Nanowrimo Snippet

Haven't had much opportunity to post lately, but this came out of my nanowrimo novel tonight, and I thought I would share it.

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There is a story told in the village of a man who leaves his family to find God. He travels far and wide: to the tops of high mountains, the depths of dry deserts, into the middle of trackless swamps and across wide prairies. He searches in forests and arctic wastes, along forgotten shorelines and in lost grottos. For forty years he searches, never once finding that which he seeks.

When finally he despairs of his search and returns home, he finds his family is gone. His wife is remarried, his children grown, his house abandoned and left to fall into disrepair. He enters the house and sits upon the floor in the dust and cries. When he has cried and can cry no more, he looks up to find a deer mouse sitting on the mantle, watching him.

“God?” he asks.

“Yes,” says the deer mouse.

The man falls forward into the dust. “Why did you leave me?” he cries.

“I’m not the one who left,” says God. “You are.”

NaNoWriMo

I'm constantly telling myself three things: I need to exercise more, write more, and eat less. Three lofty goals, to be sure, and I'm proud of them. So proud, in fact, that I repeat them almost every morning, rattling them off in my head like virtual prayer beads, only to be forgotten by the time I've gotten home for work. It's too easy put things off, to wait until tomorrow, to mark time until that magical day when we actually do something. Inertia is a powerful force, and before we realize it, the days have piled up, the years have passed, and we can only gaze in wonder at all the time lost.

Enter NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writer's Month. For those who aren't familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is an arbitrary line that hundreds of thousands of people draw in the sand each year, setting aside the month of November to achieve the patently absurd goal of writing 50,000 words in a month. I've participated three times. I've only won once.

I was going to skip NaNo this year, because, you know, I have important things to do, like watch season four of Lost. However, a close friend of mine called to tell me that he had signed up, and to inquire as to whether I was participating. Well of course I am! Wouldn't miss it for the world. You know I do it every year. I'm looking forward to it!

So anyway, I'm signed up again. And you know what? I am looking forward to it. This is the power of NaNoWriMo. There's something galvanizing about sitting down on that first day, staring at a blank page, and realizing that hundreds of thousands of people around the world are doing the same thing. Will your novel be good? Probably not. Will it be yours? Most definitely. And that in and of itself is worthy of the effort.

** Want to learn more? Head to http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and check it out.