five years ago - part 3

let me start by saying, i promise i will not re-post every blog entry i made when i first started NanoWrimo 5 years ago. but i did think this one was significant since it was from the first day. maybe it will help someone out there who's having trouble this first day.

November 1, 2005
The first day

To be honest, this was a much harder day than I imagined. I knew that starting this novel would be hard, but I really had no idea it would be this hard. I was fighting against my inner critic. I was struggling with a friend's recent falling out with a neighbor, which led to concerns about her safety. My children were more needy than usual. More problems came up, or at least I noticed them more.

Many times today I was ready to give up before I ever started. I gave it three shots and nothing I did was good enough, I thought. But after much struggling with a beginning and crying and overcoming a huge dragon in my mind, as of this moment I have 987 words. It's a start and it puts me farther ahead than if I had done nothing today.

If nothing else, today has reminded me that I have an enemy who will stop at nothing to prevent me from doing what is in my heart to do. But I also had to remember that my God is fighting for me and He is not going to give up on me. In the end, what kept me going was not the promises I made to my kids or my friends or to anyone who happens to be reading this.

In the end, as my wonderful husband told me, I knew I had to slay a dragon that has haunted me for 20+ years. It has been the dragon of "this is too hard" and "you have no voice." Today I started dismantling that dragon one scale at a time, one word at a time. That in itself is a victory.

Post Script to the first day

After I posted here, my husband came home and I went back into the guest room and wrote another 1000 words! God is good.

And the craziest thing that really made me laugh - I started my novel with "It was a dark and stormy night."

(and if for some crazy reason, you want to read that very first attempt, i've posted it on my Eldala blog: Eldala's first draft - to warn you, it does have some spoilers if you haven't read the novel yet. also, to see the difference between that and what ended up in the final novel, you can read the Prologue and first chapter.)