Pride and Writing

By Amy Lane

 

“Oh God,” I groaned as Mate drove us up to pick up our kids at their Halloween playground. “I forgot!”

 

“Forgot what?”

 

“If tonight’s the thirty-first, tomorrow is November!”

 

“What’s wrong with November?”

 

Oh, I love my husband, but why does the whole world never seem to be descending on his shoulders? He always sees one snowflake at a time, and I’m always looking at the massive dump that’s about to smother us all!

 

“Well, Zoomboy’s birthday for one,” I said, because throwing a kid a birthday party when your house needs at least three days of cleaning before anyone not related by blood or current on their tetanus shots enters is a big deal. “And Thanksgiving, and shopping, and… oh for crying out loud, it’s NANO!”

 

“What does Zoomboy want to do for his birthday?”

 

“Did you not hear me? It’s NANOWRIMO!”

 

“So?” he asked, nonplused. “So what? You’ve done this for how many years? And you have the wardrobe to prove it!”

 

I grunted. Well, yeah—their black sweatshirts and T-shirts are addictive, flattering, and apt to get you shouted out compliments from random strangers in lines, why do you ask?

 

“I could always use another black hooded sweatshirt,” I said with cautious optimism. “You know, provided I actually write my 50K this year.”

 

Mate laughs like I’ve cracked a joke.

 

“It’s not funny!” I whine. “I… I mean, I don’t always write more than 50K in a month. Sometimes, when I’ve got too much editing, or too many outside articles, or, you know, frickin’ GRL or Disneyland, it’s not as easy as it used to be! Do you remember last year? I was up at midnight before Thanksgiving at Disneyland! It was horrible!”

 

He shook his head. “But you did it. I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen? You don’t make 50K and people know you have a rough month?”

 

I try not to whine, because it is whining, and I try not to point out the obvious because it sounds overinflated. People will know I’ve had a rough month. A lot of people will know I’ve had a rough month.

 

“But people are going to think I’m slacking anyway!” (Okay, yes. I cannot avoid whining. It’s a character flaw. Love me, love that cracking sound my voice makes when I’m bloated with self-pity.) “I wrote a really long book in the beginning of the year.”

 

“205,000 words,” he said dryly. “I remember.”

 

Of course he remembers—he was the one who comforted me when I woke up sweating and panting, “I must write more! I must write more! I must finish my magnum albatross!!!” (Maybe not those exact words, but there was a lot of waking up in the cold sweats, I assure you.)

 

“But see? Nobody’s going to see that until 2017—and in the meantime, I need to write a book by mid November, and another one by December and another one by February and another one by the end of March and—“

 

“Pressure,” he said wisely. “It’s pressure. It’s what you signed on for. You’re good at it.”

 

“But NANO…”

 

“Everybody gets to see you,” he said. “I get it. They get to see you. Under pressure.”

 

“Yes,” I whimper. “It’s embarrassing.”

 

“More embarrassing than the blog about you falling down in the puddle of vomit and then getting puked on by your son before you could get up?”

 

I have to think about that one. I mean… seriously—it doesn’t get much worse than that. “Uh…”

 

He rolls his eyes. “More embarrassing than the death of the crapmobile? Because you’ve told that story to everybody.”

 

“Heh heh heh… yeah…” One of my best stories of the year!

 

“More embarrassing than the time Big T caught us—“

 

“I never blogged about that!”

 

“Thank God. What about the time you called the librarian the Book Nazi on the blog and almost got written up.”

 

“I pulled that down,” I mumbled. “It wasn’t nice.” Because I have been shooting my mouth off for years, and I’m barely—barely, I tell you—getting the hang of not doing it on a regular basis.

 

“Yeah, I know, and yet you still posted that thing—“

 

“Can we stop now?” God, nothing like living with a person for twenty-eight years to have all your secrets right there at the tip of his fingers.

 

“Anyway, so it’s all embarrassing. You’ve been putting your ass out on the embarrassment billboard for almost ten years now. So you do it again, because it’s what you do, and people can watch you write solid and they know they can do it too.”

 

Well it’s true. If I can do it it’s obviously not impossible. It can be done. But if it was an easy thing, something that I just did in my sleep without a lot of work or scheduling or discipline, well then, I wouldn’t bother forking over the money for the snazzy black sweatshirt every year, would I?

 

“Fine,” I mutter. “So, you know. November.”

 

“Yeah. What do we want to do for Zoomboy’s birthday party?”

 

“I have no idea.”

 

• * *

But I got home that night and signed up for NANOWRIMO. It doesn’t look like I’m doing great right now, because I stay up until one a.m. and post then, so I’m sort of a day behind. If I need to, I’ll pull that word count from what feels to me like October 31^st and add it in, but usually I’ve got it done by the final date, so I don’t need to. So anyway, I signed up. Because it’s something I do anyway, something that I have to do, both by temperament and by job description, but you know?

 

It’s really quite remarkable. And that goes out to all of us writing. It’s really quite remarkable that we start out to write a story and write continuously and solidly until the story is done. It says something good about all of us who have completed the task, whether it’s something people do regularly or something that they need to be driven to do. It can be done.

 

But it’s not bungee jumping or parachuting or motocross racing. One wrong move at NANOWRIMO isn’t going to kill your career or give you a life-threatening computer injury or anything else dire and destructive. It’s just going to mean you have to keep writing.

 

So it’s worth it. It’s totally worth it to write for NANO. Even if you have to stay up until midnight when you’re at Disneyland with your family. Even if you didn’t stay up until midnight, and decided to lose NANO for Mickey Mouse. Knowing that people start and finish projects that mean a great deal to them gives us hope.

 

And pride.

 

And these really awesome black hoodie jackets that get them totally complimented by complete strangers in public.

 

Because priorities matter, right?