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Friday, November 07, 2003

will... not... submit... will... not...

It's sucking me in. I'm trying to resist, I really am. But do you know what I was doing as I was mixing biscuits tonight? I was thinking about an idea for a story. Now, I have not had an idea for a story since I was in, say, eleventh grade. And this is A Good Thing, it really is, because, well, my ideas for stories had always historically been quite hokey, except before eleventh grade I didn't know any better and would actually write the stories, which generally, well, sucked, in the usual way that stories written by pretentious adolescents suck. But tragically, we never manage to find that out until we've written these things, shown them around proudly, and grown up -- only to look back in horror and embarrassment at the trash written under the influence of that haze called teenagerhood. In my personal case, I went from writing horse stories about girls named Katrina with Appaloosas who entered horse shows (age 12), to writing thinly-veiled future-fantasy stories about myself, my boyfriend or crush at the time, and our children (age 15), to writing angst-ridden self-important "deep" stories about girls who fell in love with boys only to find that the boys could never love them back because of some serious problem (like AILT) (age 16). And of course there were others along the way, frequently with characters all coincidentally bearing the middle names of my friends and me, rocking out and styling and learning to drive and having cool no-parents parties and getting boyfriends and all that stuff. These are just some of the more memorable actual examples, stuff that I would write and then promptly envision as the featured piece in Redbook, with the subheading "Riveting Fiction by Youthful California Prodigy" or something like that. Even the imagined subheadings were cheesy, see? Anyway. As you can tell, it was the by the providence of a benevolent God that I stopped inflicting this stuff on the people around me, right? So why, WHY, do I feel compelled to start afresh, years later, when really, I know better?


OK, I've talked myself out of it again. If I keep this up, I'll be safe, because NaNoWriMo only runs through November (November being, of course the Mo in NaNoWriMo), and then the pressure will wear off.

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