PAgent’s Progress

Today is my daughter’s birthday. Under the heading of “special relativity” I must confess that it feels like she turned thirteen sometime last month, not last year. I know I have lectured her countless times that she “is thirteen now, and we have higher expectations” of her. Well, that lecture is now obsolete.

Have I mentioned that she’s almost as tall as I am now? And taller than her mother? Oy.

When I have not been pondering my daughter’s rapid ascent to maturity (and my own concomitant slide into senility), I’ve been worrying about NaNoWriMo.

As you probably know (or suspected), my own favorite genre is sci-fi, followed by fantasy. This should not be surprising. There’s a reason the stereotypical geek/nerd/man-boy is always shown on television LARPing his Elven Ranger, or wearing his homemade Mandalorian battle armor. So my first impulse is to write some Epic Space Opera, with FTL drives, hostile planets, and Machiavellian interstellar politics.

And with luck, three people might read it. For whatever reason, sci-fi fans tend to be prolific writers, and in the inevitable and predictable way of Gaussian distributions, most of what they write is utter crap. Even if I were to produce something readable, or even a shining gem of prose, it would never get anyone’s attention buried in that steaming pile of excrement.

On the other hand, I’ve always fancied myself a fairly humorous fellow. I think I can tell a joke well, and I love wordplay. Unfortunately, my sense of humor has rarely translated to the written page. My poems and short stories, even when intended to be a farce or satire, quickly turn grim. Most of what I write ends up in a place that’s very dark indeed, either through the raw emotions involved, or because someone ends up getting eaten by something horrible. Mind you, there’s a place for that kind of literature. It certainly worked out well for Stephen King.

But for this, my first attempt at anything longer than a short story, I thought I should definitely try for something lighter. It remains to be seen whether I will succeed. I’ve been rolling ideas around in my head for about a week now, and have a rough outline with some of the major characters at least initially sketched out. I have a title, and I even mocked up some cover art for my NaNoWriMo profile:

I was nervous, but optimistic about the whole thing.

Then I get an email today that includes “a guide to NaNoWriMo”. It features a timeline for the month of November, which includes such gems as:

As the first full week of writing comes to a close, you will be at 11,666 words. This is more fiction than most people write in their lifetimes, and you did it in a week.

Wait. What?

After the second week of writing, you will be at 25,000 words. This is the approximate length of such legendary works of fiction as The Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, and Twilight: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion

Hey, I’m not trying to draft War and Peace here, just some little piece of fiction to prove to myself that I can. Suddenly 50,000 words is looking insurmountable. Now I’m not just worried about typing that many words, but I’m worried about coming up with enough story to justify that many words.

I guess we’ll see how it goes. T-minus 34 hours and counting.

On the advice of a friend, I picked up a copy of “On Writing” by Stephen King. This was one of the most useful books on the craft of writing I’ve ever read, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who even daydreams about putting words together.