Game day jitters

Five hours.

In five hours, both NaNoW­riMo and the Max­i­mum Geek Ulti­mate Writ­ing Chal­lenge begin. I’m going to a NaNoW­riMo kick­off party tonight here in Den­ver, and I’ll start writ­ing at the stroke of mid­night. Bet­ter yet, since I’ll likely still be writ­ing at 2am when the clocks fall back, I get an extra hour. Not to sleep as most peo­ple use this odd autumn bounty, but an extra hour to write.

And I’m gonna need it.

Right now, I’m writ­ing this in my friendly neigh­bor­hood Chipo­tle, where I plan to do a lot of writ­ing over the next year. It’s either a hor­ri­ble or oddly aus­pi­cious night to do this, as the place is likely well above the legal occu­pancy limit because of their annual “dress as a bur­rito and get a free bur­rito pro­mo­tion.” Nearly every one of the hun­dred peo­ple in here have at least some alu­minum foil wrapped around some­thing. Some, like the ones who just have a lit­tle crimped over an ear, aren’t really try­ing, but the cashier is being pretty gen­er­ous. The point is that if I can write in this din, with the end of the line con­stantly bump­ing past my table — the only one in the place with access to an AC out­let — then I can write any­where, anywhen.

And I’m gonna need that too.

On the sur­face, what I’m about to do — rather, what I’m about to start, this is a marathon, not a sprint — isn’t all that unusual as pro­fes­sional grade writ­ing goes. Stephen King does two thou­sand words a day, every day, when in the com­po­si­tion phase, and there’s a lot of writ­ers who work even faster than he does. But the dif­fer­ence is that I’m not tak­ing a leave of absence to do this. I’m not get­ting paid to do this. I don’t even have a spouse who can sup­port me for a year while I chase my dream.

In the next year, I’m going to tran­si­tion into a new job. I’m going to file bank­ruptcy, some­thing I know very lit­tle about and that scares the heck out of most peo­ple. I’m going to move out of my par­ents house into a place of my own. I may end up buy­ing a new car or buy­ing and learn­ing how to ride a motor­cy­cle. Despite what my friends seem to think, I’m going to main­tain an active social life, though I prob­a­bly won’t date more than I do now, which is to say I won’t date at all. I’m going to keep blog­ging and tweet­ing. I’m going to have a full life.

And I’m going to write some­where between a half and three quar­ters of a mil­lion words of fiction.

And now, as I sit in this cacoph­o­nous Chipo­tle, that’s start­ing to sound… real. That’s start­ing to sound daunt­ing. The enor­mity of my task looms before me and I feel small.

Tonight, I get to do that.

Because in five hours, every­thing changes. In five hours, I start writ­ing. And I don’t stop until I get to the end of book seven. I don’t give up. I don’t despair. I don’t get to run to any­one to take this bur­den from me. This is my dream. This is why I’m here on this planet and this is what I’ve spent the last twenty years run­ning from.

In five hours, the run­ning stops. And the writ­ing begins.