Meg Dowell Writes

Can it be November now? Pretty please with giant dark chocolate-chips on top?

I’ve just been really sad lately, but not the crying, sleep-all-day, mope-around-Chicago kind of sad. I’d call it the February Blues, but I don’t want to offend February. I mean, it probably gets picked on enough by all the other months for being so short, and alternating its number of days every four years. It’s just another month, ends in -uary just like the month before, and incorperates two holidays within the first two weeks. It deserves some credit.

The reason I’m sad is not because of Singles Awareness Day, because I plan on celebrating my lack of a male counterpart with my galfriends this upcoming weekend. I’m not sad because of my quiz today (which I WILL get a 25/25 on this time, not a dang 22) or my test on Friday (fifty questions I plan on knowing by the time I’m done reading the question, thank you very much). I’m not sad because my thumbnails are red. Actually, I’m going to let that one slide, Cassie.

I’m sad because no one’s pushing me to write a novel at light-speed.

I want to write! Dangit, I have a good five pages of novel ideas scribbled out in the back of my biology notebook. The one I’m working on now is the same one I started and turned in for my creative writing project last month, about a depressed high school graduate who is dumped off at her estranged mother’s North Carolina home for the summer. I have some really good plans for it…I’m just not motivated.

And whether or not you’ve checked out my famous List, one of my goals is to finish writing it before graduation on June 6th. That can easily be done, right? It could, if I’d just sit down and start outlining. But my brain keeps getting distracted. Even though I want very much to write this story. It has a very sad yet uplifting ending, and I like that kind of closing in books, the one that makes you feel emotion when you finish reading the last page. I know exactly what I want to happen, and if you ever do happen to read it, you will probably hate me for what I plan to do. But I don’t care. At least I’m making you FEEL something. I hate books that end in tags. Sorry, but not all stories end with life-long friends admitting they love each other.

I went on the NaNoWriMo website tonight after my girls left (best Super Bowl party ever, by the way—my fingernails are now three different colors) and found this. He is now my future husband, who I will marry and live happily ever after with until he writes a better novel than me. Then I’ll leave him with our two-and-a-half kids surrounded by a white picket fence and find someone who really loves me. Because my true love wouldn’t dare write a better novel than me. That’s just asking for one less toe right there.

But anyway, being there on the site made me realize how much I really miss writing two thousand words a day, sometimes more, while running from Point Meltdown and eating Twizzlers and having an excuse for why I’m so tired and cranky. I got a kick out of my English teacher’s reaction when she found out I was writing a novel, in two AP English classes, studying for the ACT (again), and scholarship hunting, all at the same time. The novel thing was what threw her off the most.

Other people think it’s so cool. If you’ve lived through NaNo, you know what I mean when I say outsiders’ reactions are the best part of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. A friend from my high school’s newspaper interviewed me for an article about it, and after every answer I gave, she was like, “Gosh, that’s so cool!” Don’t get me wrong—I’m happy that other people are so amazed at my/our insanity. But, at least for me, writing a novel is the norm. If I’m not writing a novel, I’m editing one. If I’m not working on a current project, I’m brainstorming ideas for another one. I’m juggling different ideas all the time. I merge ideas together and modify old ones. Writing a story that takes 200+ pages to tell is just what I do. I don’t see it as abnormal or “cool.” I just love it, and therefore I’m immune to its realistic insanity.

Speaking of insanity, I hope you’ve heard The NaNoWriMo Song. I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first.

Really, you can write 50,000 words in one month any month of the year. But I honestly don’t have time or motivation to do that. SOMEONE MOTIVATE ME! What’s it going to take for me to get going on this thing? If I don’t write it, someone else will, and that’s just not going to work.

Oh…quiz today. Great.

Love&hugs, Meg♥