Thursday, October 22, 2009

Confessions of the Hermit Within

There is something absolutely inspiring about being alone.

I don't mean alone in the romantic sense, or people simply being around you, I mean being solitary. Sitting in a cafe' or a park watching passers by (the obviously newly in love couple, the teenagers who think they're older than they really are, the hoards of people walking by talking obliviously on their cell phones who make you wonder, "do I really look like that?"). I can't spend every waking moment with other people, something inside me starts to slowly die and at some point I begin wonder if I'm just a shell of the person I thought I was, or if this is the person I've become?

Tonight is very important, I'm spending the night alone in my house for the first time in a long while. For anyone who hasn't discovered it, your home is a very magical place to be alone. When I'm in a place with people constantly, every footstep, every banging of a dish in the sink resonates throughout my mind. When I'm alone, the house comes alive. The constant buzzing of the heater, the squirrels scampering on the roof, the occasional creek of the gate. They all become part of what feels like one, holistic, vibration which I've become a part of with every page I flip in my book or bubble boiling on the stove.

Let's be clear here, tonight I will be sad when I crawl into bed and Matt isn't there to wrap his arms around me until I feel sufficiently cuddled, in the morning I will miss the sounds of him singing (which he does no matter how bad of a mood he's in), and at some point tonight I will think of something very silly and be disappointed when he's not here to do something silly back ... but this isn't about that. This is about a state of consciousness, one only achieved when you stop for a moment, and in your stillness you know that even though you've stopped, the world isn't passing you by, you're just catching a glimpse of it.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

NaNoWriMo!

Well then, I signed up on a site to write a novel from start to finish in the month of November.

The actual winning process works like this:

From 12:00:01 AM, local time, November 25 until 11:59:59 PM, local time, on November 30, all participants who have written more than 50,000 words can have their winning word counts verified by our site. Uploading your novel to the Word Count Validator makes your NaNoWriMo victory official, gets you listed on our Winners Page, and routes you to the secret spot where you can collect this year's winner's certificate. It will also turn your word count bar purple.

Since I can't start writing any prose for the actual novel until the month of November, and I can't seem to write an outline to save my life, I've decided to write bits of prose spontaneously on this page to encourage myself to write more, and the first bit I write on November 1st will be the start of my novel.

Creative prose soon to come ...