Not Into Compitition And Writer's Block(Head)

I've seen all over the blog-sphere, some of you are into the NaNo(oh-man-oh)WriMo Race.

I'd forgotten about it from last year. But I remember it sounded horrific. You have to write approximately 1,666.666 . . . words per day to do this. On an average its about 4.5 pages, depending upon if there is a lot of dialogue, and then it would be more. This is nothing, if you have the time to do it. And you have to do it, otherwise you have to catch up at some point. 50K words in a month. Piece of cake.
I'll pass, thanks.

It isn't because I can't do it. It's because I don't have time.

Oh. And I don't need to prove anything to myself.

I've been a writer for decades. I know how much I've written in my life--or approximately. A lot of first drafts that went nowhere. A lot of first drafts which may never have had endings to them. A lot of crap, in other words. It was a process of writing, and learning HOW to write. Which was fine. I may have several boxes of said manuscripts still around. And others from my high school and early college days have been since destroyed.

But this was me writing. Writing, day in and day out. I had no real life. If I got asked out, I went. A lot of times I wasn't going anywhere. I didn't like the bars. I mean suck-ville. So, I sat home and either read, watched TV, and wrote. When I married, I wrote, during summers I had off, I wrote, wherever I had a flat surface: I wrote in the dining room while the TV was blasting in the next room. Sometimes I wrote in bed, to get away from the noise. I didn't have a office then, like I do now.

I don't need anything to motivate me to write. I just write. I can't help myself. I have six different blogs, and I've started two novels this year. Each one in different stages--one is finished, save for some last moment edits, one is not. I'm currently writing the third one in this series. I'm not in a hurry. I want to allow my creative juices to pour over what I'm writing. I think this is something like a lovely home-made soup. I consider what I want to put into it and let it simmer as I chop and cut and stir, flip through a magazine, day-dream . . .

The over 1,000 words a day is nothing in a writer's life--if you don't have children, a husband, a job, and whatnot holding you back. I know that my mother-in-law wrote doing exactly that. Plus had a garden and made breakfast, lunch and dinner for 4 children and a demanding husband, canned, made homemade breads and other things. She went to New York twice, but was unable to get to that exciting crowning glory. Whatever the reason, I couldn't unravel it the three times I'd asked, and the truth, I think, went with her.

I remember, back when I'd written 22 pages--all in long hand--in one day. I was quite proud of that. Imagine, if you will, if I'd had had a computer. I might have done 50 pages in a day. My verve is quite strong. As I recall, my finger ached so much I had to stop.

A writer is not the equivalent, or the amount of words written in a day, a week or a month; it is not just the sweat, tears, heart-ache, joy, sorrow, despair, the countless nights of lost sleep because you stayed up WRITING, merely because you were inspired by the need to get the damned thing down!

It is the complicated, combination of all of the above, and then some.

A writer doesn't need to be motivated to write by dangling a carrot in front of them to do it.

My dear gentle readers, you are writers because you enjoy writing. Why else would you write? Why bother? What did writers do when there wasn't NaNo(oh-man-oh)GoingNuts?

Oh, yeah. There was that one excuse.

Writer's Block(head).