NaNoWrimo, Day 4: Work in the Face of Adversity

I had such high hopes for today: a relatively free schedule, a supportive family willing to let me go for some time this afternoon, and a real desire to get to the next section of the novel.

The one commitment on the schedule today was a birthday brunch celebration for my mother-in-law. This promised to be a joyous occasion with family and friends, with great food and conversation. Perhaps there might even be some inspiration for the novel!

Alas, the enjoyment of the afternoon was almost undone by a restaurant's terrible service. Due to a long wait for a table and a much, much longer wait for the food that we ordered, not to mention terrible communication by the waitstaff, we did not escape the restaurant until three hours after our arrival. Besides leaving a slightly bad taste in our mouths, the extended brunch ended up meaning that there would be no time for me to escape the house and write today.

But this turn of events was not the really devastating event of the day.

Since late September, I have been carrying a small spiralbound notebook with me, used exclusively for the purpose of capturing my random neural firings about this book. Over the course of that month — and especially in the week before November 1st — I had worked out character sketches on five main characters, mapped out many scenes and "moments" that I knew had to happen, and — most importantly — laid out the foundations for the backstory on which the whole novel is carried.

And after searching in every place I can possibly imagine (including a latenight trip to my workplace to ransack my office), I am sad to announce that this book of ideas is lost.

It's hard to describe how debilitating this has been to my psyche. Tonight was the night my writing would begin to reinvent an ancient, worldwide tradition. My map to this reinvention was in the pages of this book. Without it, I found myself moping, even resisting beginning to write.

I will forge on. And I will continue to look for the missing notebook. But it's hard to shake the feeling that important pieces to this puzzle have been permanently lost. My writing tonight — a letter from my main character's mother — was the most importan section I've written so far, and it felt very uninspired. It's hard to tell if the writing is really that weak or if everything right now is colored by my darkened state of mind.

Let us hope the notebook makes a reappearance soon. And that Day 5 is more positive than the mess that was today.