‘Tis the night before NaNo, and all through my head
Not a creature is stirring, not even the dead.
A notebook is open beside the armchair,
In hopes that an idea will lodge itself there.
The boyfriend is nestled all snug in his bed.
The prospect of lonely nights fills him with dread.
And I at my screen so bright and enticing
Have just settled down for a long night of writing.
At midnight world-wide there’ll arise such a clatter
Of fingers on keyboards, it’s likely they’ll shatter.
Away to the pencils the writers will fly
For fear of a wordcount that passes them by.
The moon and the sun and the sky and the stars,
People and partners and buildings and cars,
All disappear as the writer’s gaze lingers
On two busy thumbs and eight busy fingers,
On hands that drive stories where speed is essential.
In order to win the flow must be torrential.
More rapid than eagles the words they must come,
As for punctuation – what better than none?
“No Full-stops! No Commas! No Speech Marks or Hyphens!
No Brackets or Colons, or grammar that frightens!
Leave them to the edit and heed not its call.
Now throw away! Throw away! Throw away all!”
As word after word to the novels will fly,
As the days of November will swiftly flow by,
So each hundred words will add fuel to the fire,
And pages once printed will pile ever higher.
And then, in a flash it will be December
And writers emerge and begin to remember
That every good novel begins with a plot –
Something that during the rush they forgot.
Suddenly characters seem paper-thin.
The piece needs an edit – but where to begin?
The words – how they cluster, in structures so dense
They switch between past, present and future tense.
The sentences, structured as Gordian knots,
Are tied up so tightly they serve as garrottes.
The story is choked beneath thousands of words,
Most are unneeded, and many absurd.
Plots twists are more tangled than tagliatelle,
With wandering penguins and jars of grape jelly.
Perhaps NaNoEdMo will prove its salvation
And make a real novel from this aberration,
Which doesn’t seem that it was writ by a loon.
Or failing that, Script Frenzy opens in June.
The year will pass quickly, with novels dismembered,
And before you can blink, we’ll be back to November.
The thought of another month’s anguish and pain
Makes the suffering authors cry “Never again!”
But the fun makes the poor fools forget all the fear
As they do it again in each following year.
So let me exclaim, before I too am struck,
"Happy NaNo to all, and to all some Good Luck!"