I… have created something. – 6 of 30

Lazy day, and not much mental activity, let alone much to report. The husband headed out to DC today, and I got up way too damned early to see him off.

(N.B.: extra snuggling worth it)

I should have done a lot of things with my day, like clean the house (which desperately needs it, and it’s totally my fault), but instead I did something ridiculously satisfying and totally useless. (Also, I took a nap on the couch.)

Today, I finished writing a bad novel. A very bad novel. One that I put away after the 2005 NaNoWriMo fiesta where I “won” by hitting 50,000 words in 30 days, not by finishing the story. And it’s one bad novel. It was never intended to be a good novel. It’s a horrible science-fictiony romance that, if I ever printed it out, would have to be burned immediately. But…

I decided to pull it out and read it sometime last year. And I found myself really ticked off… not because it sucked, but because I wanted to know what happened. So I’ve finally been hacking at it off-and-on the for last week, and today, I finally finished it. 83,000 words of crap, but now I finally know what happens (for those of you dying to know, the psychopath and the evil professor go to jail! the hero and the heroine live happily ever after! the author puts the story away for another year to hide her shame!). And secretly, I know it’s not actually half-bad. (It’s also not half-good. Don’t get any ideas about reading it. As I said, I never had any intention of writing it for anyone else.)

Unlike most of the NaNoWriMo participants I knew in L.A., I never had any intention of trying to publish it. Maybe, someday in the future, I’ll try and write one for someone else, but this one was for me, and I enjoyed it. And to have finished it, as I said, was profoundly satisfying. It was a creative exercise, and it turned out something that it turns out I care about, even if it’s for me alone.

Kurt Vonnegut, in his excellent book of essays, A Man Without a Country, says the following about the arts, and I suppose he’s right:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

And so I have created something. And maybe someday soon, I will create something else. For now, I put my characters to bed in the Happily Ever After, and I put me to bed in my bed.

Listening to: Rob Thomas – Lonely No More