So, I have revisions to do. By January-ish. And I have a synopsis due by April… and this is not a problem. Except that I don’t outline. I have to finish my first draft, and THEN outline. That could be a tight schedule.

It could be tighter since I need surgery on my hand.

So: when I’m planning my revisions, I’m going to try to continue working on my current WIP, if at a slightly slower pace. And when I’m actually implementing the revisions, I don’t mind taking some time off the current one. I will probably have to buckle down a good bit.

I don’t remember which of these things came first, although I remember quite vividly where I was.

(1) I had just discovered Netflix, so I’d been getting a bunch of foreign movies – especially Japanese action movies – that I’d always wanted to see. At the same time, I’d been listening to the soundtrack of Rent a great deal. I had not been having the kind of year you can measure in love. It turned out to be the kind of year you can measure in broken bones. (Two). So as I was doing my weekly walk to the grocery store, it hit me that someone should write a musical about ninjas. And it would have a song in it called “Seasons of Blood.” I briefly considered that I should write a musical about ninjas, but in fact I have no experience with live theater or songwriting.

(2) I got back from a 12-mile bike ride feeling happy and energized. As I pulled into my parking lot, it occurred to me that a girl riding her bike across the country would make a great YA novel. But I had to ask, what would make a girl ride her bike across the country? And what would make her parents allow it? It could be that they’re just criminally neglectful, but that’s not the book I wanted to write.

So, I kept pondering, and I didn’t want to do much more than ponder because I was also writing a thesis at the time. I slowly got an impression of a girl who was sad, and very alone in her sadness – who couldn’t talk to her friends about it, partly because they weren’t really her friends anyway, partly because she didn’t yet have words for what she was feeling.

I needed to give these friends who weren’t her friends something to do. And I needed to make the book not just a sad book, but something silly and sweet and lovely too. And I remembered my idea for Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad, and it just… came together.

And then it took two years of tears, sweat, and rewrites. It’s never as easy as it looks.

And… I have it again! I have my hand on the pulse of the story, I think. In a way that will require massive revisions in my second draft, needless to say.

28,333 / 65,000 (43.6%)

26,767 / 65,000 (41.2%)

I still feel like I’m grasping for purchase with this novel; I still feel like I’m trying to get my claws in it and it’s eluding my grasp. But I saw something in it today – a certain desperate hunger. If I can put that hunger into the book, I think I can make it work.

This is the hard part of writing.

This is the part where I’m going forward with the knowledge that I’m writing really first-draft stuff. The conflict isn’t sharp enough. The descriptions aren’t sharp enough. I need to bring out this character more, because she’s extremely interesting, and I’m letting her be window dressing.

And I think that I’m not going to be able to write a good novel again.

Then I remember that there were a thousand times I thought that about Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad. Yes, it needed revision. Yes, there were some parts that I had to completely rewrite because they were unspeakably lame. Yes, there still are some parts I may need to completely rewrite. But I got at something true there… and not on the first draft. I had to go at it with an ice pick to get to the parts that scared me.

I just have to go forward with the blind faith that somehow I’ll do it again, and the dark swampy part is — somehow — a vital part of the trip.

November brings many things to mind. Turkeys. Cranberry sauce. Cursing out the stores that put their Christmas decorations up in the first week of November. Breaking out the hot chocolate and winter coats.

Sobbing over the computer virus that just ate 20,000 words while you phone up tech support and beg for help.

It’s that time of year again, National Novel Writing Month. When thousands sit down at their computers dosed on caffeine… and dozens appear from the woodwork to grump that the world has enough bad novels in it and for heaven’s sake stop encouraging them.

I believe in bad novels. I believe that NaNoWriMo teaches perseverance, fearlessness, creativity after creativity runs out, the ability to laugh at oneself and the whole ridiculous enterprise of writing fiction, the nobility of pure effort. No fiction writer can get by with just those – but at the same time, I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Most of all I think that we need to poke as many holes as possible in this culture where we consume rather than create. Most of us get our food and our clothing from major corporations, one way or another. And then, our fiction and television and music and news come to us via major corporations. This feels wrong to me; I chafe at it. It’s not as if I’m going to run away and live off the grid and raise my own chickens, but I do think that it’s right to take as many opportunities as possible to create instead of consume, to be playful and discover what we can do by ourselves. It’s about something more than good novels versus bad novels; it’s about participating rather than tuning out.

I believe in craft and practice and not settling for the second-best word and doing so many drafts you never want to see the novel again. But I also believe in writing badly. So, happy NaNoWriMo to all of you who are participating. Good luck and good coffee.

I am writing again. Always disappointed that the apostrophe is so far to the right, typing nine-fingered, but writing; and on schedule to finish a first draft by the end of February if all goes well, if I don’t have surgery.

Really there’s no reason why I should have to finish a draft by the end of February, and it probably won’t make any difference in the long term whether I get operated on before or after I finish a draft, but I’m getting twitchy about having enough time.