"I heard the boom of a 2,000-word wall crash to the ground."
With rutabagas and crispy shallots dancing through my head, I scribbled furiously through the last two-thousand words of my first NaNo novel while watching the nine hundredth hour of the The Food Network Thanksgiving marathon. Soon, I too, would be sitting down to a delicious turkey feast, my NaNo experience, a sweet and exhilarating memory.
Oh, wait…
I still had to transcribe my hand-written NaNo novel into my computer. (My eyes tend to glaze over when reading FAQs and I kind of missed the part where it said you could verify your hand-written novel in two easy steps. But let’s not go there).
Hey, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like typing 50,000 words in two days from chicken-scratch notes discourage me. I knew my three famous friends would rush in and help me if I needed them.
Let me explain…
I first heard about NaNo from a fellow Wrimo on November 17. The idea excited and terrified me at the same time. I had never written a story longer than 2,000 words in my life. Could I write 50,000 in two weeks? That night, driven by an insane desire for a coconut cupcake, I drove to the local bookstore with its insanely good café and purchased my cupcake…and a moleskine notebook in which to write. Properly nourished, I opened the moleskine to begin my adventure when I noticed a piece of paper inside.
It told of the history of the moleskine and the men who had used one to make their own history: Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Bruce Chatwin (a noted novelist and travel writer). I felt that funny feeling you feel when it all comes together, when the planets align, you find a dollar bill in your pocket, and everything is right with the world.
I had my story! I would channel the tortured yet brilliant souls of all three men to help my protagonist finish a NaNo novel! I mean, talk about a creative support group. I commuted four hours a day by train and wrote in my moleskine until every page was weathered and felt “alive.”
Fast forward to November 30. I was typing downstairs in my makeshift office, the midnight hour looming before me. An Italian radio station was blasting music through ITunes as my head precariously hung in front of the computer, ready to crash into the screen at any second when…
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Holy you know what, it was the burglar alarm. It hit me that a crazy stranger could be thinking of taking off with my computer and ruin my chances of ever submitting my NaNo-novel. (The mind isn’t always rational when under pressure). I unplugged the mouse from the computer and thought I could swing it at the assailant’s head if it came right down to it. By now, my American bulldog, Sadie, was barking furiously.
“Where is my husband?” I thought when I saw him walk downstairs, half-asleep, and proceed to turn off the alarm before heading back upstairs.
“But…what if someone is in the house?” I stammered.
“The wind made it go off. Now get some rest.”
I knew if I lay down all would be lost, so I typed and typed and made it by midnight. I heard the boom of a 2,000 word-wall crash to the ground. For one stirring moment, I was invincible. I bade goodnight to Ernest, Pablo, and Bruce and slept sweet dreams until early afternoon. Since then, I’ve had two more NaNo victories and gone to lots of crazy places in the process.
Still, you never forget your first.
Barbara Plotkin Gilchrist resides in Madison, Connecticut with her brave husband, two wonderful kids, Beth and Mike, her trusty sidekick Sadie, two guinea pigs and a rabbit. She has promised her husband that in 2010 she will not use NaNo as an excuse to get out of unloading the dishwasher.
