AlMoStNaNoWriMo

Have I mentioned that I totally failed NaNoWriMo 2009?  Yessir, in classic mattjosh fashion, I was quick to start, slow to finish.

Oh yes, I am a force in first gear, a gallop out of the gate, a booster during blast-off!

But as the time went on, and my life intruded into my writing schedule, I took my mid-month trip to Washington for my organization's national conference and endured long days, intense partying, and hard nights on various floors and beds in the circa-L'Enfant Plaza area.  I wrote on the planes, but could not recover my initial momentum once I arrived home in Albuquerque.

It didn't help that I launched into a project that had sat for two years, after a blitz of inspiration birthed and raised it in two days time into a bouncing baby step outline for a screenplay.  Now I was trying to adapt it into a novel as I went, dismayed constantly that I was not capturing the tone I had envisioned.

It's a difficult project.  A satire on Islamic Terrorism in middle America.  It has to be funny but not too funny, serious but not too serious, real but not too real.  My tone was alternately farcical and melancholic.  Maybe it will work.  Maybe, taken as a completed whole it will reek of genius, rather than simply reek.

Most importantly, I need to return to it because I won't be able to die easy without having completed it.  But there are a lot of those project sitting around my world, and maybe it's better to keep a few unfinished just so I don't get too comfortable with the notion of my own demise.

I'd like my last work to be an autobiography, its closing words, dictated because my hands have grown too feeble to type, quoting Polonius emerging from behind the curtain, "O! I am slain!"