So much for SocNoc salvaging my writing in 2008. After grinding out 30,000 words, a combination of flu, employment, new child and plotlessness undid me. With 20K to write and a week to go, I realised I wasn't going to make it, and did the honourable thing, which was to run like the coward I am. The Hell with all this heroic crap about desperate charges, trying to write 15,000 words in the last ten minutes, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and so on. I am Scottish. I know that defeat is inevitable, the only choice is between defeat and disaster. Given the forces arrayed against me, I decided not to lose it all (literally, I think I would have died if I had carried on writing) in a romantic, but still doomed, effort.
Seriously, having done Nanowri mo four times, SocNoc once and various other writerly challenges, I didn't feel the need to prove myself. I KNOW I can write incoherent muck. I think the next stage in my writerly evolution may be to try and write some coherent muck. Yes, that may mean that I attempt to PLAN something, instead of freestyling, come Nanowrimo 08.
