My Word!

If I say I’m going to do something, I generally do. Oh sure, I weasel as much as the next guy. I say “I’ll try to” whenever I can get away with it, but that’s because if I say “I will” then I really will give it a shot.

As you can imagine, this gets me into a lot of trouble. By “a lot” I mean, a LOT. I was bitten in the butt twice today by my self-imposed code of honor. The first was a repentant promise I extracted from a friend weeks ago which finally came to fruition this afternoon – but not to my benefit. Sucks, but there it is. The second bite came from NaNoWriMo.

Remember NaNoWriMo? Scroll down a few posts. You’ll find it. National Novel Writing Month. When I said I’d do it, it seemed like everyone I know had already jumped on the bandwagon and I was the last to board. I swallowed the dregs of the Kool Aid™ with all the sugar chunks at the bottom. (Dear trivia freaks: Yes, I know it was really Flavor Aid™, this is colloquial usage.) Throughout previous Novembers, all I ever heard was NaNoWriMo this and NaNoWriMo that. This year, it’s only crickets, tumbleweeds and dusty keyboards. I’m the only one left. Ironically, I’m the only one not writing a story.

Did you scroll? Never mind, I’ll repeat it. My NaNoWriMo isn’t a narrative. It’s a stream of consciousness. 1,667 words of whatever is in my head; rinse and repeat every day for a month. I’m writing this as part of it, which would be cheating unless you saw some of the utter drivel that’s been coming out of my fingers. Go on, I double-dog dare you to sit down and write 1,667 words just like that. Actually it’s not so difficult. It’s the third or fourth day that gets hard. The ones after that aren’t so fun. You start to get tired of your own kvetching, and I was tired of mine years ago.

If I was an infinite number of monkeys, instead of one tired middle-aged writer, then I’d have a snappier punch line, or the script for Hamlet, or just a lot of bananas. You have my word on that.