Failure

oops.

If your wondering what failure looks like… it’s this.  Also my partially finished book, which to me looks a little bit like failure.  However with any good failure, I have some excuses and some lessons learned.

couldn’t do it

I wasn’t able to finish.  #NaNoWriMo defeated me.

I now have two half finished books.  It would be nice if I could put them together and make one book, but I think there is a far stretch for the books to meld properly.  So Now I’m back to where I started, with unfinished things.

My excuse for not finishing was that I just ran into a lot of other things that were more pertinent, like school and work, than writing in a book.  I started off strong, but a trip to Nashville for a conference totally killed my plans for the book, and after trying a couple more days, I officially gave up and knew I could’nt finish.

It may look bad that I have a few unfinished works that I plan on finishing, but havent yet.  But I look at it this way.  These two works are somehow deeply rooted within myself and other parts of me, so to say they are finished would be to say that I am finished.

These works will grow and change as I change and grow.  I’m going to move back to working on my first one called “More than Words” it’s funny how when working on the other I found inspiration for it.  It did what I wanted it to do. It reinvigorated me to finish it.

I’m about half way done with the first draft of “More than Words” and I have alot left to work through on it.  I might post a chapter or two here for you all to read someday, but it’s all a work in progress.    Just like my life, it’s a work in progress.

50,000

50,000 words is the magic number.

Why? you may ask. Well I made a decision I was going to take part in something I found out about last year as I explored the Twitterverse and stumbled on a guy named Kevin Hendricks. He took part in what is called National Novel Writing Month, or for short NaNoWriMo. You kinda sound like Mork from Mork and Mindy when you say it, but it’s real.

I plan to write an entire novel in the month of November.

Integrity

There are only a few major lessons that I can remember being taught over the years, and some surface at odd times. There’s the time you’re about to do something, and then your Grandmother pops up in the back of your head shaking her finger. Or the times when you hear your Dad’s voice telling you the “what for”. Maybe it’s really them, maybe it’s our imagination, maybe it’s our conscious. Whatever this is, these lessons have stuck in our head for a reason, and I can think of one specifically that was drilled into my head at an early age.