I Am A Guilty Pleasure

Photo idea blatantly stolen from Pencil Revolution. Kind of cool looking, huh? Also completely unrelated to the rest of this post, which sort of goes with the theme...

After eight past NaNoWriMos, seven of them successful, I don't have anything to prove to myself. I know I can write a whole bunch of words in a month, one way or another. Some years have been painful. Some have been surprisingly easy. A few of the resulting piles o' words aren't steaming piles of...whatever.

This year, I didn't have a preconceived story I was eager to get out, or any high hopes. So this year, I decided, I was going to run with the assumption that whatever I wrote might never even get transcribed, let alone edited or shared. I'm just telling myself a story, in this case a sort of epic thing set in space, mostly about a first colony and a revolution. Oh, you moan, how cliched! But there is a certain comfort in cliches, and besides, it's my story, and I can stick whatever I want in there. I can put in all sorts of exaggerated and stereotyped characters--plucky ship's captains and cute doctors, surly geniuses with good hearts, gutsy colonists, controlling and bureaucratic "old worlders," maybe some pirates or monsters. There's no need for plausibility, no need to get the words in the right order. If I get bored, I can take off on a completely new tangent with no explanation.

And you know, it's kinda fun. Admittedly, the writing is often pretty bad. It's kinda like one of those books that I enjoy despite knowing the author is a hack who really doesn't deserve to be published--one of those books that when people ask, "So what are you reading?"I say vaguely and sheepishly, "Oh, just a book about...um...it's kind of a sci-fi thing." And if they try to pin me down by asking the author, I say, "Author? I don't really remember. I think it begins with an 'M,' maybe?" 'Cause I know it's lousy. But I like it anyway.

There is room in life for a little lousy.