fine whine

Back when I was planning out my PTO I'd picked today as the token day to finish out my novel. I had no way of knowing then that by the time I would reached this day I would have already given up on writing not one but two separate novels. This is in fact the case, as I posted on this Nano forum post, excerpted below in its entirety for those who do not want to read the rest of the conversation or are merely too lazy to click links:

I've decided to throw in the towel. I lost motivation about midway through the second day, plugged along with a couple hundred words of easy expository dialogue here and there until the 12th when I had a late night revelation of what I thought was a plot. I furtively wrote it all down (I wasn't at home nor near a computer) but in retrospect it's really only the skeletons of the beginning and ending. I'm missing the whole middle.

So I wrote nothing until Thursday the turkey day, when I conceded that a book I didn't care to write would be tough to make someone else care about reading, and I started over with a very slightly fictionalized account of my life, and where I am with careers and dreams and whatnot.

I milked a good 14,000 words out of that before losing steam, and today I am throwing in the towel. Last year I wrote 48,000 words about not being able to write, but this year I don't feel like mustering the effort to do those other 30,000 (if I keep the fourth thousand words I did for "Killers from the fourth dimension"). I'm sad to do it but unless I cheat I can't win this year, and it's a big step for me that I'm not going to try to cheat, I think. After all, I usually resort to cheating in video games before I give up.

I didn't care enough to even name my protagonist. For that matter I didn't even use a placeholder: I merely referred to him exclusively with personal pronouns.

Moreover I did consider cheating. What a hollow victory that would be, to claim that I'd won a contest judged on the honor system with no prizes other than personal satisfaction and individual pride. I could've easily found fifty thousand words to post, as I had already sized up the words I'd posted here this month. I even considered tracking down all the emails that I'd sent and replied going back to the first, but before I got too far along that shady path I saw the wisdom of my ways and posted my concession. I'm disappointed with myself and feel very defeated, but I'll move on easily enough, I think.

I have a much greater respect now for the people who succeeded in writing not only novels this month but novels in general. For now I think I'm a short story author. Do I even have a novel in me? We'll know next year, I guess. Time to play some video games and start the deluge of library reserves that have been stored up for the whole month, I suppose.