Dear Daniel

Dear Daniel,

Here I am 25K+ from my goal on NaNoWriMo. For those who read this blog don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. And I’ll be honest Daniel, you don’t know me, and the reality is will never know me, by that’s not what this blog has ever been about so I’m going to talk about my current state of mind and my mind’s current state is this. It is exhausted.

Let me explain. NaNo is 50K in one month. However, I am attempting 70K overall. I’ve never done that before. Ever. The furthest I’ve gotten is 60K and that was after trying to get out of it, several times. It lead to my first advance, which I gave back because they wanted to strip my voice out of the manuscript.

Don’t get me wrong they were nice people and it’s a fabulous indie publishing house but it wasn’t the kind of fit I was looking for. It meant turning down a 500 dollar advance. Which in this world was very hard to do.

But as I said it’s a year later and I know 70K is within my grasp but I’m very, very tired. When I tell my parents I’m toast after a day’s work they think I’m nuts. Point is after all the tweeting, FBing, and blogging one should be sick to death of even being on line, yet, it’s part of the daily grind.

Now, I love writing. Penning tales is kind of my thing. I feel like something’s wrong if I’m not writing. Like maybe I’m fidgety and my skin starts to jump. I’m restless and without direction. I wonder if it’s like that for other artists, that is you’re not creating you feel like perhaps something is just off.

Which brings me to the flipside of that, the exhaustion. My parents are tolerant of my pursuit of my creative endeavors. In my dad’s eyes my mother is a saint. And to some degree she is. But no one is perfect. 

Especially her or me. Dad is pointed in his assessment of this. He says living at home bothers me more than it bothers them. Of course it does. I spend two thirds of my time in that room. Partially because it’s conducive to writing and partially because it protects me from whatever particular mood they’re in that day.

Back to #NaNo. I struggled in the beginning. I thought, how am I going to make it to 50K? And then I realized what was blocking me. I had never written an EPIC before. A book with varying viewpoints. Flashback fully realized. And characters, even the bad ones, could have humanizing qualities. Innocents turned bad due to circumstances beyond their control. Heroes who are inherently flawed making them more anti-hero than hero. And with only one true heroic character, the heroine, I suddenly realized somewhere between 5K-15K that this book could go the full 70K distance. Which truth be told was still a little too short for NY but it just might wiggle through if it was good enough.

What makes things so awesome is I have my own personal cheerleader in someone I will not mention because I don’t know how they feel about me using their name. Of course there’s a part of me that doesn’t want me to share her. She simply too awesome.

Sincerely,

Amy McCorkle