Social scientists working on a decades-long population study have recently concluded that every single living resident of the United States suffers from a condition known as imposter syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments, except for you, an actual fraud who is almost certainly on the verge of being found out by the people who only think they love and respect you any day now....
I thought I’d document what non-blog writing projects I have been working on sporadically this past year, where they stand now, and where they might be going. Please forgive me, my one and only reader, for using acronyms—they reference working titles only, for my own use. The final titles, which for me always come last, are TBD. Fiction writing RTFT—A scifi/fantasy/comedy that I started four days ago, this is an adaptation of a very silly farcical screenplay about aliens visiting Earth I wrote back when computers still had floppy drives (with the floppy disks that were truly floppy)....
Now that I’m writing again, I’ve started thinking about the things I wrote before. Last night, that took be down into the (water-damaged) basement to see what I could find. I wasn’t quite sure what was there, because over the years I’ve lived in at least twenty-four different places, and when you’re moving that much, boxes of stuff become these sealed nodes of wonders and troubles, with old bills and old love letters and old photos and old magazines and old what-the-hell-did-I-keep-that-for kinds of stuff, and after enough moves you really just stop looking in them because it’s so much easier to drag them along from place to place, knowing only that there might be something in there you might want…someday, but not today....
No, I did not reach the 50,000-word floor that NaNoWriMo puts out there as a goal for sprint-writing in November. I didn’t come close. (4,286 is the count, to be exact.) But I don’t care, for two reasons: I spent much of my writing time editing the manuscript of someone else’s novelette. (More on that soon.) Writing is about process, not about distance. I embraced the NaNoWriMo endeavor not so much to see if I have the right stuff to blast out 50k words in 30 days....
They’re two different jobs. I’ve been doing a bit of both this month. On the one hand, NaNoWriMo isn’t really happening for me. On the other hand, I’m helping a novelette get published, and I think it’s pretty good work. So that’s good.