A confession

With less than an hour to go to the start of this year's NaNoWriMo, I want to make a confession about my plot:

I tried to write this novel before. In fact, I tried to write in during NaNoWriMo '06.

I'm using NaNoWriMo to write it again for two reasons:

1) in '06 I didn't get very far. I wrote less than 15 pages, I think, before I quit.
2) I'd been thinking about this idea for quite some time, and in '06 it just came out wrong.

I was pretty angry then about where my life was going, and how little time I'd had to work creatively. Grad school doesn't leave you with a whole lot of free headspace. (If anyone tells you that doing a PhD is worth it, believe them. If they tell you you'll have loads of time to do creative work while you write your thesis, then they are dirty liars.) I was uptight and upset and those 15 pages of malformed book were hilarious and gross and pretty awesome in their own right, but they didn't do justice to the idea as I had originally envisioned it.

So I'm starting over. I've done more thinking, and more research. I've pared down my responsibilities. I've decided to spend a few months on creative work. I've been meditating and exercising and trying to like myself better and I've cleared away all the logistical obstacles I was able to. I'm ready to embrace this project fully: intellectually and emotionally and hell, even sexually and spiritually, if you want to get personal about it.

It's a new beginning.