Tuesday, October 26, 2004

to novel or not to novel

I ought to be doing dishes. There is something foul in that sink, and I need it to go away. I ought to be working on my paper for BarbCobb, but she has extended the due date, which extends my procrastintion. I ought to be in bed. I have to get up pretty early in the morning, as usual. But somehow, I felt like I ought to blog.

Don't ask me why. I'm not so sure.

It's been a long ol' day. Tuesdays just are. It began with Shakespeare, where my mid-term was returned to me. He gave us a three-point acknowledgement of the fact that we were interrupted with a fire alarm and had to transplant ourselves during the test. Those three points turned my grade from an 87 to a 90. It feels a little cheap, but I guess it counts. But I sure don't think that's too bad for only having read approximately one and a half plays. Earth science was earth science as usual: mind-numbing. I came home after chicken with Justin and eventually worked on my lesson plan for tonight. Much to my surprise, I was fairly confident about it, but to tell you the truth, I hardly remember teaching. The time flew by, and I'm not sure I did a thing. But I got a 98 on it, so apparently, I did okay. She also handed back our research papers. 93, there. It was a 92, but I proved that my MLA was sound and snagged back another point. All these grades sound good, but you know what they say to me? Grades, numbers on a scale from 0-100, really don't mean a thing. They surely don't reflect my efforts. It's a mystery.

So I'm thinking about this NaNoWriMo thing. Maybe you've noticed the Thirty Days Hath November link on the left. And maybe you've followed it. If you have, you know that I've signed myself up to particpate in National Novel Writing Month, being next month. Participants are challenged to compose 50,000 words' worth of writing that could loosely be passed off as a novel in a span of thirty days. Do you realize how much that is? Let's look at it this way. In the past year, I've written approximately 91,000 words on this blog. That would make one month's work equal to over half of what I've written in twelve months. Well over 1,000 words per day. And this would be fabricated fiction, too. Not me droning on about the meaningless details of my life.

So why did I sign up to begin with? I don't know. I can't even write a paper over a week's time. I always have to wait until the last minute. This will require me to keep up a word-count quota every day. I think I'm insane. By signing up, that doesn't mean I have to churn out 50,000 words or some dark council will sacrifice me by moonlight, but if I start it, I want to complete it. And if I don't do it, I may never. [See previous post concerning things I want to do before I die: Write a book.] But it is honestly about the last thing I need to be doing. I do have a tendency to put a lot of effort into things I ought not, so this could be quite successful. However, that simple fact means I'll likely devote my entire month to this piece of crap and completely neglect everything else in life. And who made this thing during a month with a major holiday? Just because November starts with the same four letters as novel... I don't know. I'm just trying to decide if I should do it or not. I probably will. Stupid me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello hello! If you would, put a bunch of your random black and white pics on a disk or cd or something. It would be a huge prop. I told Paul about the whole idea tonight and he loved it. He was actually excited about it. He was even asking if we could put one on a buttion, t-shirt, sticker, etc. I said "I don't know." And of course, we'll give you all the free shit that we can. Love you Cass! ~Poppa Gumbles