“I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Nevisian-American general, economist and politician, 1st United States Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was born on this day in 1755. (d. 1804)
I have yet to see Hamilton the Musical live on stage. I’ve seen the recorded version on the Disney Channel a couple of times. It’s not that I haven’t had the chance to see it live, it’s more that I’m not inclined to spent the equivalent of a car payment on tickets to one live performance. Any performance.
I mentioned the other day that I’m cleaning out and redoing my home office. It’s a dangerous process. Not because there are necessarily any physical dangers, it’s just all the stuff.
I’ll come across a box of show notebooks or props. Or memorabilia from a trip or two. I’ll find myself losing an hour or more going through said box instead of doing the work I need to be doing and eliminating half the contents.
I’m doing this in stages because it’s not just a one-day project.
Last weekend I came across a stack of notebooks. They’d been sitting on the shelf for some time.
Turns out they were the hard copies of my Nanowrimo projects over the years.
Nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write at 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. I’ve attempted it on several occasions and succeeded on a few.
My current work in progress (well, work with not so much progress) is a combination of two of those Nanowrimo years. Finishing that draft is on my list of things to accomplish this year…as it has been for the past several years.
What I found in the stack of notebooks was half a dozen or so semi-completed manuscripts. I realized there’s some good stuff in there.
There’s also some crap.
The tricky part about Nanowrimo is that you have to keep writing. You’ll never make it if you go back and edit for the perfect word sequence.
That means some ideas are not well thought out and some are just garbage that you crank out just to hit the days count.
So, I have a supply of works in progress. That’s a nice resource to have.
But I also have several more children’s books in various stages of development, or not.
Will I complete a novel this year? Maybe.
Will I complete another children’s book this year? Yes, at least one.
And, I’ll keep going.
A writer’s job is to put words together. Sometimes they’re good ones.
Sometimes they make a finished project.
Sometimes the writer gets lost in old manuscripts and doesn’t get many words on paper that day.
And sometimes he spends too much time trying to write a clever blog post.
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