The Shop Around the Corner

I hereby announce that I have entered into NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, this stands for National Novel Writing Month. Information can be found here. In a nutshell, it's an event that happens every year, where aspiring novelists such as myself start on November 1st and hopefully conclude November 30th with a 50,000 word novel. I heard about it last year and decided that I would jump on the bandwagon come November.

I am cheating a bit, though. I am going to try to knock out my story that I have been sculpting for 3 years now. It has gone from being "the untitled dream story" (some know it as the Twilight Zone story) to (tentatively) "We Own Your Dreams." Hopefully, by Nov. 30th, it will be We Own Your Dreams. I have maybe 6-8 pages written, and at this rate I'll finish sometime near my death and will certainly have wasted my notebook full of other story ideas and leads. Hopefully this will give me the push I need toward regular writing.

I do consider myself an aspiring novelist (currently I am also an unknown essayist) and others such as myself flock to bookstores such as Barnes and Nobles' or Border's to be amongst the things they love. True, I love reading as well, and these are generally the places I come when I slake that thirst, but I have a different viewpoint of such bookstores.

They are my ninth circle of hell.

Why is this? Because all I've ever wanted to do with my life is be an author. Just like everybody else in those stores. I pour hours and hours of toil and sweat into writing a work and leave a large piece of me within. Somehow, someday someone else picks it up and decides that it should be published. I am overjoyed with this idea and ecstatically go through the long process of rewriting, etc. When the final, finished project is done (probably with a cover picture that I think is stupid, yet I am powerless to change) it is placed on the shelf in the fiction section between Brand, Max, and Brautigan, Richard.

Lost in a sea of thousands no different than it.

If you never say your name out loud to anyone they can never, ever call you by it