Camp NaNoWriMo - A Novel in 30 Days

I love to write.

I want to write.

I am afraid to write.

All of the above are true statements. The last truer than the others.

I am afraid to write because I am afraid I will write crap.

Everybody says it's all crap in the beginning, that's the way it works, and then it gets good.

When you edit, when you rewrite.

And I just. cannot. stand. it.

I don't want to spend hours churning out piles of filthy, smelly, fly-swarming manure.



I want pretty.

Right from the beginning.

I'm not a perfectionist, I swear.

Unless its art.

Art of any kind - music, painting, drawing, needlework, but most of all writing.

I want to write the good stuff right from the start.

So I end up rehashing, reworking, rethinking every single solitary sentence, phrase, word, punctuation mark until I suck all the heart out of it.

I've spent 2-3 hours writing, and I've got a whopping 100 words to show for it.

Now that's really a pile of crap.

So, what's a crap-hating, pretty-wanting, perfectionist-denying girl to do?

www.campnanowrimo.org

For the month of April, I'll be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, 

which means I'll be writing a novel in 30 days, 

which also means I will have no time to edit as my goal is 50,000 words,

which means I have to write 1,667 words a day.

At least. 

I know. Shoot me and all who live with me now.

My hope and prayer is that this will kill my inner editor and teach me to wallow in crap for a while.

Because digging through all the mess is how you find the good stuff. The stuff worth keeping.

So I won't be blogging much this month.

But I'll pop in every once in a while to share a tidbit of how things are going.

Here's the beginning!

She scrambled down the muddy embankment until her feet slipped into the swollen creek. Here she hoped to disappear. Already gone up to her ankles, she sank shoulder deep letting the dirty water cover her near nakedness. Her hands crawled along the bottom as she worked her way into the shadows. Her matted hair snaked behind leaving tiny ripples in its wake. Nestled into the crook of a fallen tree’s branches, Ashton shivered at the howling dogs in the distance. Even at 12, she recognized death when she heard it.