I’m so dumb sometimes

So, last night, Friday night, I got to a little over 22,500 words on my NaNoWriMo novel. Still under half-way to the official minimum wordcount, but I had eight days left and only one class session to attend, so I should be able to bang out the other 27,500 words no problem, right? Heck, if it comes down to it, I can quote the other nearly 5,000 words I wrote during the first week of the month, before I set aside that novel until I had more time to devote to properly researching every detail of it, which means I only had to write, like, 22,500 more words! There’s going to be an article in the Arizona Living section of the Arizona Republic on the 27th detailing local efforts to write novels in a month, and the author is likely to mention that I was at 22,500 words when she interviewed me, so I better at least get past that point. Right?

Sure, except that today, Saturday, at noon (look I know it’s after midnight now, but pretend for a moment it’s really just extra Saturday) when I set down at Mill’s End Cafe & Creperie to devote ten or twelve straight hours to writing for my novel, I was feeling a little … forlorn. And the content at the point I’m at in the novel I was trying to write detailing my history of relationships is particularly intense. And last night I was made to feel bad for having experienced such things, and worse for writing about it. So at about 12:30 I saved what I had, I put away the materials I was referencing, and I started again from scratch.

Brand new novel, starting with a character fed up with the book he was trying to write and the people around him who labeled him a freak when they found out he didn’t just appear out of nowhere, he had a past. Twelve hours later, I have a little over 11,000 words written of this third attempt at a novel. If I can get an equal amount of work done on it tomorrow, I’ll have caught up to where I was yesterday, so I can start after class on Monday where I thought I was going to be when I woke up today. It’s like I’m unwriting. I keep working and working and working, and my word count keeps going backward, the goal keeps taunting me and jumping away.

I better be able to do it this time. I have to make some surreal sketches before class Monday, which is why I don’t think I’ll have a a free minute before I get out of class at 7:30PM. But I don’t officially have to go to class Tuesday, and Wednesday’s class is just supposed to be “continued work” on the final project, but so are all my waking hours until December 9th, really. Argh. If I can write 11,000+ words tomorrow, a few thousand Monday night, another 10,000+ Tuesday, several thousand Wednesday, write all day thanksgiving, and get another 10,000+ Friday, I can surely finish up the remainders on Saturday, the absolute last day to work on the thing. Yee-haw, three more 10,000+ word days, and next sunday you can come watch me bleed out of my eyes. We can make it a party.