Nanowrimo 2014 – Day 28 + Currently Listening To

Current word count: 46, 608 words out of 50, 000.

I’m pulling another all-nighter. The thing with all-nighters is that they’re just not sustainable. It has such a detrimental impact on day-to-day life. But perhaps that’s part of the beauty of NaNoWriMo: for one month I can say, “I am going to write and that’s that.” It’s life on hold for one month while I set aside all the other priorities and focus on something I am passionate about. Every day of the year I am a frustrated writer. In November I can say that I am serious about writing. I set aside my prejudices regarding how much I dislike my own storytelling skills (my training is in sociological academic research and writing, and it’s a different realm), and I just sit there and give it a crack… so to speak. (Am I writing in Aussie-isms? I don’t know. I’m pretty tired and delirious right now.) The rest of the year I’m busy trying to put others before myself, trying to ignore my own dreams – especially those I gave up in order to be a “good” person. Writing is the one thing that has stuck with me, and I won’t let life steal it from me. Nano gives me a time and space in which I can say that I am going to write a story manuscript and I actually do it.

In the spirit of writing things in distinctly non-chronological order I am now going through the older chapters on Scrivener on my Mac Mini and adding in linking material. New characters are appearing. I had noticed a distinct lack of variety in the types of people represented in my story so I’ve been able to rectify that. The fact is, I live in a real world peopled with countless ethnicities and personality types, whereas in my writing there’s always that danger that my characters will be nothing but two dimensional representations of myself – Anglo-Celt, middle class, female, introverted, rural-centric, and somewhat eccentric (so I’ve been told). I wanted to confront that tendency in myself and explore the world from the perspective of “Others,” who may have different ideas and beliefs and values to me. In that sense, when handled well, creative writing can be a form of self-expansion. I want to be an inclusive kind of person. I can start with my forms of creative expression.

Anyway, I digress. While I’ve been writing tonight, I’ve been listening to classic alternative music from the 1990s. Please find attached at the bottom of this post a representative video clip of a song from the mix of bands I chose to write to tonight.