“High in a tower she sits by the hour, maintaining her hair…”

I’m halfway through my National Novel Writing Month project and I am pretty miserable about it. Naturally, I share this with you.

I read a lot of reconstituted fairy tales and thought it might be fun to do a re-telling of Rapunzel. 32 pages in, I’m realizing that the reason no one ever rewrites the Rapunzel story is that she spends many years trapped in a tower and nothing happens to her.

Well, they do say to write what you know, I think to myself, staring out my apartment windows at the big old world going by outside.

So there’s my crappy plot to deal with. On top of that, the initial ease of prose flow in the first week made me all cocky and I stopped writing for three days, not realizing that by the time I caught up with myself I’d be reduced to describing every piece of fabric in this goddamn boring tower room where nothing ever happens to her. So now I am roughly 5000 words behind my quota.

On top of all this, I have written just about every cliche I know into this story, every sentence clatters and clonks like I’m shaking a box full of blocks, and my character is supposed to be a tomboy but turns out to be a big boring bookworm with nothing to say for herself, just like me.

On the plus side, I gather this is how I’m supposed to feel halfway through the month, so. Yay for me.