Guess I'm Doing NaNoWriMo Again--Woot!

The resurrection of my blackmail fodder--I mean, my first novel

What the bleep is NaNoWriMo, you ask?

NAtional
NOvel
WRIting
MOnth

Also known as November. The goal: write 50,000 words of fiction in a month.

Fiftyyyyy…. Thousannnnnnnd…

Which I’ve done. Many times.

From 2011 to 2020, I was a NaNoWriMo devotee, including some of the Camps. I only missed 2013. (The Year of Chronic Seizures.) The only times I’ve ever tried and failed to complete this challenge were:

• 2012 (the Year I Got Punched, which kicked off the chronic seizures).

• And 2019 (the year I needed a wheelchair and a Disability Rights advocate). Technically, in 2019 I knocked my personal challenge out of the park by being realistic and halving the official goal because this was not my first rodeo.

• In 2020, I actually did meet the challenge. What I didn’t do was report it correctly on time so… 🤪

Seeing as how the end of NaNo 2020 came three weeks before the 20th Anniversary of my big car wreck, yeahhhh…I was due some slack-cutting.

No shortage of new words that year, that’s for sure.

In my near-decade of doing NaNo, I’ve pounded out the overhaul of my toga-punk fantasy series Books 2 & 3, and I wrote multiple memoirs when I contemplated genuinely fictionalizing them because a critique group once decided that a belly dancing martial artist with Dain Bramage was too far fetched as a memoir protagonist. I hear I’m the kind of person “nobody else would ever be able to relate to.”

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I really am an unrelatable alien. You’ll have to tell me as you dive into my stories.

I’ve also NaNo-puked the sequels to the original Persephone & Haides novel I’ve been serializing HERE on Substack.

So what is my project this year?

I shall celebrate the Day of the Dead by resurrecting the long-buried corpse of the first novel I ever completed in eleventh grade.

It’s called THE WRECK ROOM. ©1990

I began this story when I was thirteen and finished it at seventeen, the same year my short story about a gladiatrix was published in an anthology.

(Yes. THAT Gladiatrix I wrote from age seventeen to forty-two. During the two decades I spent hidden in the Writer’s Closet after snooty university Academia and misogynistic fighter-jocks got ahold of that story, I just called it “My Book.” When I decided to try to publish the thing and looked up little details like word counts, I suddenly realized: Bwahahahahah! No. I’d written a monstrous, sprawling fantasy series.)

(Excuse me. I’d written prepubescent tripe. Also known as “mere” genre fiction.)

(One must enunciate this with one’s teeth properly clenched and a condescending “smile” slathered upon one’s face.)

(Let’s practice down our noses: “genre fiction.”)

Sooooo…

Back to my blackmail fodder—I mean, my first novel. It really was awful, don’t get me wrong. I was a teenager with no more instruction in the crafts of writing than anybody else got in the English classes of a teensy town in northern Minnesota. But just as I never could have truly done justice to this story until now, I’ll tell you what makes the original draft special and that no amount of courses, how-to books, workshops, conferences, critiques or even the professional editing of a publishing house could ever give this project.

The ‘80s lingo, rhythms, environment, and mindsets written in real time.

This story about being a teenager in the ‘80s was written BY a teenager IN the 80s. I could never duplicate that today no matter how many movies, news clips or documentaries I watch, or how many books or articles I read to remind myself what it was like back then.

Plus, even when I was a kid, turns out I actually knew how to tell a story. There’s a rattly skeleton in there. One that I never, in a million years, would have thought I’d be unearthing.

Until I went fishing in my dad’s old boat this past spring.

The second I hit college, I’d abandoned that manuscript and started expanding my gladiatrix short story into the Monstrosity of Toga-Punk Tripe. I mean, come on. I was a big, fancy twenty-year-old adult! So I grabbed that battered canary yellow folder I’d carried everywhere through high school, along with its two floppy disks (the black, legit floppy kind, not the hardback kind), and the two stacks of dot-matrix printouts stuffed with my “stupid little teenage story.” I shoved it all into the bottom of a box, intending to never show it to a living soul.

EVER.

Even as late as Summer 2022 when I blogged a big series detailing my (mis)adventures as an unpublished female fantasy author-wanna-be scribbling about the male dominated world of gladiators with a female-fighter protagonist from 1990 - 2015, I was convinced of this:

Said to me about my Gladiatrix by innumerable people (mostly unpublished male fantasy author-wanna-bes or female author-wanna-bes penning “real” literature at critique groups or cons):

"Ohhhh, you will NEVER publish your first novel. EVER. Just let it die in the trash and—"

Actually I finished my first novel at seventeen, thanks. And you're correct. That blackmail fodder shall NEVER be read by human eyes. EVERRRRR. Except for whoever has to go through all my belongings after I'm dead, and by then I won't really care because I will no longer have a functioning brain to feel mortification.

G'head. You can smack me. I don’t mind.

Well, an agent and a Big 5 editor disagreed about me chucking my Gladiatrix in the trash, so there’s that. Alas. Getting blasted in the face by an angry man and the year of seizures he gave me put that traditional publishing venture in the ground.

By the time I figured out what sort of publishing regimen might work with my TBIs, I had long since stopped writing with the intention of publishing in mainstream Fantasy, and I’d started letting myself write the way I really wanted to. Which meant I abandoned “prepubescent tripe” for “asinine housewife porn.”

In other words, I switched from Fantasy with romantic undertones into Fantastical Romance. Sorta. Because sometimes my Meet Cute doesn’t take place in Book 1 since around here we’re all about the larger plot, the character development, and the fantastical world as well as the swooning. Even when it takes place in Chapter 3 sometimes they don’t so much as smooch until Book 3. (I don’t do anything “right.”) Oh, yeah. And sometimes the camera follows characters behind the bedroom door where I turn up the heat level to a friggin’ Erotica novel.

What can I say? I write what I wanna read.

This year, I wanna write something I swore for thirty years that I never, EVER would.

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Up Next: THE PERFECT ANGSTY STORM that transformed a grouchy teenager into a novelist

June 1986
13 years old
A small town in northern Minnesota, pop. 333

It’s Saturday. Usually, my parents and I would be at The Lake by now. But we’re not going to The Lake like we have every single weekend of every single summer for the last few years.

We won’t be going back to The Lake ever.

And I am furious about that.

A rare shot of the Unimpressed One, caught in her natural habitat. 1985 - after learning that this would be my final summer at The Lake.

Whatever is a sullen, moody, disgruntled teenager to do in a situation like this? Why…write a novel to vent every one of her hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations, of course.

Progress of this project will be tracked on Notes:

© 2023 Hartebeast

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