Writing Updates

I'm thinking about starting some sort of auxiliary blog strictly about writing. It's gotten to where blogging about writing is starting to feel like blogging about knitting. Not that there's anything wrong with knitting, but given that neither was the original focus of this site, it's become really narcissistic and hobby-like. To be honest, I've all but abandoned this blog.

So... I'm doing CampNaNo, which is basically NaNo with a cute prefix. I didn't join a virtual "camp," but I do like having something concrete that forces me to write everyday. It's going. I'm doing a complete overhaul of my novel, basically changing everything but the characters. I only set a goal of 30k by the end of April, 20k less than a full NaNoWriMo, but it does give me a more reachable goal. I printed the first ten pages of my story and it's not as awful as I'd feared -- boring beyond belief, but not embarrassingly bad. I still won't post it, any of it. At the risk of sounding like a complete snob, I write realistic, contemporary fiction, while everyone else I know writes genre fiction, fanfic, or something staring vampires. And by now everyone knows lit fic is awful. To say, "yes, I write literary fiction" sounds nothing but pretentious.

One helpful discovery: I write better non-linearly. I opened up a separate document for edits, which is anathema to NaNo's "write first, edit later," style, but this lets me get out of my head a little and fine-tune something I otherwise wouldn't. I'm also trying to be conscious theme and motif, or anything other reoccurring patterns.

Inspiration: David Foster Wallace's short story, "The Suffering Channel," which deals with our obsession with reality TV and celebrity, and Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," which feels like it could.