18,000 words, most (all?) of them typed by thumb on my phone's notepad, during moments snatched here and there around the edges of my life. A long labor of love. Yet 18,000 seems so few compared to the yearly goal of 50,000.
I am such a different person now than when I started my first Nanowrimo seven years ago. Yet if I do ever publish a book, hopefully a successful one, it will be entirely thanks to Nanowrimo coming around each November and reminding me of what is possible.
My children are older now, 13 and almost 10. I have a new puppy. We are back living at the family home Grace Meadows. School is winding down for me but the last six months until I graduate may be the hardest yet. I always thought I would finish Tea's story first, and I did, in a way. I told it out loud in parts to my daughter as a bedtime story. There has been change in the telling, and I think that is perhaps why I no longer am interested in writing it, at least not as it was. I went back and read some childhood favorites by Louis L'amour, but I no longer enjoyed them as much because my adult eyes saw things that my ten year old self did not.
As a child, I loved Beauty and the Beast, but after the #MeToo Movement, and the general conversation about the treatment of women, I can't see the story the same way anymore. It is interesting to me how I react very differently to cartoon stories and what seems okay in that medium versus the live action ones. So I have been re-examining the stories that last and the ones that don't. My son and I had an interesting conversation in the car the other day about Columbus and how one's legacy can be redefined in the future. My conclusion is that kindness lasts and ages well even when other things do not. I myself prefer Indigenous Peoples Day to Columbus Day. What was acceptable, or perhaps just overlooked, in relationships in the past, now seems inherently unhealthy and even immoral or just plain wrong.
This ties in to my fear that parts of my Tea story will not age well. The central love story between Ama and Der, and the blurred line between Tea and Ama, did not set well with my daughter. I began to question the old (immortal-ish) guy/young girl trope too and so I took it out of the verbal story altogether. Ama reappeared, and I thought about the way older women are often written out of the story. My daughter loved the friendship group dynamic between Tea, Sol, Aze, and Why, especially Why's silliness and passionate commitment to his erroneous ideas of earth things, like the stabby stabs. Jeto and Der figured only lightly and it was not as dark overall. But I missed the time pretzel part of the story in the verbal retelling, and Der's journey. So now I hold the broken pieces of my story, not quite sure how they fit together, or what the story is about anymore.
Which is why I have been writing Sara's story instead this Nanowrimo, my sequel to A Little Princess, a childhood favorite. Which brings me back to the 18,000 words that are still a bit jumbled and not a cohesive story yet. It's mostly dialogue with a few setting snippets here and there. At the same time, I am immeasurably proud of those 18,000 words because they all came to be in 200-300 word chunks. Maybe once or twice I thumb typed out a scene with 1,000. I feel as if I have been catching raindrops for years, and finally have a small bucketful. My arm is cramping from thumb-typing this, so now I shall be done.
Until next year, my friends. Please excuse the typos since I am not going back to proof read this.
