Why I Love Strands of Starlight

I picked up Strands of Starlight by Gael Baudino almost entirely because of the cover art -- the rest of the motivation I needed involved the description including the Inquisition and Elves. I've never been shy about my feelings in regard to the usual wisdom that one shouldn't "judge a book by its cover" -- that wisdom applies better to people than to books. Cover art is no less art and their visual design and appeal are important. Thomas Canty's work brought me to a lot of good fiction - particularly the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror collections put together by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. The more important part here was that I picked it up at all, and that I was a teenager.

It's no big secret that I was sexually abused as a child. In spite of that -- or perhaps because of it -- I found my peace in school and learning, in roleplaying games and speculative fiction of all sorts (fantasy, science fiction, horror). I had more adult friends than peers my own age. Though I was assigned a therapist by the state, I didn't find him helpful. What 16 year old would?

It's been nearly 20 years since I was an angry teenager in a therapist's office, arguing with him over what he thought he knew about me and what I knew about myself. I still think he was wrong; I didn't blame myself and didn't need to move through the step of admitting that I blamed myself so that I could realize it wasn't my fault. I already knew that, I already knew people could be "sick in the head" since my father was an alcoholic and abused my mother. I wasn't burdened with guilt from thinking I had caused my own abused and maybe that's really what saved me.

Still, as I've gotten older, as I've learned to reflect more on my experience of being human and what I've learned about the human experience through stories, I sometimes have epiphanous moments where I better understand myself and the things I've loved.

I have loved Strands of Starlight from the moment I started reading it. I have loved it for more than 20 years, though I never could quite put my finger on why, beyond the facts that:
1) the cover was beautiful
2) Baudino's storytelling voice flowed well for me
3) it mixed real world bits with high fantasy bits -- I hadn't experienced magical realism yet, though I feel a strong connection to the stories that seed our reality with magical possibility.

I heard three words today: Redemption through Transformation. And I suddenly knew what I'd been trying to figure out for so long, what I'd been so close to figuring out on more than one occasion when I found myself looking at this book -- holding a copy I'd found in a used bookstore in my hands, or dusting off my second copy (I lost the first), or preparing to send a friend a copy because it was like giving them a piece of my soul even if they didn't know it.

As part of the story, Miriam, the protagonist -- like so many protagonists -- can only achieve redemption (and revenge) through transformation, and it occurs on a very literal, physical level for her. As a teenager, I was essentially powerless. As an adult, it isn't a whole lot better. But I needed to believe in the possibility of setting things right, of gaining some modicum of control over things happening to me in my life.

As a teenager, I lost control of a lot of things, including my body. When I manifested Hashimoto's and my thyroid ceased regular function, I put on a lot of weight in a very short amount of time. This loss of bodily control was just as hurtful to me as my abuse, maybe more so since there wasn't someone doing this to me... my body was doing it to itself.

I saw this in Miriam, too. I related strongly, even if I didn't realize it, to the figure of a girl who had done nothing wrong but was treated by a dominant system as though she were guilty of some crime. For Miriam, it was her power of healing which didn't fit the church's paradigm. For me, it was being asked what I did to provoke my abuser - a man of nearly 40, when I was 6. It was being accused of lying and stealing by a foster mother who was more accustomed to younger children. It was having my escapes taken away from me by a religion-sponsored children's home. And Miriam did the thing I wanted to do -- she escaped to a world where people valued her and didn't care about her past. And she changed. She took power for herself. Without spoiling the story -- because of course I hope you'll read it -- she did the things I wanted, needed to do, even if I hadn't consciously realized it.

Maybe this is also why I like "unlikeable" characters, like Miriam or Meche. But that's a whole other can of worms...

It seems silly and oversimplified, put like this. Stark black letters on the white (digital) page.  But it's powerful and it was a story I needed as a teenager, and to an extent still need today. We all need stories like that; stories that tell us that we are not defeated, that someone like us can, has, will find a way through the pain and suffering and will find beautiful things.

Is it always happy endings and rainbows? No. I would argue it isn't even often happy endings and rainbows, but that's not what hope is for or about.

The End Again: National Novel Writing Month

Last year I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and I was a bit cynical. As I struggled through the process, I learned a lot about MY process and a lot about the gaps in my writing toolbox. I only achieved half the goal for the month, but I like to think that what I learned (and the sheer amount of outlining and brainstorming that happened) made up a little bit for the lack of words on the page.

The truth is, nothing can make up for words that don't make it onto the page. Every word written is better than a word unwritten, and last year, I barely cleared 25,000 words. (And of those words, most of them were backstory for the world in which I thought I was writing. They weren't even ABOUT my main character, though they had some historical significance.)

This year, I decided to try a different approach and it seems to have worked out for me, though it didn't work as planned. (It never goes as-planned.)

I decided I wanted to write some specific types of short stories and based on average length estimates, I projected I could churn out 5-7 stories during the month of November.

I just can't seem to follow the rules though. (Incidentally, I have similar trouble when game-mastering and trying to use a module. I just can't do it.)

I started out working on a story about half of a set of twins and a graduation party. I finished that piece on the fourth day. At that juncture, I wasn't sure where to go, so I fell back on a character that'd been wandering around in my brain for a while. I started writing about her encounters. I thought it might be good for a couple of the projected stories. Then it got away from me and I just kept writing. So, the first 8956 words were on one project, but the rest were on this one character and her world of experience.

There are still a LOT of things unwritten and the majority of them are purely the happenings in her personal life. While that may be compelling (or not), I feel like I need to observe her character arc and give her a story arc with which to interact. Or maybe not. I know for now I will keep writing. My "master document" tells me I have over 83k words, which includes a lot of notes and some outlining, while my solid word count - which does not include those outlines/notes - comes in at 55,372 words as of today. (Today was a small day, 522 words on an incomplete scene.)

Did you participate? Did you "win" (I still hate the win/lose dichotomy - if you learned something, if you produced something, you are winning at writing)?

Feel free to share your thoughts, your victories, your defeats. Or ask me questions about mine. I'm not a professional writer (using the definition of 'being published, making money at it'), but if I've learned anything from my time talking to writers, observing writers, and writing... it's that we are all on a journey together. It's not a destination, it is ALWAYS a journey... and everyone has something they can teach and learn.

Wells of Words: The Books We Come Back To

Recently, Stant Litore (The Zombie Bible) conceived of the notion to collect a library of sorts for his daughters River & Inara. I won't try to over-explain it, he does a fine job of saying just what it is over on his blog. (I encourage everyone to read through the contributions; it is beautiful.)

As I considered what quotes and what books I'd share in this particular light, I started to notice a trend in the sorts of books I quote.

First and foremost, whenever I am asked to offer a quote from a beloved book (we might take a moment to remember that I love books of all sorts) I come back to two particular texts without fail:

The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams

and

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

With The Velveteen Rabbit, it is always the same excerpt:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. This sentiment is the reason songs like Iris (by the Goo Goo Dolls) speak so strongly to people. We are so afraid of being flawed, ugly, broken in the sight of the people around us that we forget we are always beautiful in the sight of those who love us - and that those who love us are the ones who matter most in this life.

On the other hand, with The Last Unicorn, I tend to pick and choose (there are SO MANY quotable bits in that book (many are maintained in the film)) to suit the audience doing the asking. In the case of Stant's Library, I offered the excerpt about heroes knowing the order of things - it is a testament to the Hero's Journey and the cyclic nature of our personal narratives, not just those of fictional personae. But in truth, it is Molly Grue when she meets the Unicorn... this is the true quote that lives carved into the inner walls of my heart:

“Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.

When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. "You don't talk like that," he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. "Don't you know how to behave, woman? You don't curtsy, either."

But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down.

"I am here now," she said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."

"She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you.”

And really, of all of that, the only parts I needed to know were Molly's words, "Where have you been? ... How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" All the weight of her life is in that simple four-letter word - this. I didn't need Mr. Beagle to explain what she meant (though he helpfully does for those who may not know/understand); at sixteen years old, wrung out from a childhood of particular abuses, strained family relationships, few friends, several upheavals, foster care, an orphanage, a new home or two every year, I already knew what Molly meant - and this is why her words are the true quote for me from all of that wonderful tome.

All of this really brings me around to this question: What words, what books have etched their words into your heart and/or mind? When you're asked to offer up a favorite quote, from what well do you draw your bucket?

Getting Back on the Horse

Getting Back on the Horse

I've always been curious about the phrase "getting back on the horse" and how it is used to describe the act of trying something again. Have you ever fallen off of a horse? That's probably the worst part, followed by the fear of falling off of it again. The expression sums up continuing on despite the fear of failure and pain in the future...

So what kind of phrase should one use when it's just that you have a hard time forming the kinds of habits you ought to be forming? Things like going to bed at a decent hour, maintaining your writing space, or writing every day? Or, in this very specific case, keeping an active blog?

It might be easier if it were something that provided more to me than a soapbox - I don't really like being on a soapbox, or a stage, or any focal point of attention. It might be easier if I were being paid (but I don't think I'd like that either). But, they also say things about easy and doing well...

Who are they?

In any case, this is me chiding myself aloud about falling off this blogging horse and promising that I will try to be a more consistent writer; both here and on my creative projects, which I hope I can share a little about here as well.

On my list of to-do's, I want to go back and revisit the Story Board videos at Geek & Sundry, the way I did with the first one (on Urban Fantasy).

Six Sentence Sunday, at least as a large group activity, disbanded shortly after I participated for the first time  -- I may adopt the idea as a way to share my creative work without posting it in full here.

And all the other things I've already talked about last year and didn't manage to follow through on.

I'm also open to suggestions, either submitted in the comments or sent via email.

The Cost of Kindness

This morning I woke up, read some more of Stephen King's "Full Dark, No Stars" and then went out for some errands. I've been in need of sundry bits and a couple of nice shirts that would be appropriate for more-than-casual appointments or potential interviews. After knocking out a couple of stops, I went to grab a sandwich for lunch from the nearby Subway.

As part of my own sort of self-therapy (and because I'd had a good morning of reading and thinking about my own writing), I tried to smile at strangers, to make at-least-polite eye-contact, and to just be as pleasant as humanly possible. The idea being that not only would this help me feel more comfortable, but it might actually improve someone else's day. This, unfortunately, has a pretty messy price. It leaves me feeling a little spent - it really is an effort to not simply shut down to all the strangers milling about in a store. But it also seems to create in others an expectation of who I am, of what I am to them.

It says something when I explain that I know when someone is about to ask me for money. As I came out of the shop with my sandwich, I made brief eye contact with a slight smile and then went for my car. I wasn't worried that this person was going to do anything harmful to me, but I could see the shift in his body language and he altered his path to intercept mine. I was closer to my car however and had determined that I just wanted to leave. I was pulling out of my parking space when he entered my field of view again, this time in front of my car. I had no choice but to stop.

Of course, he approached and told me his story. This one was simple. He was 50 cents short for bus fare, if I had some change or could help him out, he'd be very appreciative. I didn't have any cash. I looked in my change tray. I had two brand new pennies that weren't superglued (by goodness knows what) to my console, so I was apologetic and offered them to him. He said something I couldn't quite understand and I said, "I'm sorry?"

At this point, he wasn't aggressive and I am not sure he was actually talking to me anymore.  He'd completely dismissed me now that he'd gotten the change I had and there was no further use for me. I didn't even get to wish him luck or give him a "God bless you" which is the standard exchange I'm used to with strangers who approach me for money in parking lots. But I could tell he's annoyed.

Did I want to avoid him? Yes. Did I want to leave as quickly as possible? Yes. Did I want to do it because I thought anything negative about him? Not particularly. It had everything to do with me being a means to an end, with knowing I would be wedged into a situation where MORE kindness would be asked/required from me than I could give at that time. And my deep-seated dislike of disappointing people. It also happens frequently enough that I've learned to recognize that it's going to happen - this means it happens a lot.

I find myself with very real justifications for the patterns of social behavior I'm trying to correct. Situations like this feed my anxiety and encourage me to close up and pretend other people don't exist.

"Kindness doesn't cost a thing." 

For those who struggle with anxiety, this is so far from true. Kindness given by an unwanted or unwelcome encounter feels essentially forced. It doesn't reciprocate, it doesn't feel good at all.

On top of that, every person that approaches me for monetary help brings back with them every person I've met in that way. The homeless man I spent 15 minutes talking to one day about surgery and the infection on his leg, the parolee whose family wouldn't take him in, the man who ran out of gas, the woman with three kids leaving an abusive husband, another parolee trying to keep himself in school, and a few others whose stories blend together. Sure, some of them could've been - probably were - cons. I knew that the moment they engaged me, and I decided that there was no way for me to know and that I would give them all the benefit of the doubt.

With all these stories though comes the emotional battery that some of us experience when taking on the burden of another person's tragic story. If I am to have faith in these people, I have to believe their stories. If I believe their stories, I cannot help but empathize, or at least sympathize, with every one of them. Their stories become my stories and that is what guides me to help them - tempered with keeping my own well being and means in mind.

Today I could only give the man 2 cents from my console and he did give a quick thanks, but then he was done with me. Obviously, I'm still carrying some of him. I hope he got the change he needed to get the bus he needed and that he got where he needed to go. I hope all of them did.

I don't remember where I was going with this other than to say that we bandy about the idea that kindness doesn't cost a thing, but it does for those of us who really consider what it means to treat others the way we would want to be treated. How do we know how we'd like to be treated unless we can slip on the other person's shoes to consider how we might like to be treated in their place?

Insert Witty Title About: Graduation

My PTK tassel is hiding somewhere.

So, I finally graduated from step 1 of college (it's a 4 step plan).

I now have an Associate of Arts degree from the Community College of Aurora. Graduated Summa Cum Laude, and during my time there completed 3 literature-oriented Honors papers and delivered 2 public lectures.

Lectures:

Lecture on Charles Brockden Brown & Edgar Allan Poe - December 6, 2012

Lecture on HP Lovecraft & Stephen King - May 2, 2013

(this video came to me in 3 parts and the software I used to merge the files causes the audio and video to fall out of sync. I am attempting to fix this issue and will fix this link with a corrected upload as soon as it is available. But - you can still LISTEN. There are no important visuals.)

Obviously, I finished all of the things that've been looming over me for coursework and now it is time for Summer Break before I embark at the University of Colorado Denver. Also called UCD, also called CU Denver - I haven't figured that one out yet.

I find that I don't really have much to say about graduation. It is a thing that happened; one step that allows me to move on to the next step. This is like every step. One, then another. I'm sure it was some excellent Zen poet who said that life is not about the destination, but the journey -- long before Emerson did. (Not that Emerson is a bad guy.) Maybe it was Matsuo Basho.

Fleas and lice biting
Awake all night
A horse pissing close to my ear.

Now that it is summer break, I hope to get some writing done both here and in my projects folder. I need to learn more, hone more, and get some things out into the world. In the meantime, I'm greatly enjoying my opportunity to immerse in books and research and intellectual discussion of topics like:

Just what IS magic realism? Feel free to offer some thoughts in a comment box. Research without thoughtful interaction is too stale for a topic like this (or in discussing and thinking about any genre).

On Being Ready or Not

Lately, I feel ready for almost nothing.

This spring is my final semester at the Community College of Aurora. I will be graduating with my Associate of Arts degree (no designation as we did not have the approval for the Literature focus when I started), and a 4.0 GPA (assuming I maintain it, and I have no reason to think I won't). I'm wearing this thing and myself out as though it were a much larger degree, I think. I'm not ready.

On my plate:

• Honors Paper - H.P. Lovecraft as the man who took the torch of Gothic horror explorations of the human condition, and carried it down that long hall into the future, opening the door and letting its light gutter in the escaping air and then spread its light and shadows over the rest of us. I'm lacking a solid thesis and there are only 8 or so weeks left in the semester.
• Research Exhibit - Sally Ride. A group project but only 2 of my other 3 members are even trying.
• Creative Writing (II) - "Murder Hobo" (I feel that my stories tend to have codenames rather than working titles.) Progress is slow on a level that would make molasses feel fast. I'm afraid I'm going to fall short on all of my goals in that class.
• Japanese (IV) - Final semester and the most intense as far as taxing my ability to remember anything, ever.
• Literature (American, Post 1865) - In addition to our short and excerpted works, we are reading two novels. One we just started this past week. The other I will start, regardless of the class schedule, once I have finished Richard Wright's Native Son. This class is particularly intensive due to the comprehensive and conceptual-understanding nature of the tests.
• Commencement Address - I am one of (I don't know how many) students applying to be the student speaker at my graduation. This week is the deadline for the application. I'm having trouble explaining what I want to say to my fellow students, or even knowing what I'm WORTHY to say to them.

All this segues into my introduction of a blog post that I found hiding and unread in my email box, by Andi Cumbo, over at AndiLit. I'll give you an excerpt here and then I encourage you to go to her blog and read the whole post (even her whole blog!). Andi teaches writing courses, online and sometimes in person... this excerpt is from the spirit of a talk she gives her nonfiction students, but is just as relevant for any kind of writing:

...you have to be ready for critique. You have to be ready for your classmates and I to talk about HOW you wrote about this subject, and while we will do our best to stick to the HOW and not the WHAT, it can be hard to separate those things in our writers’ minds and hearts.  Very hard.  So before you turn something in, be sure you are ready to hear it taken apart a little.

You'll have to go over to her blog post to read the rest: "Writers, Are You Ready?"

Sleep & Introversion

First: I am an introvert.

Pretty much every psychological personality model includes this (or its counterpart, the extrovert) concept. Of course, despite the fact that most people think in black and white, either-or situations, I don't lack extroverted features and sometimes seem void of the exterior indicators of introversion; I'm not always reserved or quiet, sometimes I'm quite talkative and energetic. In this sense, I tend to agree with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator 'philosophy'  (I've been told this is also Jung's approach) that personality traits work like genetics versus a spectrum. While we have the coding for both "types" of behaviors, one is more dominant than the other. (In some cases, like my MBTI, two aspects can be very close to equal in dominance - for me, I am an INFP, but sometimes I am an INFJ. P/J often score within a point of one another and circumstances determine which has the upper hand.)

Introversion according to Merriam-Webster:  "the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life". While I typically love language, I don't like this definition. I care about a LOT of things that have nothing to do with my "own mental life" but that still live amicably with my nature as an introvert. Maybe I'm splitting hairs. I'm not particularly up to challenging Merriam-Webster at the moment, in any case.

All of this, however, is early morning rambling that doesn't relate directly to my topic except in a background sort of way. I should also be honest and say that it is nearly 2:30pm and nowhere near "early morning" in the way most people understand it.

Second: I am a night owl.

Given the opportunity, my sleeping pattern shifts drastically and "naturally" to a pattern that would most often have me sleeping somewhere between 4am and 2pm. Science will argue that this is not a natural sleeping rhythm, that perhaps I have a sleeping disorder. Parents and other "adults" would and have argued that I just need to "train" myself to sleep during "normal" hours and that before I know it, I'll be sleeping in those times and won't think anything of it. And, of course, there's the blame - that this sleeping pattern isn't normal, even for me, and that I ruin it on my own by indulging in bad behaviors.

I don't accept the "blame", but I do accept the responsibility.

I am a night owl due in part to the fact that I am also an introvert.

The daytime, when the world is full of sunlight and businesses are open, is full of noise. It's not even just audible noise - it's a buzz somewhere beyond hearing. It's life and busy-bodies and rushing and doing-things. That buzz creates real noise, too. People moving around overhead, on the sides, outside, inside, laundry, dishes, running water, televisions, computers, YouTube videos, the Disney channel, keyboards, telephones, voice chats, yelled conversations from one endpoint of the house to the other, cars, horns, music, traffic...

"That's one thing I hate! All the noise, noise, noise, noise!" (I love you, Mr. Grinch.)

At night, the world goes to sleep. For the most part, televisions are turned off, cars are parked, people are sleeping instead of talking, no one is doing chores, taking showers, washing laundry, running dishwashers... At night, it is as though everyone's left the pool, they turned on the heating coils and FINALLY I can relax. Sometimes this is disrupted if I choose to play around in an MMOG, but that's a risk I can choose to take or not.

Night is comfortable and quiet and decidedly uncrowded. It's when I can hear myself think, when I can unwind enough and even my anxieties slink off into a corner and rest. The only worry that bothers me? "What will other people think when I "sleep in"?"  And even that worry has been muted by years as an adult and reasoning - If I'm only sleeping 8-10 hours, I'm not exactly wasting any more of the day than someone who sleeps that long during "NORMAL" hours.  (With my thyroid issues, I struggle with fatigue, so 9  hours is fairly ideal for me.)

The idea has eluded me for years. I could never figure out why everyone would tell me that my inclination toward sleeping during the day and being awake at night was wrong, abnormal, broken, and why it felt the very opposite of those descriptions. It wasn't until this morning, when I put down the book I'd been reading (Hellbent, by Cherie Priest - enjoyed the first, enjoying this one, want more) and wondered why I wasn't yet tired at 3:20am that I put it together.

The world is a busy, messy place, and the only time I can actually drop my awareness of the rest of the world is when the rest of the world is no longer a press or a threat to my psychic space. (Maybe we can talk more about that another time - but yes, people who are awake and have access to my personal space are perceived as potential threats, or presses for attention of some sort. This keeps me in an alert state in which I cannot do things like read.)

Resetting this sleep pattern to accommodate work and school is going to be a little unpleasant, but there's no reason not to enjoy the serenity while it's available.

Maybe later I'll also talk about why there wasn't a New Year's Eve post, or even a Christmas post.

The End: National Novel Writing Month

National Novel Writing Month. This year, I finally decided I would participate. I signed up on the website, I outlined a little bit, I pondered it over in the week leading up to it... then I started two days late because I found myself with an outline but no real direction.

At the end of the month, I have accumulated just over 25,000 words on a single project. Sort of. Some of the pieces feel like they belong to distinctly different stories though in my mind they are all part of the same world. Some of it was world-building, as opposed to the story arc of my main protagonist(s) (never even met the secondary protagonist).

My NaNoWriMo Graph

Do I think I "failed"? Absolutely not. I may not have churned out the 50,000+ words of other writers, I may not have "WON" the event that NaNoWriMo is celebrated to be... but I wrote 25,000 words related to ONE project. That's a lot, given that I'm much more comfortable in shorter, smaller territories. I did fail though, in one important regard - and it's the one thing I believe kept me from generating the 1,667 words per day.

I failed to KNOW my characters very well. I didn't know my characters, so it was very difficult to invest in their story. Certainly, I find their story interesting, or I'd have thrown it to the wayside immediately.

The pieces that got me to and beyond my daily word goal? Those were about characters I adapted from other half-formed stories in my mind, characters that I've played with and known in some regard or another (some of them for several years). These were easy. I knew their internal landscape. I could put them in situations of varying types and I'd know how they'd react, respond, what they'd get out of those situations, how they might change and develop... I knew them.

Kyern, though? The first of my two main protagonists? I don't know him. What I do know of him, he doesn't know yet. I know he's young, a little confused, and pretty much 'lost' in the world. He lives his day to day life and that's all there is. At the beginning of this story, he doesn't yet know ANY of the things that might make him more interesting. He's pretty much just a regular kid (young adult, but... kid) who has a very irregular destiny ahead of him. I found exploring his life, his daily routine, to be rather boring - but I needed to explore it to get to know THIS much about him. (I did discover an old man who is pretty interesting though). Novel-story progression is slower... maybe not as slow as my mind has painted it, but slower than a short story's nonetheless. I learned a lot from it and about it.

I have to say that I did not get very much use out of the NNWM community. I don't need the pep talks, and I don't like the socialization aspects of it. I also don't like the competitive nature it evokes when it declares those who reached the 50,000 words "winners" - that means that everyone who didn't (even if they didn't give up) are losers... and that's incorrect. (If there are "winners", there are "losers" - that's how the dichotomy works.) Maybe I'm being overly semantic. Maybe I think that the people who really won are the people who will keep writing, who didn't stop writing even when they knew they weren't going to reach 50,000 words...

In any case! I participated, I did not reach 50,000 words in 30 days, and in the future I will not be participating within the "official" capacity again.

I wrote.
I outlined a novel (or series!) length story, which is something I've never done before.
This story is interesting.
I don't need a 30 day "writing competition" to tell me that I'm worthy, that I am a writer.

Maybe what really bugs me is that I don't think the word "won" even has a place in this process. I think there's did and did not.

I did:
A lot of things I'd never done before, including writing (almost) every day on a singular project.

I did not:
Reach the 50,000 word goal within one month.

When compared to one another? One of those things has significantly more weight than the other.

The end result is that NaNoWriMo isn't a fit for me. I'm very, extremely happy for those people who find it to be a useful motivator and tool, but now I know it doesn't serve the same purpose in my personal space.