Control: NaNoWriMo Madness…

I, Dalton Lewis, wanted to write about writing. Specifically, blogging about writing with a mental illness interests me. I have a mental illness. We’re not sure what it is but call it paranoid schizophrenia — according to the doctors. I’ve had it for so long that I hardly remember anything else — I was diagnosed around 2002 or 2003 or so. The illness basically makes me rant at the voices inside of my head instead of paying attention to the world around me. This means that I sometimes don’t think about the writing that I am doing.

That needed to change.

I was writing stories without thinking about the decisions that I was making. I wrote about mentally ill characters. My lead character is a forty-something schizophrenic private investigator who wants to catch a corrupt corporation that uses supernatural-seeming effects to mistreat people. I wanted something that sounded impossible but was very real.

Corporations do scary things to crazy people sometimes, and I wanted to create such a story.

Writing the novel in a month took work.

I wrote 2000 words a day in the mornings.

I would wake up in the morning around 7:30 am to my father talking to me.

“Breakfast, D-man?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I got up and put on my pajamas and took my morning pills. My dad took the electric chair downstairs, and then I took him and put him in the wheelchair. I wheeled him into the kitchen where I gave him his morning pill for Parkinson’s. Then I walked out to the garage and opened the garage and opened the passenger side door and got out the little item that gives my dad something to hold on to in order to help him get into the car. Then I got him to his walker, and he walked to the car with the aid of a walker. He entered the car, and I got into the driver’s seat. We drove to the fast food joint without talking a lot.

I don’t talk a lot. I just don’t.

Then we have fast food — a breakfast sandwich and a large Diet for each of us. The food is always delicious. It’s not expensive but it’s always good.

Then I go home and Mom is there.

She helps my Dad to get back into his wheelchair and then back upstairs and takes him his large Diet.

I sleep for a bit and then by nine or so I start to write.

It takes about two and a half or three and a half hours to write 2000 words each morning in November. The goal for NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — is to write a draft of a 50,000 word novel in a month. I write 2,000 words a day because that way I can take up to five days off and still finish my goal.

I didn’t plan this one.

I typed, mostly in my bedroom, listening to Christmas music. As always I poured my heart and soul into the novel. I tried to express all the things that I could not say in my real life. I wrote interesting and unusual and fun scenes for this one.

The next logical event used to be the norm for me. Now I decided to try to write something interesting and different — to change the narrative. I hope that it makes for some interesting reading.

The novel comes out sometime in November, and it will be a free download for a while. If you want to read it you can do so. If not — I understand. It’s just something that I put a lot of work into.

Thanks, and take care, friends.