Report Card (16-22 Nov ’09)

weight: 138.8
exercise: 
    300 pushups
    30 sit-ups
    140 side bends
    2 ‘other’ cardio activities
books read: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (page 591; continuing)
blogs written: 0
photographs edited & posted: 1
cups of coffee: gave up counting when I started having lattes for lunch
christmas trees erected: 1

…

The theme of this week’s report card is: admitting defeat. 

I have hit the NaNoWriMo wall and cannot bust through.  Yes, I know I am supposed to just rattle off words and not edit myself or worry about how good it is and so forth… but there is just no solving the problems I am having.  I have no story.  There really is no way to get my protagonist, Benny the Troll, from point A (a medieval setting where Benny makes his living as a traveling musician) to point B (Benny gets gunned down in a back alley of a modern city by a jive-talkin’ pimp named Cinnamon Brown).  The plot is really just a running joke that got started between my wife and I — when I threw together two characters from altogether different story ideas.  It works as a joke.  Not so much as a novel.  I cannot sustain the humor for that long.  In fact, I cannot sustain the narrative for that long.  And what is worse: it’s not that I’m blocked (even though I am), it’s that I am bored.  Bored to death with the whole story.  It is simply not interesting to me anymore.  At the same time I am reading a truly fascinating piece of literature that, while time-consuming, is by far the most intellectually stimulating book I have read this year.  So when faced with committing what little time I have in the evenings to either writing a gibberish ‘novel’ that will never see the light of day or reading a newly-discovered modern literary masterpiece, my heart longs to read the masterpiece while my mind urges me not to give up on the writing contest.  This week, a friend finally gave me permission to stop worrying about Benny.  Life’s too short, he said (I’m paraphrasing), to spend it doing things you don’t enjoy… especially if you’re doing it just to say you’ve done it.  So, unless I hit some tremendous second wind during the coming week, I think I may be done with NaNo until next year.