. Basically, I'm going to write a lot but on a lot of different projects."
And who'd have thought? That answer was so much more satisfying for my mother.

One of the reasons I've relished postgrad studies is because I'm forced to write on a lot of different topics and to deadline, but one of the things I hate about it is that it sucks my soul dry of any other writing time or headspace. With uni on hold between semesters, my goal is to dip into some unfinished writing projects, to submit to some places, and to get back into the swing of writing the stuff I can't get out of my head.

So here's to DanoWriMo! You folks can keep me accountable and ask me pointed questions when you see me, about whether I've written at all in the last twenty-four hours, or whether I followed up that invitation to submit. In the meantime, how can I cheer you on? Who's doing NaNoWriMo this year?

My novel ate me.

Nanowrimo is proving to be an exhilarating, terrifying ride. Whenever I'm called upon to explain the project, there's an inevitable question that follows: "And... is this fun for you?" I find myself pausing before I answer -- a lot. Trying to formulate a response to this question has had me asking myself, "Is this fun? Is any of it fun?"

I've come to the conclusion that, for me at least, there's only a very tiny aspect of the writing life that is just pure, delirious, unadulterated fun. It's those moments when the story has a firm hold on you and the present world ceases to exist while you are sucked down into a vortex of words and people and places that have somehow blossomed into life, apparently on their own. Those moments, when you are just dragged along for the ride, are the most fun.

Mostly though, for me, it's like trying to catch a cloud and keep it in your hand. There is this nebulous, vague, but seemingly important idea or picture or feeling I am trying to lay hold of, and every word I write is either chipping away at the rock that comes between me and the idea, or putting a clear line around it, waiting for each little fragment of the drawing to join up and turn this transparent whisp of condensation into a clear shape, an outline I can recognise and understand. Proving my point entirely, in this paragraph alone I have stumbled into a thousand metaphors in my attempt to make things clear -- and still I've failed.

What I'm trying to say is that, mostly, writing kind of hurts a little bit. There are rarely times when it doesn't feel like very hard work. I write with my stomach clenched and a frown line between my eyebrows. I write slowly, methodically, imperfectly -- none of which sounds like the definition of fun. And when the slow, methodical, imperfect work is done, I must go over it all again, seeing if I can make the imperfect just a little more perfect, the unclear just slightly more clear. I bump up against my own failings again and again, which also is rather not fun, and I see just how not-good I am at forming words into pictures, of making the untrue appear true.

But for some reason, I still want to do it, and this is the weirdest thing of all about writing. In trying to find something to compare it to, the only example I've latched onto is that of exercise. Exercise is horrible. If you're not born possessing the sporty gene, then it's just something that you have to drive yourself to do whether you feel like it or not. You have to wear ugly shoes, and you know you will get sweaty, and you might get a stitch or an ache in that part of your leg where it feels like there's a split between two bones that shouldn't be there. You do it anyway, though, because you know you must, and a part of you hates it the whole time.

But another part of you comes alive, and starts thinking thoughts in rhythm to the beat of your feet against the ground, or in time to the revolution of the wheels whirring underneath you. And you get sweaty and sticky and there's a hard, sharp stitch that the hateful part of you considers might be the beginnings of a heart attack. But the other part of you revels in the humidity and the knife-edge of the breaths going into your lungs, and that part of you tells you to do just five minutes more, and then another five minutes more. And then you are done, and the only part of you making any sense is the part of you that feels most alive now, and you can almost think that you're actually getting healthier with each hard-drawn breath you take, and you feel lighter than you did before you started, even though there's an odd click in your ankle that you suspect wasn't there before. And you know that tomorrow night, when you are tired and you just want to sit and watch tv, you are going to hate the thought of exercise all over again, but that tiny alive part of you will nag at you until you start moving again, and once more you will feel happy and alive and like this horrible horrible thing is what you were actually meant to be doing all along.

I think writing is a little bit like that -- for me, at least. It hurts and makes me ache but it's a good ache, the sort of ache that stays with me into the next day and reminds me that I have flexed a muscle that was made to be moved, that is all the healthier for having been stretched.

All of which, of course, I did not intend to say when I sat down to compose this post. I was going to write, instead, about the hazy sunset my mother and I drove out to shoot last night, and to give you a little sampling of the pictures. I was going to tell you how the nano novel is consuming much of my writing time, and is using up nearly all of my meagre store of words. I was going to say that I have no words left to give to such paltry pursuits as blogging.

But look! My own blog makes a mockery of me. I suppose that's as it should be.

NaNo is a go-go:

I think the face I am pulling here, in this delightfully-grainy webcam photo, is a look of cautious optimism -- either that, or concern for my mental welfare. Maybe it's a little bit of both.

Last year, I bemoaned the fact that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) falls ridiculously, cruelly, in November -- almost the worst month possible for such an undertaking, for those of us in the southern hemisphere at least. I mean, there's just so much happening, including (or sometimes especially) the end of semester finals and all the joy that comes with that.

This year, however, I'm already done with uni (thank you, bizarre trimester system) and although everything else is still happening, that is one sizable chunk of stress delight which I don't need to think about. I only made this realisation about two weeks ago, and the lightbulb moment brought with it glowing feelings of enthusiasm and a little madness. I could do NaNo this year. I could actually do it.

So I'm going to. And by "do it", I mean "attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days." I know the frenzy is part of it, and I'd really really love to reach that ridiculous finish line, but at the same time I'm excited just to be giving it a go, regardless of the consequences. I've waited years for this! Who else is joining in?

Of course, I feel ridiculously under-prepared. Friends I know have been outlining for weeks (months!) now, and many have their majestic plots all neatly laid out and ready for the prose work to begin. I have a half-baked idea that has been growing in urgency and interest for me, but which still has no clear ending, even though the characters are starting to make themselves known. This isn't my ideal scenario. I'd love to have a fabulous plot outline drawn up, with names and faces and character sketches of all the major players. As it is, however, I just keep getting more and more odd little ideas and filing them away mentally. I take comfort from the fact that NaNo founder Chris Baty seems to have taken the same approach as me every year he's actually participated. Somehow, out of his personal madness and lack-of-plan, novels have emerged.

That's my goal, too. Just a novel. Not a great novel or even a good one, but in the true spirit of Ann Lamott, I just want to have another really trashy first draft under my belt, written in the haze and frenzy of one busy month. It'll be a good kick-start to the writing system during these Summer holidays, when I'd like to get lots of words flowing.

What am I planning to write? Well, it's a buddy story with biblical allusions, and it's set in dystopian Brisbane -- which is frozen, no less. Also, there are aliens, because, well, because.

Yes, please go ahead and laugh. I am.

And while I may be laughing, I'm also super, super looking forward to this. I might just be a little bit in love with my main characters already. Onward!