procrastination

Questions I Found on the Internet (AKA Avoiding Camp Nano)

July 3rd and I’m on Day 3 of avoiding my NanoWriMo Camp. As you do. But I did consider writing today, and I promise myself and my camp I will work on my never ending novel this afternoon, but I have decided to brush off the old blog before I do because, you know, procrastination.

Also as a side note that bears mentioning but is in no way related, I haven’t written a post in so long, everything here is different. I don’t know what all these changes are to wordpress so I’m probably doing this wrong. I mean, I was doing it wrong before but now I can blame it on my inability to understand change.

Anyway, so in looking through my mess of notes for the novel I’ve been trying to perfect for years that is essentially just several badly named and organised google docs, I came across a list of random questions that I had saved long ago to maybe use as character prompts or scene prompts and I thought they would be fun to do as blog posts while I’m hiding from my novel, but I just realized that if I do these, I’m actually working on my novel, which YAY!! But that also means that now that I’ve made the connection, I’ll probably ditch this project in a few days soon as well. But this is a good idea because while a lot of these probably won’t actually make it into the story, they will definitely be good jumping off points.

On to it! Question of the day is:

Do you ever doubt the existence of people other than you?

source: someone somewhere on tumblr

I think everyone has at some point. Like I think that’s a philosophical bullet point everyone hits eventually. Like the time I thought I was a horse in a human suit in 3rd grade and then made an invisible trap in a tree to catch mean kids at recess. I mean, that’s totally normal kid activity.

And then there was middle school which we called junior high back then but no one says that anymore around here now so this is also another thing I may have imagined, anyway, I remember thinking that everyone was in on a joke that I didn’t know. And they were playing a game with me to see how far I would go before they broke me and could point and laugh at me. Like, the whole school was in on this inside scam to make me look foolish and I thought I could trick them because I figured out the joke. But I couldn’t figure out the joke, probably because in reality it didn’t exist. I don’t think. Because that would be a huge undertaking for a bunch of 12 year olds to plan and perfectly execute. I mean, right? This isn’t Carrie. Did I mention that I currently live with crippling anxiety?

And then when I got my driver’s license, I was so weirded out that I actually existed out on the road, like, other cars would have to actually stop if I had the right of way. And then I hoped they all saw me. That I really existed, they they actually could see me, and I wasn’t some ghost car traveling a deserted road at night in mist that local teens would warn each other about on sleepovers.

I don’t think I actually answered this question. Because as far as people not existing, I’m clearly more on the Bruce Willis end than the Haley Joel Osment end in this scenario. Spoiler Alert. If you don’t get the reference, don’t blame me if you google it.

So unless you mean like, ghosts, which yes, obviously I believe in them, then I’m not sure I have actually believed that other people didn’t exist. I mean I have wished for it. I’ve also wished that ghosts not exist, but that didn’t work out so well either and I ended up sleeping on a loveseat for a year so a ghost could have the bedroom.

Alright, off I go to work on the novel. Wish me luck.

Day 23.

Does this mean there’s only a week left of NaNoWriMo???? Yikes! I am in serious trouble if I plan on finishing on top and on time. I was going to blame my laziness on Thanksgiving but really that was only one day and I’ve been behind most of the month. And it keeps getting worse. 

The problem is me and my procrastination and my love of looking things up on the internet in case someone challenges me to a battle of trivia wits. I need to be up on my conspiracy theories and pop culture and whatever is happening on TMZ at the moment. 

So now I’m 7 days out and 11,444 words behind goal. That’s a lot of words. I need to hunker down and get serious about this. According to the NaNo site, I need to bust out 4,000 words a day from this point out to finish on time. I can do this. I am currently pretty much immobile anyway because I fell down the stairs like a fool on Wednesday and my tailbone feels like it’s the one in charge of my entire life right now. I might as well use this time productively. I just need someone to bring me a mimosa and a string cheese. And an epidural.

Dramatic recreation

Book Club: The Final Countdown

 

The day before Book Club.

I was given 3 or so MONTHS to finish this book. The meeting had been put off and put off, but it was finally here. The day ahead glared at me like an evil witch, judging me for my sins. D-day. Do you know how far I was into this book, the day before the book club meeting, that I had had MONTHS to read???? Page 94. I officially made it to page 94. In 3 months. ACTUALLY, more like 4. FOUR months. If I did my math right, I would like you all to know that that is 30 pages on average a month. If you break that even further down, you sexy mathematicians, you will get one page. A day. Average.

So I planned on doing what any of us would have done, I cheated. I googled for spoilers, I read endings. I am a book club failure.

I was pretty sure I could fool everyone, though and I intended to try. I was going to go down in a blaze of glory. All or nothing. Lying to these nice people who let me into their group and their homes as I ate their pastries with confidence, commonly defined as “Of-COURSE-I’ve-read-this-book”-edence, blueberry scone crumbs clinging to the corner of my lying lips.

Look, in college I was an English Major, you think I haven’t faked this kind of thing before??  And by “English Major” I mean, “don’t look too deep into that because you’ll find I was inexplicably labelled a ‘Speech Major’ and I was too scared to go talk to anyone to get it changed. So I just made it all up as I went and then refused to completely graduate so I didn’t have to deal with it all and now here I am writing my bad-grammar blogs for free on the internet.”

So cheating and lying my way through this book club meeting like a snake oil salesman was the grand plan. And it would’ve worked too if it weren’t for that meddling Anxiety!  Because when Anxiety found out about it, she jolted me awake at 3am with judgements, panic, and an idea! Who cares about sleep, we Research! We can’t do it any other way. We’ll be kicked out of Book Club!! Several hours, and coffees, and pages, and post-it notes later, I was done.

And that’s how I finished a 306 page book. In 3 or so months. Actually more like 4. I read an entire book in almost 4 months and had to come and brag about it online.

Anyway, the next book has been chosen. I have about 6 weeks. What’s the over/under on whether I finish? One day I’m finally going to get my life together and you guys are going to be blown away.