Initiate

I'm a writer. A story-teller by near-genetic inclination. The first time I noticed, really noticed, the words a writer was using, I was in college. I was reading a short story by Leslie Charteris about his creation Simon Templar, The Saint, and he used the word 'vimful' in a sentence. It set the tone for the story and the character perfectly for me, saying 'this is a serious sort of situation, but we're in no way taking it seriously.'

Before this experience, I'd been simply taking in whatever story I was reading, be it comics or any of the other books I was able to get to. When my sibs and I were kids, our home library had paper cards, much different from the plastic bar-coded cards of today. Our mother had written on hers that her children had her permission to use her card because at that time, if you were a juvenile the library would not let your take out any adult books. My grade school had a small library made up of donations and hand-me-downs from other places and they allowed us only one book per week. Picking only one was always hard for me and I was almost always the last kid out of the library when my class's time was up.

I wrote stories in grade school as a way of having a story like the ones I'd liked to read, for no real reason other than that. I entered a couple of contests but nothing came of them beyond a small pile of typed pages I haven't seen in ages. I'd had no thought of publishing; I'd amassed a sizable collection of bound blank books so I could have my stories in books. This was less than successful given how many times I changed my mind and ripped out pages. Not a pretty thing when the pages are sewn in rather than glued.

Now, however, I'm getting tireder of the daily grind at my job. Imagine how an innocent coffee bean feels being roasted and ground down to espresso fine coffee and you have an idea of how I feel some days. Part of that is because we're unsettled at my job just now and the temporary boss is only doing it so there's somebody in charge on paper. She doesn't want the job full time, but then nobody in the department wants the job. Given that they've posted the job inside the system, we may be relieved soon, but I'm not betting on it.

So I'm looking at self-publishing now. Of course to publish something, I'd have to finish it and I have friends who claim they'll have died of old age before I manage that. I'm feeling increasing internal pressure, because of the job situation as much as anything else.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. I've participated since 04 and never managed to get past 25k at best. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days, which they break down as 1667 words a day. Like all the years in the past, I've declared that This Will Be The Year. I have more of a plot laid out than I have had before, so this may indeed be it. I'll probably post some of it here. We'll see.