NaNoWriMo and my squishy swollen brain

So everyone on staff at OLL and all the guest authors who write pep talks for NaNoWriMo and all the exhausted crazy people who dump stuff in the NaNoWriMo tag on tumblr all say the same thing:  "you’re writing 50,000 words on one piece of original fiction from scratch in 30 days; it is going to be rubbish and you are going to write on in spite of it.”  I’ve heard that easily dozens, possibly hundreds of times, over the last year-plus since I did my first NaNoWriMo.  But for some reason I’ve always had it in my head that that doesn’t quite apply to me.  Like, “I am KIERSTEN.  I am an ENGLISH MAJOR.  I write things ALL THE TIME.   I want to write fiction FOR A LIVING someday.  I am, like, contractually obligated by existence to only write things that are at least halfway awesome.”

And then it just hit me today how egregiously pretentious, egoistic, hubristic, and downright laughable that is.  How crackbrained do I have to be to think I’m only going to write good things?  Furthermore, how helpful is it if I kill my creative inspiration because I’m afraid that it is esoterically “not good enough”?  (The answers are, respectively, “extremely” and “not at all”.)

I’M WRITING A (short) NOVEL IN A MONTH, FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE.  There are novelists I love and admire a great deal who won’t go near NaNoWriMo because they know very well how impossible it is to write a high-quality book in thirty days.  This is a month for pure stream-of-consciousness creative flow.  I can get down the plot and ideas, and then edit the living daylights out of it later.  There will be lots of places where I will have to intentionally write clunky and awkward rubbish just to fill in gaps.  (I have a hard time even doing that in essays, and those are usually pretty boring to read even when I enjoy writing them.)

And that is okay.

Halfway through the month, I am at 32,133 words.
That is not bad.
No bad at all.
And some of it is actually pretty neat, if I may say so.

I declare that this will be a success.  I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS STORY.  Even if I may not do it all that well.