It’s done. No eleventh hour finish, here. Remind me to get independently wealthy so I can spend three and a half hours writing whenever I want. Normally I take a great deal of pleasure in writing afterwords. It’s a little perk for novelists, so whenever I finish something substantial I indulge. But I can’t think of much to say about this one.
I’m proud of what I’ve got, but not for the usual reason. Normally I’d be exhausted from that much writing in one month, but I’ve been averaging 1100 words every day this year – so the added workload was actually negligible, which means this doesn’t feel so much like a Feat as it has in years past.
What I am proud of is evolution. On the previous “novels” (Yeah, I know 50k hardly counts, but humor me), I’d have a difficult time summing up the plot, because there was just so much of it. Three years ago, during my first Nano, I resorted to an absolutely byzantine plot. I remember explaining it in brief to a curious friend. It took about fifteen minutes, and by the end she still didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. By comparison, this book (title TBA) is difficult to sum up because it’s so simple: it’s about the life and death of a relationship. That’s it? Yeah, I’m happy to say. No shoehorned subplots, no cheap devices, and no reliance on all my old writing crutches.
And it only took me two tries to get it. Last year – the only year I’ve lost Nano – I had the same objectives going in as this year. I failed. Typically, the failure taught me something, maybe something as simple as: you weren’t ready. So I’ve been working harder, reading more, trying to do better. Word after word, until now I’ve got nearly a quarter of a million, all that to enable me to write this story.
If you know me, you know I’d kill to make a movie. I love the medium, and if I had ten million dollars laying around, I start buying cameras. But the reason I’m a writer and not a director is because I could never do it with other people. I’d hate to give up artistic control. Writing’s about as solitary an activity as it gets, and a tightly controlled one. It’s you and a word processor document. There’s nobody to tell you what you can and can’t do, and nobody to blame but yourself if something doesn’t work. It doesn’t permit excuses. So setting out to do something challenging, and to do it as well and as honestly as you can, and then finishing it? It feels good. Especially considering all the limitations in this world, all the people and institutions that say you can’t or you shouldn’t or just ask Why? It’s inertia (or ennui, if you like), and it’s worth struggling against, to do something that’s completely your own.
Though I’m moving through college, and there’s less people to wag their fingers at me, I’m still in the last slog of a long semester. I’ve got deadlines and demands on my time. But this – this was just for me.
Turns out I had an afterword in me, after all. Thanks very much for following along. Tomorrow I’ll be doing a post-mortem.
Words written today/total: 3072/50242
Pace: N/A
The End.
