Twenty Thousand Words Under The Sea

Happy Birthday to me!

By the time you read this I will have officially commenced my late twenties. I am now the wrong side of twenty five and in between my Mum's playful reminders that I'm getting older (read: get me some fucking grandchildren already) and my colleagues being genuinely surprised that I am older than them (Quote of the day goes to some fetal teenager thing whispering in shocked tones "Wow, shouldn't you be doing a better job than this by now?" Yes, yes I should). It feels less of a day of celebration an more of a desperate scrabble to become a millionaire before I hit thirty.

...But I've dragged my heels in writing this post for so long that this opening spiel is now hopelessly out of date. Except the part where I am older, that hasn't changed. It just happened back in January when the world outside my window is one giant frozen pit where the only means of staying warm is throwing money at the gas companies.

So lets have an update, if your new the this blog then Enforced Whimsy exists as a practice range come narcissism intensity ray for me to take over the world with my glittering smile and witty repartee.

And if that doesn't work my Ninja sloths certainly will.

When we last parted ways Nanowrimo or National Novel Writing Month for those of you who don't speak fluent acronym, was just about to commence. The month of November is given over to furiously masturbating ones creativity to churn out ten thousand words of a novel. I was confident, I was planning to pen my first master piece in a month. I set off in high spirits ready to tell a tale of disillusioned teens who get super powers that are kinda shitty. So far so Marvel/DC (delete whichever you prefer to hate).

Three weeks in and 20,000 words later and I gave up. I didn't merely stop writing though, I fully rage quit (which isn't nearly as impressive without someone around to see it.) Looking back at the proto novel I found a whole steaming pile of badger anus and the remains of my desire to write dead in a ditch. I had no desire to ever put pen to paper ever again.

Unless Paper brought it's good friends Dice along for the ride - then everything was pure natural 20.

If you want to experience Nanowrimo for yourself then imagine being a student who has an essay to hand in every single night, complete with frantic scrabbling to hit the word count, bitter tears rolling down your cheeks and smug little bastards braying about how they've already finished the challenge and how ludicrously easy the whole thing was. Did I already mention they were bastards? Because they are.

Similarly to the student way of life the majority of people who do Nanowrimo forget the rest of the known world and only ever want to talk about their literary baby at any social encounter, even in event of a mugging or chance sexual encounter; quickly singling themselves out of any conversation within in the first five minutes and being quarantined like they've caught a particularly pretentious illness.

Though before I make myself out to be a bitter and twisted person (what do you mean it's too late?) I'll point out that Nanowrimo is a noble endeavor. Some people write good work, a selection of which get's published, and the community that springs up during the month of November is fantastic to see, though I rarely hear of these communities staying in touch when they're not all meeting up to write together like literary peacocks trying to attract nerdy mates. Almost as if they went to a temp agency to get a better class of friend to hang out with while they preen their dictionaries.

"Keep it up, they might ask us about what we're writing soon."

The month of Amateur Novelist Angst is not for everyone and if you tried it and failed (or saved time and said fuck that) you shouldn't beat yourself up. Creativity is a strange and varied bag of badger anus and what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. After talking with a fair few people who have also undergone National Lobotomy Month there's a good chance you might find the following.

The core lesson Nanowrimo is to hammer home is that you should write every day, and that is a very good  lesson. One I sorely need to learn myself. But, the absolute drivel that it inspires from this creative forced march is normally of such a low quality that you might as well sling the entire thing and start again from scratch.On a particularly bad day when real life has invaded your self constructed author fantasy it doesn't matter what you write, only that you write and hit the word limit so you don't create more work for yourself tomorrow playing catch up. Now there is something to be said for writing through the writers block but it is on the understanding that once you hit a good pace that you can go back delete the dross you left behind. Not so as far as Nanowrimo is concerned, it sits their, staring at you for the rest of the month - your past brain farts dancing around the room taunting you with their stench.

In no other profession is this advisable, surgeons don't just start slicing up patients just because they can't think of anything to operate on. Builders don't have a minimum brick quota they're desperately trying to hit regardless of what their suppose to be building. So why should you, an aspiring author, feel the need to crush their self esteem in trying to write through the pain? The point of a first draft is to be a giant swimming pool of suck but a swimming pool of suck you can do something with.

Instead you end up with a nervous breakdown told through the perspective of a tepid over grown bath.

Nanowrimo fails to build on the one good habit it's trying to create. Writing every day. After your giant, straining push through November you are likely to want a break (ask anyone whose over dossed on laxatives), and then go at your own pace continuing to improve on what you've written. People being people however they will stop writing regularly and only do so when they're guilty conscious starts hitting them with a 2 by 4. Which is understandable because bills need to paid, games need to played and laxatives need to be worked out of you system.

Also before anyone points it out I am well aware that I haven't posted on here for months! I point back at the start of the last paragraph to highlight why I didn't. I also had stuff to do! Stuff! It was important, honest...

Oh OK! I've just spent this entire time reading Homestuck. Expect a post on this soon because I have been converted into a full raging fanboy.

Now this might just be my experience of Nanowrimo (in fact if memory serves the motto of this blog is 'biased and opinionated') but I don't get along with deadlines. Which is a shame because keeping to a deadline is the corner stone of Nanowrimo. Keeping to the promise you made to yourself to see this challenge finished come hell or high water. Which is fine if the person you make the promise to (yourself for those of you not following) is a fine upstanding member of society.

Sadly I am not.

My life in general is controlled by two factors which are normally the only forces to get me to anything; Shame (that I have done so little recently, thus this blog post) and Ego (which occasionally needs feeding by me doing something, thus this blog post). Neither of which are beholden to deadlines. You might be mistaken in thinking shame might make me shift my arse a bit more often but shame is a very stupid creature that is easily fooled. Half a job application filled out or ten press ups is all it takes to distract it while I start my fourteenth play through of the original Deus Ex while eating a pack of chocolate digestives.

Thirty seconds starting at a picture of Wonder Dog also calms the savage beast within.

To look at this horribly malformed idea more closely we can see that deadlines are really the spawn and end step of planning. Planning is a horrible monster that sits under your bed and late at night. When your just about to fall asleep, it starts to whisper it's filthy reminders that you haven't paid council tax or washed the dog and you really aught to start scheduling better and what would your parents think and when are you going to stop being such a horrible failure and ARGH! OK! I'LL DO EVERYTHING JUST SHUT UP AND GO AWAY!

Turns out the only thing under that trap door was a five year plan involving paying off your student loans and negotiating a mortgage.

Even fun things are brought low by the terrors of planning and a clear indicator of shattered dreams and melodrama. Weddings, birthdays, weddings, children's parties (like regular parties but the jelly doesn't have vodka in it and the clown was invited to scare everyone rather than staring through the window), weddings, Saturday nights that started being planned on a Monday (because some people despise spontaneity and therefore fun) and weddings.

All of which will be improved if they just happened and this isn't just blind hatred for a perfectly reasonable life skill being hammered out onto a keyboard at three in the morning. It's cold hard fury being spat at the world wide web via a tea tray with an alphabet stamped on it at four in the morning (I had to spend the last hour organising the hate into reasonable sentences.)

A quick Google search later and it turns out that keyboard tea trays are in fact a thing. Well shut my mouth.

There is a happy ending to the last ten minutes of idle key-smashing, I've taken the first draft and have started writing a web comic with the help of a very talented friend of mine Aaron (http://necronomicwan.tumblr.com/). When we have some pages to show you all they will be posted here (and there, and everywhere). Also now winter has passed and I don't want to spend my entire time curled up in bed doing indecent things to a hot water bottle expect a lot more posts in the near future.

Right, that's enough rambling from me. Pretty sure today's post contained 20% more narcissism than usual which is getting dangerously close to your daily allowance. If we carry on this post might change topic again and I don't want to put you through that. This is just a quick one to get me writing again in a more reasonable manner without word count websites tittering at me behind me back for not being able to satisfy them in the way they want.