Apologies, Updates, and Terrors

If you hadn't noticed, "Pygmalion" has been put on the back-burner for quite some time. I have the blog on my quick-links at the top of my browser, and it's little orange "Blogger" icon has been giving me the look of death for weeks now. It's really quite terrifying. I just did the math, and it has been (gulp) three months since my last post. Here's a brief explanation of how these three months of totally barren activity upon the blog came to be:

For the first month, I had every intention of getting back to it. During the second month, I convinced myself that what I really, really  needed was a good outline (and it's true that I was hitting the point in the story where I felt like I was flying blind from point a to point b, and it causing all kinds of stress inside of my tummy). I believed that the outline would solve my writer's block, but you see, the problem with block is, it's one part actual lack of ideas and six parts terror that all of your ideas are crap, so writing an outline doesn't actually solve the block. At best, it can only be a way of speeding through the block. With month three, there came this mad thing called "University", and suddenly I was so caught up in the swing of making new friends, going to classes, attending parties, and essentially rediscovering myself that Pygmalion became the furthest thing from my mind. That, my dear readers, is why this blog has been so lonely for the last three months.

Now, on to the future! You see, there is actually a future to Pygmalion, and it has been inspired by none other than my favorite contemporary author, Neil Gaiman, himself. I was tooling around his tumblr this afternoon when I came upon this link. That link might have just changed my life. Go read it right now, particularly if you are a writer. I'm going to go home and pin that letter to my bulletin board AND my desk! That letter is what inspired the decision I made this afternoon. I am going to finish "Pygmalion" as a NaNoWriMo challenge.

For those of you who do not know, NaNoWriMo is "National Novel Writing Month". It is an actual, legitimate event that happens every year for the thirty days of November. Google it if you don't believe me! The idea is very simple. In thirty days, all participants of NaNoWriMo are attempting to write a 50,000 word first-draft from scratch. Now, those of you who are reading this might (fairly) be thinking to yourselves, "But Gardiner, you're definitely NOT writing this from scratch," and you'd be right. I'm not. I am continuing a novel that I've already begun writing, so sue me. If, you simply cannot abide this, here is how I'm justifying myself: I have just under twelve-thousand words at the moment. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 words novel. Therefore, in order to complete NaNoWriMo, I must come out of it with a manuscript of no fewer than 62,000 words. This seems perfectly fair to me.

Now, as I've already mentioned, I'm at College now, which doesn't leave a terribly large amount of time to write, particularly for people like me who a) take pride in the work they do at school and b) like to have a social life. I admit it, the thought of adding this much writing to my already busy schedule terrifies me. It makes me want to piss myself in fact. You know what scares me more though? The idea that I might not finish this novel. For a while now, I've been sailing on the high I felt when I finished my play last spring. Finishing that validated me. It made me feel like a "real writer". It isn't as though I haven't written for the last few months either. I finished a couple of decent short stories and some poems. Even so, the high from last spring is fading fast, and the need to further validate myself is growing even faster. Therefore, I have two choices. I can either cave into the fear of NaNoWriMo and how hard it will be and then suffer through the fear that I'll never finish "Pygmalion" and will therefore feel like less of a writer, or I can suck it up, try my best at NaNoWriMo, and carry on with a little less sleep and a less active social life for a month. Personally, I find the consequences of the latter choice to be WAY less terrifying than than those of the prior.

So, here we go, in twenty-two days NaNoWriMo begins, and I will continue writing the first draft of Pygmalion. It's true, the slightly sick feeling I get when I think of NaNoWriMo will probably only get worse as November draws closer in, but I've got a plan to keep myself in good spirits until then. I'm going to spend the month of October posting other writings on the blog (some of them Pygmalion-related, but not from the actual novel, others not related at all to Pygmalion), writing general posts about how terrified/excited/etc/ I am, getting a head-start on any and all of the schoolwork I'll have in November that I can do early, and finalizing the outline of Pygmalion so I have a pretty little roadmap to follow going into this madness.

I don't think I'll be posting the actual novel in November, just short (and quite possibly increasingly frantic) posts about how things are coming. If all goes according to plan though, I'll begin editing the first draft in December, and that's when posts will become more regular again. Trust me when I say, you and I will both be happier if what you read on the blog is not a first draft (me especially). Please be patient with me, and those of you who send me emails or stop me on campus to ask how the novel is going, please keep doing so! It's very encouraging!

So, if sometime around the eighth of November I develop a chronic twitch in my left eye or stop returning your calls (sorry in advance), you'll know why. It just means that I'm following my dreams, and I think that that's a perfectly legitimate reason to develop eye-twitches or not call your dear, loving, altogether quite understanding mother as often as you might. I promise that once November is done, regular levels of Gardiner-interaction will resume.

So here's a toast to following dreams, even in the face of chronic eye-twitches and a terrible lack of sleep!