Wednesday, October 11, 2017

To NaNo, Or Not to NaNo

Okay, for those of you who don't know any better, NaNo is short for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month which takes place all over the world for the month of November. You can find out more about it HERE.

This is actually a new poem for a change, written in the form of a parody. And in case you flunked high school English, it's a parody of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet, To Be, Or Not to Be. :-D

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To NaNo or Not to NaNo

To NaNo, or not to NaNo--that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to write
For thirty days without stopping for breath
Or to just not bother trying at all
So as to avoid failure. To write, to sleep
No more--and by a sleep we say pass out
From utter exhaustion, pen and paper in hand
Unable to let go. ‘Tis a decision
Not to be taken lightly. To think, to write--
To write--perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that writing what great ideas may come
When we write without looking back,
It gives one pause. There’s the website
That makes a community of strangers.
Who wouldn’t want to be part of this experience
Where there are no judges, just writing
And struggles with the muse, the word counts,
The de-railing of thoughts with LOL cats and
The society of write-ins, and the frenzy
Of word wars that weed out the unworthy,
When all you want is a quiet hour
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a heavy pen,
But that the dread of some weird plot twist,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, screws up your story line,
If not your word count so that you start padding
Your prose and your novel becomes you know not what?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And you start to edit even though
Time is running out and you should be adding words
Not deleting them and your plot has disappeared
Under the stroke of the red pen. But persistence
Is key here -- Keep writing -- For in the end
You will have written an entire novel in thirty days,
And you and your book shall be remembered.

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