Novel #20!

So you wanna know something? I'm tired. It was a rough semester and I spent the better part of my last week off sleeping. Well, that and being stuck in Christmas traffic. I'm never shopping on Christmas Eve eve again. This is a lesson I'm sure everyone else learned ages ago, but I guess that is what your early twenties are for.

I promised you chicken popovers today for the amazing City of Thieves book. This is still coming soon, but I wanted to share a bit of news today instead. One reason I've been so busy recently is that I did NaNoWriMo.

This isn't the first time I've done it. In fact, this was the fourth time I've done it, but only the third time I've won (A term I'm not sure I feel fully qualified to use. How about finished?). Last year I lost (A term I DO feel qualified to use.) for the first time in NaNoWriMo. It was my freshman year in college and I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with stuffz. I started a novel that was a disaster and quit at around 30,000 (which, from experience, is about when I hit a wall anyway).

This year, I tried again. I was a little wary. I'm still in college and probably busier than ever but if there is one thing that bugs me, it's when someone says they don't have time to do NaNoWriMo. And we've all heard it. "Yeah, I really, really want to do it, but I just don't think I have time this year."

You don't really want to do it. Time is an excuse, not a reason. Last year, I didn't lose because I didn't have time. I could have made time, despite working and having an internship and being a full time student and living in an undergrad dorm. I could have done it. But it wasn't the right novel, I was having other life issues that made it hard for me to get motivated to write. There were reasons that I chose not to finish, not reasons that prevented me from finishing.

So this year, I decided that I would do it again because I haven't finished a novel since I started college and I wanted to prove to myself that I still could, and that I still wanted to. One great thing about NaNoWriMo, to me, is what it encourages me to do. It encourages me to cut down on the amount of trashy TV I watch (One Tree Hill, anyone?) and the amount of time I spend studying for class and forces me to increase the amount of time I spend doing something I love -- writing. Because writing isn't a chore for me, or something I feel like I have to do to get a good grade and prepare for my future. Writing is something I do because I love it. It's a self preserving activity, something that has become increasingly obvious to me since I did NaNoWriMo in college. I love college, but it can make me crazy. And writing makes me sane.

I finished NaNoWriMo this year, reaching 51,000 words during the course of November on my new novel, Jacked. I'm pleased to say that today, the day after Christmas, I finished the novel in full. It is my 20th novel. I'm going to relax for the rest of the day, drink some hot chocolate and eat Christmas leftovers. In a few weeks, I'll start editing and I'll make sure to carve out time when I go back to school to edit and write because if I don't give myself time to do what I love, what am I doing?

My Future and the Future of the Humanities

I'm back at college now and in a week I will be 20. I know for a lot of people, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But when I think that this is my last week as a teenager, I'm actually a little freaked out. This is what the difference between 19 and 20 says to me:

19-year-olds can spend massive amounts of time watching "Say Yes to the Dress" on Netflix. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds can know all the lyrics to "Call Me Maybe" and scream them out open car windows at stop lights. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds don't have to be ashamed that they spent their last Friday night learning all the dance moves to Gangnam Style, while in their horse-pajamas. 20-year-olds should be.

But, most importantly, 19-year-olds are teenagers. They don't need to have their lives figured out yet. 20-year-olds are young adults. They should.

The prospect of my future has never really freaked me out before, which I guess is a pretty naive statement. I've been a very lucky person in life. I've always known I wanted to be a writer, and I'm not bad at it. I got into my first choice for college with some scholarships. I come from an amazingly supportive family and I've got great friends and a terrific boyfriend. When I came to college, I knew I'd be an English major and a Creative Writing minor and I knew my goal was to go to graduate school, either for a PhD in English or an MFA in Creative Writing. A professorship would be next, some tenure, a home in New England, some novels published on the side.

So today I decided that since I'm turning 20 and everything, I should probably start thinking about how I'm going to make these things happen. I went to a workshop today on how to apply for an English PhD program or a Creative Writing MFA program. Want to know how that went? Pretty much like this: Me Being a Dumb Ass (minus getting a C and wanting to go to Yale)

Suffice to say, the general message of how to apply to graduate school in English was don't do it. Why? Out of 600 applications, 15 get accepted. Programs are shrinking, getting canceled, ceasing to exist. For the first half hour of this workshop, we were given a lecture about how the death of humanities is upon us. A panel of advisers and professors in the English department told us with straight faces that people today see little need for the humanities and its future is very much at risk. And I thought it was just mine.

I could make this post a long rant about how ridiculous this feels to me, how stupid I want to say people are, how helpless I feel but also how much I want to fight back against this stereotype of the humanities and the idea that soon it will only be something people once studied and liberal arts universities will no longer really be liberal arts universities. But I'm not. Because I think those opinions of mine are obvious. I'd heard these sentiments before but I'd never taken them too seriously. But when a group of experts in the field sit in front of a group of future experts in the field and tell them that their field is on the brink of death, it's hard not to take seriously.

What do you think? Are the humanities dying? Why do people need the humanities, and literature in particular? Because I know this was a question that I'd never thought needed to be asked.

(On a lighter note, I read a fantastic book by David Benioff called City of Thieves. In honor of it, I'm making chicken popovers (the book is about two boys hunting Leningrad in WWII for a chicken). I'll post the results up here on the next post, like I did with Lemon Cake.)