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I'm deeply embarrassed by the quality of most of it, but I'm going to go through it all again sometime next year to see if I can salvage anything worthwhile.

I have a feeling you're being both modest and shy, Martine. I hope you'll share at least something of what you wrote.


~ Lizzy

damellon wrote:Hi Ydc
Can you hear the strained silence coming from here? I have to admit defeat at this stage. I'm not going to make it, word-count wise. Thanks for all your encouragement, I really appreciate it. You too Lizzy. Blonde Madonna, Martine - will you guys make it to the finishing line? I have my fingers crossed for you. If it's within reach, do persist. Post mortems after Friday. Good luck to you both.

Congratulations Martine.
Damellon, I am truly sorry to read the above, but hey, you gave it a try, & I can tell you from someone who has on multiple occasions struggled to get a couple of thousand words lined up the way I wanted 'em (& years later wasn't satisfied), you took on a helluva an undertaking. From the very inception of nano-write, I have always expressed reserve. After Maddonna started this thread however, I am willing to support any creative writing endeavor, & although I see a lot of cons to nano-write (quality, for example) I now certainly recognize some pros. My reading & writing time are presently tied up in knots by a wayyyyy late forray into higher education; however, by watching you Ladies-of-Nano on this thread, I think I have a few ideas how I would do it if I were to attempt it. (Previously, I had NO idea.) Anyway, Damellon, every year has a November, & 'til things change, every November will have a nano-write. I would like to propose that not only do you try it again in a year, but that I join you.

At any rate, I respect you & you have NO reason not to be proud of your effort.

In al sincerity.
Ydc

Hi Damellon ~

I second Ydc's phrasings of his kudos to you .

We're going to be a cheerleader short next year, Ydc; perhaps, one of the been-there's, done-that's will join me, if they choose not to participate. "Front lines" support, so to speak. You can do it, buddy .


~ Lizzy

Hi Blonde Madonna
Are you nearly there?
We're nervously waiting here at the fininshing line for you to write 'The end'.
Ydc has polished up the glasses and is ready to pop the cork on the champagne, Lizzy is cheering and waving the Congratulations banner high above her head, Martine thought of you during her Christmas shopping expedition and has made a lovely tinsel wreath to crown your golden hair and I am ready to soothe away your cares with a perfumed Indian head massage.
Don't worry if you don't make the word count. We're celebrating your courage to begin, your persistence to continue and your commitment to finish (whether you did or not). Altogether now - Yipee !!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep ~ Yipee !!!!!!!!!!!!


< * I have a headache now from all the cheering and hoisting that banner. May I have a soothing, perfumed Indian head massage? * >

C'mo-o-o-o-o-o-n-n-n-n-n-n-n, Madonna!!!


~ Lizzy

December 1:
Damellon, Ive already expressed my feelings towards your efforts; I hope you take them to heart.
Maddonna & Martine--so how did it go?
Ydc

.

Hi Martine ~

A job well done... 35,453 words is nothing to be embarrassed about, much less deeply so. Congratulations! Did you stop mid-stream or did you bring it to a conclusion? Will you be sharing any of it?

The problem I have now, is trying to stop myself from waffling on ~ why write only a paragraph when I can now drone on and on for pages!
And pages and pages.
I have also developed a tendency to repeat myself.

Reading this, why... this sounds tailor made for me .


~ Lizzy

I'd like to thank Ydc, Lizzy and Christine for their support, damellon and Martine for travelling beside me, nano for inspiring emails and podcasts and my dogs for sitting at my feet when everyone else was asleep.

In editing mode now and realise that most of what I write is not worth reading.

Hey, Madonna, (& on edit, I didn't intend to leave Martine out)
sorry for the somewhat belated response to your post; you know how it goes w/ Ydc, always another round of who knew what when--the typical treachery & deceipt are always enough to keep any ruler occupied.

Anyway, I am sorry to read that you didn't make 50 thou in thirty, but really, lest anyone take that task lightly, sit down & see how you feel about laying down just three thousand good ones (or mediocre ones, for that matter) & then think about mulitlying that by ten, in the time frame of a month.

Hence, probably the true reason I never attempted it. You are to be congratulated for your effort; someone once told me that the only loser was the one who wouldn't try, & in retrospect I believe that person was absolutely correct.

Hey, next year you may even see me jumping into the project.

Sincerely,
Ydc

Hi Ydc
good to hear from you again.
I intended to post here with my ideas on why I didn't make it to the magic 50,000 and will do so before Christmas.
I think the attempt was worthwhile and am not too disappointed.

damellon wrote:Hi Ydc
good to hear from you again.
I intended to post here with my ideas on why I didn't make it to the magic 50,000 and will do so before Christmas.
I think the attempt was worthwhile and am not too disappointed.

That actually sounds like a good idea, Damellon. that kind of post nano-thread deserves it's own thread--all three of you could contribute. It might serve as a primer if someone remembers to bump it up next year.
Ydc

I wouldn't be looking for a new day job if I could do this:

Adah:
….her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what is there for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was gone.


Because I could not stop[ for death he kindly stopped for me, or at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky blue mouth as he passed….


Rachel:
…The whole world would change then, and nothing would be all right again. Not for our family. All the other people in the whole wide world might go on about their business, but for us it would never be normal again….

….We were different, not just because we were white and had our vaccinations, but because we were simply a much luckier kind of person.

Barbara Kingsolver/Poisonwood Bible

Hi Ydc ~

Is this to say that Barbara Kingsolver was the winner, "Poisonwood Bible" is the title of her novel, and this is an excerpt?


~ Lizzy

No, Lizzy, it was one of the wierd evenings of my life last night, & that sometimes begets wierd behavior on my part.
I found myself in the "Ydc Library" (not unlike the sure to be future old dick c. library or the present old bush library) (I wonder if young junior will have a library? That would be innovative for an individual who is probably functionally illiterate....) where I was digging through piles of manuscripts & books looking for a passage by Thom Jones & a paragraph I had scribed years ago under the influence of something that was passed off as synthetic mescaline, but in all likelyhood (in my opinion) was probably phencyclidine. Regardless, I located neither, but I am easily distracted, so I wound up satisfying myself by rereading pages from a couple of old novels in the Ydc collection. Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible is, simply put, a work of genius; when I came across that particular chapter where Ruth May (the baby of the family) was stricken by the viper, reliving that beautiful writing resoldered some primitive neural connection in my head & for some reason I remembered the Nano Write Effort. I am still unsure of what prompted me to excert this last night, but there are more pressing matters than that on my mind right now, namely the broken glass in my hair I woke up with & the blood stains on my pillow-case.

Evidently nostalgia must have dictated that I also left "The Library" with some Hunter Thompson as well; although I have no memory & evidently left no tracks like my preceding post, I found my old Hells Angels paperback, with its yellowing pages lying on the floor as well:

"But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right...and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it...howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica...letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge...The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others--the living--are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles and LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both means to an end, to the place of definitions."
(Hunter S. Thompson/Hells Angels)

And to think, I still remember reading a post in which Aunty Bee referred to the man as a "drunken idiot" or some such.