Monday, November 29, 2010

Post-Nano Blues

I want my Mommy! Or, better yet, a new story!
I'm not quite so sure that congrats are in order, but I reached the 50K goal for Nanowrimo yesterday. Yay. Great. Meh.

I just asked a friend of mine if the following is a valid and natural response to reaching your goal - in a post-Nanowrimo moment, you look at what you've written, and want to curl up and cry like a baby. Sound familiar? If so, in my professional opinion (which counts for squat, by the way), this sounds like a case of post-nano blues. Oh, the horror, the horror!

Symptoms of post-nano blues

1) Sense of hopelessness and despair, as you consider why you ever bothered to sign up for Nanowrimo in the first place.
2) Dizzying headache, as you acknowledge that you may have wasted an entire month just spewing out new crap, whereas you could have edited your old crap, or read a book on how to avoid writing crap.
3) Maniacal, hysterical laughter, as you accept that this is truly the most craptastic crap you have ever written.

Possible Triggers of maniacal, hysterical laughter:
a) Precipitated by a recognition of yourself as some sort of feckless fool lulled into the idiotic hope that you could have created something intelligible, without any editing, over a 30-day period.
b) Prompted by the awful stench of your bad writing, with its passive voice and stilted characterization, the perusing of which has now driven you completely insane.
c) Derived from a feeling of blissful luck that your solitary efforts have escaped the attention and eyes of others, who might be inclined to laugh hysterically if they ever saw what you had written.

Cure for post-nano blues: 
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Open to suggestions!

2 comments:

Michelle Gregory said...

keep writing. it's the only cure. or edit what you wrote. i think that's only a second best cure. but whatever works. we all write crap. welcome to the club.

Kristina said...

You made me laugh! I think the cure would be editing what you wrote. I just did that today as a way to inspire myself to move forward, and it refreshed my perspective.

And by the way, I laughed hysterically when I found a couple sentences I'd written that were just super strange. I can't even believe they sounded good at the time. I would give an example but it's too embarrassing.

Time flies when you're having fun, or writing novels.

It's been a tremendous twelve months. A new job and health issues have impacted my writing time, but I'm still at it, trying to wrap...