7 Reasons NOT to NaNo

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is upon us. In about eight days on November 1, writers around the world will begin pounding typewriter/keyboard keys or moving cartridge pens and pencils across various thicknesses of linen and vellum all with the hopeful expectation of writing….something….new?….exciting….purposeful?…or just writing anything that will get them to the requisite 1667 words they need to achieve each and every day for the next 30 days.

Sound crazy? It is. And I’m going to tell you why you should NOT do it.

1. First, it puts a deadline on you, the writer. God forbid that a writer meet a deadline, right? I mean, sure, editors and agents and publishing houses all use them, but why do you need to put that on yourself? What purpose does it serve other than to help you adjust, on a daily basis, to meeting a goal and find self-initiative and success? What do you get when you put such stress on yourself but success? Really, is it worth it?

2. Second, it gives you stress. We all know that writers wither under stress. Stress sparks imagination and plot bunnies, it makes your dream more wild and vivid. Stress makes you eat chocolate and crave the company of others like you so you don’t feel alone while stressed. And once you are with others, you find comfort and stress relief as you work together to meet deadlines (see #1). This stress will make you get up early to get those word counts. It may force you to find a reason to write. It may teach you more about yourself and make you discover hidden strengths (and weaknesses). Good grief, who wants to be forced to learn more about their writer selves?

3. Next NaNoWriMo seems to make people show up at libraries to do – gasp – research! Now you have reasons to delay writing by claiming you can’t find what you need! Thank goodness I have a personal treasure trove of books where I can get lost for hours on end as I research and make notes and read and imagine. NaNo introduces me to others who can help me find information and force me to get lost in learning. Do we need that??

4. NaNo encourages people to go out to “meetups” and “writing groups” and “write-ins” where other crazy, stressed, sleep-deprived, anxioius, keyboard pounding people will also be, and then it wants me to engage with them and find friends who will encourage me and cheer me on to make sure I meet my daily, crazy goal of 1667 words a day. Who ever thought of anyone actually being FOR you to succeed? The very idea!

5. With daily writing, my senses are opened to new ways of seeing the world. I am forced to discover new descriptions, to open my mind to new ways of thinking as I develop characters who are not me, characters with ideas and traits that aren’t mind. Daily writing challenges me to write realistic dialogue and to actually create and give birth to new concepts and new people. I may even end up building a new world (or two). It’s an insane proposition. Why should I dare to do something so over the top?

6. During those 30 days, while stressing over plot lines and finding plot holes, I may learn how to actually tell a good story. It may not be this year or even next year but one thing I might learn is how to be a better writer than I am today. Imagine being trapped into this discovery. The cruelty and disgust I will feel when I realize that I have become more than I ever dreamed, only because I dared to try to write 1667 words a day for 30 days. Do I need this stress that serves up such results?

7. Special Bonus – Four of my NaNo projects are now published, award-winning novels. But who wants to have that as a part of their resume? I mean “AUTHOR?” Isn’t that too much of a burden to carry?

Imagine it. If you can’t imagine with me then you definitely should NOT participate in National Novel Writing Month.

On the other hand, if you CAN imagine the growth and fun behind the challenge, if you CAN imagine the chance to complete a book project and begin your journey into authorship, then please do join me in this year’s National Novel Writing Month by going here and signing up. I’ll be your buddy and one of those crazy people who cheers you on, especially when you start asking yourself what in the heck you are doing trying to write 1667 words a day!

So, okay I’ve been very sarcastic here and making fun of a wonderful opportunity. Now stop laughing and think about this. My handle is poetphoenix and I’m a NaNoWriMo junkie. I hope you will be too. Just imagine it and good luck!__________________________________________________________________

Happenings

ON THE RADIO – come listen to me when I’m on AUTHOR’S CORNER with Laurie Kehoe, Oct 25 at 10pm EDT or 7pm PDT. We’re going to chat about author things and my new release, LOVE AND BLOOD.

Author Ravannah Rayne interviewed me and published it on her blog. Please drop by and give her some love and see what I have to say about writing and stuff.

Finally, I’m a fostered author in this year’s Foster an Author 2018. My foster blogger is Jodi Huntley Bird of Ruby Red Romance Reviews. For one week, Jodi will be promoting my work and helping me to find an audience. Please go see what she does.

Have you signed up for my newsletter?? Might want to give it a try! Things show up in there that I don’t say anywhere else….

Thanks for stopping in – see you at NaNo!

Yours Between the Lines,

Sherry

Proof Vampires Are Real

A few days ago, I read an article in Ars Technica about some archeologists who discovered the burial of a 10 yr old child in a 5th century Roman site in Italy. The child was buried with a rock in its mouth. This practice was done to keep the body from rising from the grave. It is believed the child died from malaria and the rock was to prevent the child from returning and spreading the disease.

picture by David Picked of Stanford University

The locals are calling this corpse the Vampire of Lugnano and is believed to be one of the more unusual preventatives to a body from rising and wreaking havoc like spreading disease to the living. It goes to the belief that vampires must be, might be, could have been, were believed to be, REAL.

I’ve studied this belief of, and in, vampires for over forty years and in every major civilization in every continent around the world. The legend of the vampire, or some version thereof, is deeply seeded in every culture with stories and legends, and makes one wonder if so many believed, why is the possibility of real vampirism also dismissed as a lie?

From the Ars article: QUOTE: Pretty much every culture on Earth has some version of a vampire (or proto-vampire) myth. Chinese folklore has the Jiang shi, [corrected] which are reanimated corpses that rise from the grave to prey on the living; one type has sharp fangs, the better to bite into the neck of said prey. Russian, Albanian, Indian, and Greek folklore have similar undead monsters. Russian villagers in the Middle Ages often drove stakes into the bodies of suspected vampires upon burial to keep them from rising again. UNQUOTE

Again, if so much is believed, then there must be some truth just out of reach. Other cemeteries have odd practices, and it is believed that the Romans even used witchcraft to spell the evil to stay within the bodies. However, burials with stones in the mouth is very eerie and uncommon and drew a great deal of attention to this excavation.

There was a previous discovery of a burial where a 16th century Italian woman was buried with a brick in her mouth. She was discovered in 2009 and the discoverers named her the Vampire of Venice. (Photo courtesy of National Geographic Television)

Archeologists learn a great deal about a civilization’s culture from the way they bury their dead. The dead do not bury themselves, therefore, how a people perceive death and the possibilities of what happens after death, are telling in these discoveries.

Again, I have to ask, with so many cultures afraid of the chance of rising from the grave, of a chance that vampires may be near, why are we so quick to scoff at such a fear?

VIVISEPULTURE

You know the English used to bury their dead with a rope in the coffin tied to a bell up above. If you woke and proved you weren’t dead, you pulled the rope and it rang the bell above. Truth was there weren’t any documented cased who were saved from suffocation in their coffins. But some of those buried rose without ever ringing the bell and families have told tales. And they were never found again. Thus buried alive, vivisepulture, was the precursor to vampirism. Embalming seemed to correct this problem. Still, families did dig up their family members to check to see if they were truly dead. Many did not go back into the ground. Why not?

Picture of Safety Cross, courtesy of Kimberly Bannister

I believe Vampires are real. There are too many cultures afraid to be less than the truth. 

If you are a writer and you want to give new life to a tired trope like the vampire, consider the realities of a culture and their long-held beliefs in superstitions. There is always a bit of truth in every legend. Find it and give new life to your stories. Every day there are new discoveries that give a twist to the vampire mythos. Make use of them, be inventive, surprise us. History certainly does, so why not you?

New life. Like the vampires. A Legend that will not die because they don’t.

Something to think about late at night. Perhaps while you write. Or read. Listen for the bells.

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Yours Between the Lines,

Sherry

Writing with Mortality

My maternal grandparents in 1956

I’m getting older. At 64, I have to step back and examine my life and where I fit in to the legacy of my family. My dad died at 69. My mom at 76. Her mom at 82 and her dad at 66. Mom didn’t see it coming. She was in good health.

I’m in okay health and sometimes I wonder about my ticking clock. I ask myself at night if I accomplished all I needed to in the day to be sure I didn’t waste time or leave important things undone. It is often motivation for my books, to be sure I finish before I die. Mortality. 

Life and Death is an issue in Infinity War as she see our superheroes snapped out of existence. Like Spiderman said moments before he disappeared, “I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark.” The entire idea of suddenly ceasing to exist is made ever more poignant to us old timers when we hear talk of the Avengers moving on and the old actors passing the torch. Truly, Fury, Capt. America, Iron Man, Thor, are all aging in real life. Mortality seems to be an issue for Hollywood (age diversity and discrimination will be for another day), and younger superheroes are waiting in the wings. Just look at what was done with the X Men. Poor Professor X!

Mortality is an issue with our books too. If we write supernatural or paranormal characters we don’t have to worry about their aging. Or if we have to deal with it, it can be done very slowly (like decades slowly), or even used as a plot device if we need to kill off someone or scare everyone with the loss of a favorite character.

But where are the love stories for the over 40? Honestly, I don’t find many adult books, other than Contemporary Fiction/Romance, where the over 40 or 50 group deals with love or loving again. Yes, we find it in younger characters, but we avoid the “older” or the “elderly.”

Gives a girl a complex and makes her think she’s passé. Like all the talk about the older actors being past their prime for their superhero roles, they are made new with younger, more viral, more “viable” contract players. Seems a bit unfair especially if you have superpowers to say that after age “x” that you are too old to do your job.

My job is to write. My job is to write good stories. If I write stories about older people, the younger folks don’t want to read about the 50 year old divorce with three grown children and four grandchildren, her arthritis and her aged mother with diabetes or Alzheimer’s. It’s too….real? Too close to home?

Maybe that’s it. We’re aging and it’s real. It’s contemporary but not the way we want to be remembered? I don’t know. Can you imagine a story about Hawkeye and his family in addition to his fighting Thanos? It’s rumored that we will have something like that in Avengers 4. Why doesn’t that mortality bother us?

What about your stories? Do you write about older people other than wizards and witches and sorcerers and vampires? Can you? Would you? Or is mortality too scary to manage because it is too real and close to home? Like a birthday cake with a heart – a real heart – it frightens and grosses us out. But there is a magic in the reality if we try to see it.

I think about it every day. And I’ve discovered that I am adding older characters to my stories. Yes, some of them have supernatural abilities. And some are mere mortals who have managed to live into their more senior years. I don’t write Young Adult stories so maybe I’m trying to match reality with the imaginary in a way that makes my reality more palatable. Or maybe it makes you think more about your reality and manage it better?

Mortality. The scariest story there is to a writer with a million stories to tell. I’m writing as fast as I can but if I get zapped out of existence, I want my readers to have truth amid the fantasy. I want to read that too. Write more real people. Age them along with you. Let me know that my mortality is okay and that I can be a superhero even with gray hair and eczema or contact lenses.

Maybe the best writing is one that says the greatest superheroes are the best of us, just the way we are, even aged.  Just do me a favor? Write faster and leave a legacy that will outlast time (or Thanos).

Mortality. It only matters if you let it take you without a fight. Right Mr. Stark?

Thanks for stopping by.

I remain, Yours Between the Lines,

Sherry

(All credit to Marvel and DC. I do not own rights nor use photos for personal gain).