HELLO, NANO: NANOWRIMO 2019

To be perfectly, unerringly honest: I never even considered the idea that I wouldn't take part in NaNoWriMo this year... but as of midway through October, I had every intention of kind of phoning it in.

In the past, I've used NaNo as a means of entering into the realms of Thriller, Satire, Horror shorts, and a YA adaptation. I try to get into new genres every year, and use it as a means of not just forming good writing practices, but utilizing it as an opportunity to try out new voices and perspectives, working on unfamiliar formats and difficult subject matter.

However, this year, I was feeling fairly uninspired. I didn't have any kind of grand project idea, and was pretty much just ready to keep adding to my NaNo from last year, Fighting with the Wind. A  light and hopeful modern-day YA adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden wasn't exactly what I felt like focusing on right now - in the midst of life transitions, trying to find a job, and battling through some rough personal feelings - but it was all I had ready, so I felt prepared to buckle down and tackle the second half of that project, left unfinished.

Instead, I got a little help from my mom... not in any way that she intended, of course. 

We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner, when I brought up that NaNoWriMo was almost upon us. My mother openly scoffed. "You're not doing that this year," she said, somewhat brazenly. "You're too busy."

"Oh really?" I replied. "Because I'm pretty sure I am, in fact, doing it."

She rolled her eyes. "What would you write about right now? It's not like you can just write a cookbook." I'd been spending most of the last week's evenings cooking dinner from the family, including a quite large one for my own 26th birthday celebration.

A lightbulb. Actually, you can totally write a cookbook for NaNo, I thought. I told her as much, and the subject passed. Little did she know, that she had planted a seed... this was now what I fully intended to do.

Really, it's something they should all have seen coming. I take it upon myself to periodically warn my family members that I - a prolific journaler since a very tender age, someone who creates scrapbooks, has filled countless notebooks and planners, and is all around, an passionate documenter - will someday write my memoirs. Whatever is published, will be backed up by years of receipts. Tread softly, lest you get written about.

While I have done absolutely nothing notable or worthy in my life to justify the writing of memoirs just yet, I keep telling myself it's better to start now, rather than wait to do so later, when my inevitable fame and acclaim will no doubt hinder their production. My perspectives on what forms such a work would take have changed around a bit in the past year, thanks to Kathleen Flinn: her book Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good - following the culinary lineage of her grandparents and parents, and food-oriented upbringing - is honestly the genesis piece for my NaNoWriMo project this year.

I was an early adopter of M.F.K. Fisher as a kid, gaining a collection of her works in a large bound copy of The Art of Eating as a freshman in high school. Through high school and college, I would frequently pick up the books of Ruth Reichl, which my mother loved, once she had finished with them. I have collected my own set of cookbooks - especially those of Jamie Oliver - for years, and rarely went a week without flipping through one or another as a child. Food reading has always been a part of my life, for about as long as reading has as a whole, so it was honestly only a matter of time before I hit on the idea of writing a food memoir.

My Mother Hates My Soups: Bites from a Meal I'm Still Eating will follow the traditions, memories, and relationships forged in my childhood kitchen, and beyond. I'm a home chef, and not even a very good one at that - one that is still very much learning, something I'm reminded of every single time I add butter to a pan, or chop a head of broccoli - so this will probably be my most un-publish-able NaNoWriMo project ever. However, to be honest, it's one I've probably been thinking about for longer than any tackled in my past.

Food has actually managed to sneak into multiple other projects I've done for NaNo: one of the horror shorts I wrote, in a continuation of my NaNo project from 2017, was about a chef who endures a strange and unsettling trip to the grocery store, while in my 2018 project, the character of Martha was transformed from Mistlethwaite Manor's maid, into a young and ambitious local line cook. Her mother was old friends with Mrs. Medlock, giving her plenty of reasons to expose the petulant and uncertain Mary to new cuisine, frequently swinging by the brownstone "manor" with new recipes that I'd have found and pinned to my project Pinterest board.

Therefore, with all of this inspiration backing up my passion, I'm ready to get started. Granted, that start may be coming a little late in the game - so far, I've only written 5,504 words - but it's a start I'm proud of nonetheless.

Keep your eyes peeled for more future updates like this, filled with not only status reports from the blank pages of a Word document, but of all the food I've been cooking since then (which, spoiler alert, has kind of been a lot).

Are you tackling NaNoWriMo this year? What's your project about? 

Let me know, in the comments below!