Today, let’s talk about something that all passionate writers/aspiring authors go through.
goals
The new year is upon us.
Yay!
I hope 2014 is going to be a great year 🙂
My heart’s full of goals and dreams and wishes, but I shall leave you with two songs:
Team, by Lorde–what more can this song say? It’s about teens who are growing up, discovering that the world is not as perfect as it was portrayed, but loving their lives anyways.
My favorite line: “We live in cities…you’ll never see onscreen, not very pretty but we sure know how to run things.”
I’m changing and evolving this year. Even in the writing world–these two blog posts by Jessica Spotswood and Erin Bowman open up and are honest about the good and the bad side of the very competitive book industry, how it is not all glamor and promotion and book tours–and how sometimes, you may not live to your expectations.
But I’m happy writing. I’m love the world I’m in. I am in love with storytelling and writing novels and creating places and emotions out of a sea of words. It may not be the shiny, instant NY Times Bestseller life that others see, but I love it. My dreams still hold steady, but I want to love the world I’m surrounded in, regardless of how imperfect it seems.
And…
It’s Time, by Imagine Dragons.
I love this song to death. And I think the words–“It’s Time to Begin…” are perfect for the New Year and for the hopes I have in me.
Any songs to define your goals this year?
Here’s to 2013…and 2014
You know, on any other normal New Year’s Eve I would go to sleep, or stay up to see the ball drop, or whatever. I wouldn’t feel too keen on blogging as the last hours of 2013 slide by.
On embracing fears and being willing to work hard.
It’s been a transformative few weeks.
stuff to do
Okay, so today I played at my last piano competition.
*whew* That’s out of the way.
(After a hugely stressful week, you have no idea how much joy it brings me to sit in sweats and type out a blog post.)
So after these few crazy weeks, I will have the entirety of Winter Break to study for final…and revise!!!
Yaaay!
I have tests, projects, stuffs and stuffs to do, so for this week and the next, well…I hope it passes fast.
Right now, here are my goals:
That makes me a tiny bit nervous to type out. But my plan is to wrap TeaNovel up, and then while I’m querying it, I’ll take my mind off of it by focusing on my current novel.
I seriously have no idea what to expect.
So yeah.
A letter to NaNoWriMo
Dear NaNoWriMo 2013,
–I’m scared.
I think the writing life constantly cycles between various stages of fear and excitement. Each year I do NaNoWriMo, it gets increasingly harder–as I’m getting older and moving into higher levels of education, schoolwork gets intense, life builds up, and right after I scale a mountain an even bigger one is there for me to climb.
And it’s three days ’till NaNo and I am so, so scared.
I have barely any plot. I know my story very, very well, but only on the most instinctive level. This is the story I have been getting the first seeds of since I was in eighth grade, the story based on the things I loved most, a dream of two lands; one frozen with ice and one glittering gold with power. There will be a brutal, ancient war and otherworldly, violent, savage creatures. It all sounds very lovely in my head right now.
But ultimately, I know it might splat. My friends and family think I’m possibly crazy for even attempting. On the outside, I wear my bravado–because what else do I have? How do I rightly justify myself in the eyes of society, a girl who weaves dreams and lies for fun and stays home, eyes worryingly intent on a manmade glowing contraption, fingers clacking out her childish fantasies instead of oh, I don’t know, STUDYING, maybe? How many hours of time and energy will I have to forgo to make it through another season? Might I turn into a zombie? Very valid questions, but I have no idea.
But then people say, “You can totally, like not do this.” And that’s possible, easy even, but
No way.
I will not quit. Not doing NaNoWriMo has never been on my mind (Ask me again in two weeks, please.) I gripe and moan and complain, but in the end, I love NaNo with all my heart because it made this girl write. It made this girl believe that she COULD write a novel in a month if she wanted to. It made her believe she could write a novel. And it DID make her write novels.
I will always be eternally grateful to NaNoWriMo. Because last year, when I suddenly decided that I wanted to do NaNoWriMo, three days before the event, it made me scramble for a plot and think…and think…
And I came upon a story that I absolutely, absolutely loved. And I’m going to start querying it, this January.
I love NaNoWriMo because of its go-go-go mentality, its encouragement to chuck caution to the wind and just create something, anything. I love it because it calls for exuberance and wild chaos, beautiful crap-dumping that would later be polished to stunning prose. It allows you to make mistakes, and not give a damn about it.
And I may question myself constantly, asking myself why I’m being a nutball and deciding to do this every year, but I will never quit because I love making stories, and the idea of not participating in this when I could have will hurt me 10x more than plugging through this month-long purgatory.
And I know that in a month, I’ll be so, so glad I did this.
As I stand on the bleak shore, staring out at the choppy, formidable waves, I pray to the NaNo gods for another successful season, and I hope my stubbornness can brave me through the rough tides.
This is it. Here we go.
Love,
Christina