Wednesday, October 22, 2008

An open letter to my 2008 NaNoWriMo attempt


5 comments:

Strikethru said...

Hee, funny. However, you know that a determined, scenery-chewing minor character will not be deterred from derailing your story by mere threats alone.

Your handwriting *is* quite neat! Might have to look into that book you suggested...

Elizabeth H. said...

Thanks! I'm still seeing all the places where I'm uneven (that's unlined paper, which I love, but...) However, imperfect as it is, it's mostly legible, which is something that couldn't have been said for my old handwriting.

Just as a simple comparison, here's a page from a story I was working on a few years ago. (You might have to right click and open in a new window/tab to see the whole image.) Granted, the ink doesn't help the legibility, but my writing was...well...not much better than chicken scratch. I can read it, but it's a struggle, and I doubt most other folks could make much of it out. Now I can read my own journals. What a concept.

Anonymous said...

The Spam-smuggling aliens sounds like it could be a good sequel to Daniel Pinkwater's Fat Men From Space.

Elizabeth H. said...

As I recall, it involved aliens who considered Spam a delicacy worth risking life and limb to bring back to their home world. There was a whole ring of Spam bootleggers.

It was *supposed* to be totally goofy, because my first NaNo in 2002 was the opposite (in spite of how bad it was), and I wanted a break. But by about 10,000 words into the story, I was really starting to see things from the aliens' perspective and taking the whole affair very seriously, and I couldn't mentally deal with the absurdity of it all. So I ditched it. That's the one year I didn't finish.

Elizabeth H. said...

Oh lord...it still exists! I thought that particular story was long deleted, but I was just organizing my computer and came across an old backup folder I didn't recognize. There was a file labeled NaNo2003, and sure enough...spam smuggling aliens.

It's more creative than I remember, but terrible writing. To be positive, it's a reminder that even though I'm still a lousy writer, I've still made some progress. Yay, me!