12,000 and change

...still chapter 2, though!

pre-writing blog

Just to be different, I'm blogging first then working on The Novel tonight. If I get some super-duper word count before my eyes fall out of my head and start bouncing around between my keyboard and my wrist pad, I'll post it here. Then I'll pick up my eyeballs and go to bed.



(Another shot from after the Run With The Giraffes event last month.)

Just over 10,000

So it feels like I'm finally getting to know my characters better. It's like we've all had a drink or two at the party and are starting to loosen up a bit. A few more Gin & Tonics and the skeletons might start rolling out of the closets. The plot is becoming more solid as well. It gives me hope. No sleep, but hope.

Working on Chapter 2

Of I don't know how many chapters.
The luxury of writing a novel instead of a poem or story is that not only can I let my characters ramble on, but for the sake of this crazy word count, it's to my advantage if it takes pages for not much to happen.

Except, of course, that when I do a new draft, it'll be half the size of whatever this ends up being.

And in spite of that luxury, I'm only at 9,000 words. Ah, well. That's what happens when one is still trying to do other things like go to the gym and then spend 4 hours at children's birthday parties.

I think I'll have a couple of hours free tomorrow, though.
For now, it's nearly midnight, and I'm turning into a pumpkin...

8058 if you must know

Dear Small But Beloved Reading Audience (all 6 of you!),
For those of you who are asking, I've reach 8,058 words. I hope to be much closer to 13,000 by tomorrow morning, though, so I won't be spending much time blogging.

Get-well-soon wishes to Suzanne's M, and condolences to Suzanne on the demise of her beloved car. (But we're so glad you're all right!)

Can't Blog...sleeping...

...but I'm toasty warm from being under a blanket on the couch and from a blazing fire D made in the wood-burning stove, so it's a very happy kind of sleepy that I'm feeling.

Update on novel when I have something more positive to report. Today was more of a stare-out-the-window-and-figure-out-the-plot kinda day than a pound-it-out-on-the-keyboard kinda day. Also, (not that I'm complaining), I was only home for 30 minutes between 4:45am and 8:30pm, and once I got home, I did nothing more than get the kids to bed and fall asleep on the couch. C'était la vie aujourd'hui.

Another added benefit

Because I have to write this novel during whatever slivers of free time I have in my schedule, I found myself writing for about an hour while the girls had gymnastics lessons today. Imagine working on a novel while in a huge gym full of kids running around and coaches yelling instructions and parents gossiping over coffee. Throw in the siblings of the kids in class, bored and restless and underfoot.

Not conducive. Not exactly a room of one's bloody own.

But I managed to crank out a page or so in between helping with homework (my kid's and that of another random 5th grader there) and supervising my other child (and the other 5th grader's little sister) so that they were somewhere between entertaining each other and setting the place on fire. (It's a fine line, but if you're a parent, you've already had to walk it.)

So what I'm saying is that somehow, I've developed a way to concentrate in the midst of total chaos. Say it with me, now: "Whoo-hoo!"

Lisa suggested I keep a word count of the novel-in-progress on my blog. Not a bad idea. But which word count to use? The one automated by Word itself is probably more generous than an editor would consider. The method I'd learned about 15 years ago is to count words per line and lines per page and work out the average. And then there's the standard "about 250 words per (doublespaced) page." But for the sake of simplicity, I'll go with Word's calculation and then add some extra words (if possible) for insurance.

And drat. I found this note in a NaNoWriMo forum that addresses what one can include and what one can't include towards the final word count: "The only real limits are that it has to be written in November, and not beforehand." So ridiculously long (but new) chapter titles would count, but not the pages I'd written toward another novel and am incorporating into this novel - not, that is, until I have completed the necessary modifications to move them from 1st person to 3rd and from near-past to distant past. That is to say, I'll be re-writing and putting little bits and pieces from previous-year's notes in this new work, but until I actually put them there, I should not count them. This dramatically decreases my count. By like 5,000 words. Blast.


At any rate, kudos (read: are you insane?) to Josh for picking up the same gauntlet he threw down for me. We're on our way!

Day Two Observations

1. Much of writing a novel consists of staring into space thinking about the characters and plot. This is critical for my process, anyway. Driving and showering seem to be great times to hash things out mentally before I waste time wandering around on a page headed in the wrong direction. It means missing Morning Edition and potentially forgetting to use conditioner, but one must make sacrifices.

2. I am only deluding myself if I think I really will go to bed on time but then get up two or three hours later to write for an hour or two. It's a lie! A big fat lie! And also not good for my health--mental or otherwise. I'd learned this lesson earlier with my blogging but apparently seem to think that because I AM WRITING A NOVEL the laws of physics and such go out the window. And float. (Get it? Laws of physics...float? Ha!) Anyway, I can manage the going to bed on time or the staying up to write, but doing both means neither has any quality to it. Note to self: remember One Needed Thing. At a time.

3. Taking the girls to the library while I write is a great idea, and should give me another 2-3 hours a week of production time, but it works even better if I don't spend the time balancing my checkbook.

4. My house is likely to stay much cleaner than usual during NaNoWriMo. True, any time spent not writing is spent not writing, but see #1 above. The fact is, I can and do decide on things like the hair color, eye color, names and history of my characters, as well as plot points, while washing dishes or folding laundry. This cuts down on time spent staring into space while a Word doc is sitting on the screen in front of me, mocking me.

5. The support that friends and spouses show during this time is very helpful. Thanks to all. Um. I mean spouse, of course. Mine, that is. Not that my friends aren't spouses, some of them. But they're not my spouses. Except that one. Of course.

Proof in the Pudding

So the first day of NaNoWriMo is done, and what have I learned?

That I am already too dependent on making this happen through the use of lots of caffeine.

That since I will be single-parenting at night for at least a week while D works a late shift, I'll have to be even more creative and disciplined than I thought I'd have to be.

That if I'm not willing to cut out all social activities for the month to do this (I've talked about my stoopid pride before, haven't I?), I will have to expect to pay the price.

That one of the compromises I make might could be educational videos (like the French language instruction one we currently have from the library) to keep the kids entertained while I write.

But so far, I'm on target. Lots of words written (over 3,000 so far, but that includes a section written 2 years ago that will have to be pared down and re-incorporated correctly).

A fat, horrible, first part of a first chapter of the first draft. An outline. A voice starting to emerge.

Boo!

S as Hermione,


R as a mysterious gypsy,







...and some of our little pumpkins.





A mellow Halloween, all told. R went off with a friend to the infamous "D Street" on the other side of town, where the top-of-the-line decorating and treats happen. S and I hit a couple of blocks, then she had a piece or three of candy, and went happily to bed (having picked up the phrase, "I really scored," from me, I'm afraid). R came back with stories of how much fun she'd had, full of great good feeling for the whole world. She said she only had about five pieces of candy, but whatever they were, they sure made her a believer.


I'm focusing on the novel, now. Two hours until NaNoWriMo. Ready-set-write!

Halloween Eve

Is there anything slimier than the innards of a pumpkin? (If you are a pre-med student or doctor, please note that this is a rhetorical question.) Two of our eight (pumpkins, not doctors) are carved, and the rest will be tomorrow afternoon's project.

Only one more fence post hole for D to dig, and then he can finish putting up the side fence.

Only one more day to prepare for losing myself to the novel.

If I were smart, like my neighbor who has done NaNoWriMo twice now, I would incorporate a Costco trip into my schedule somehow to buy groceries in bulk so dinners will be easier for the next 30 days. But honestly, I find Costco, with its towering rows of Consumer Goods and Night of The Living Dead Zombie Shoppers, about as a appealing as...well, as the innards of a pumpkin, if you must know.

Things some of us don't learn until we are adults

Pickles are made from cucumbers.
Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. (sorry, D, but I had to include this)
The first quarter moon and the second quarter moon are curved on different sides.
Prunes are made from plums.
40 is really quite young.
There's a reason to pay attention to politics.
Childbirth is the easy part.
Dates aren't made from anything but dates.

What "obvious fact" did you learn as an adult that surprised you?

Double-dog Dare

DOUBLE-DOG DARE - verb phrase. Also: dog dare, double-black-dog dare, double-dare, n*gger-dare, niggle dare. Chiefly Southern, Southern Middle. To challenge defiantly. Note: The formulaic phrases build both on alliteration and (usually euphemistic) intensifiers. 1892 Dialectic Notes, 1.229 KY, Dare. Children in quarrelling say, "I dare you." "I dog dare you." "I black dog dare you." "I double dog dare you." "I double black dog dare you." From "Dictionary of American Regional English," Volume II by Frederic G. Cassidy (1991, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England).

(Found here)

Contemplating the Improbable

**warning: another self-centered navel-contemplating post follows. stop now if you've already had enough of that sort of thing from me. **



This is what it would be like, then. Getting the kids to bed, D going to bed, and then in the dark of the night (the only time available, let's be honest), me sitting at a keyboard clicking away to make little black squiggles in the screen appear, one after another, line after line of them, fifty-thousand groups of black squiggles created to tell a story, some story, any story, in a month.

I tried today to write at least a few pages of that ghost tale, hoping somehow to finish it before the writer's group meeting tomorrow - or at least before Halloween, which seems fitting. But once again life got in the way. Work, then a time-consuming hustle to find & secure what looks like the last available place to stay in Avila for Thanksgiving for six people, then getting S & R to gymnastics, getting dinner on the table, & managing the evening routine until 8:15pm, when I tucked S and myself into bed. (I was so naive, thinking that while the S had her gymnastics class, R would do her homework without any coaxing, cajoling, confiscation of reading books, and direct supervision including backrubs. And while on some days, S will entertain herself while R has her gymnastics class, those days do not include any time I have plans to get some of my own work done.)

So the ghost remains with his story untold to my haunted characters, although *I* now understand what happened to make him so desperate that he has stuck around all these decades near the site where he lived and died. It's melodramatic, boy-meet-girl, boy-loses-girl stuff, but my poor characters can't help that. (Imagine Romeo telling Shakespeare, "Don't you think I would have checked better for a pulse, man?! I mean, give me some credit, here...")

So if I can't write 250 words in a day, how will I write 2000 words every day in November? And still work, parent, jog (which saves my sanity), and sleep a full night (which saves my health)? Something will have to give. And it will be sleep. Or maybe the sacrifices can be evenly distributed: I'll lose some sleep, some runs, some quality time with the kids, some of my drive and focus at work. And I'll gain a poor quality but complete draft of a novel before December.

Worth it? Especially if I'm questioning it before I even start? I don't even, quite, have the advantage of denial-based optimism to get me going on this. I have instead the conviction that it will be very difficult and that important aspects of my life will suffer just so I can be part of some funky online movement and so I can gain a deeper respect for myself as a writer and a masochist.

And yet.

This blog post, for example, up until this sentence, represents 494 words on its own. And this year with this blog I have proven that I can, when I want to and even when I don't, write every day. And posts like this are the shovel with which I am digging myself into the commitment. It's pre-accountability. Like telling people I'm thinking of running a half-marathon or thinking of growing out my hair: contracts I make with myself, using other people's knowledge as the witness to the agreement. This is effective, because it means that my pride doesn't allow me to back out at the slightest difficulty. But it's also dangerous, because that same pride doesn't allow me to back out even if the pressure or cost is too great to achieve my self-inflicted goal.

So better to say "I hope to run a half marathon," or "I'm going to try to grow out my hair" or "I'm going to participate in NaNoWriMo and see how it goes," and really allow myself to stop, without any guilt, if I need to.

Yeah. That might work.

Chicken!

S has taken to inserting "CHICKEN!" into her sentences whenever she doesn't want to listen to you or is stalling or just being silly. At least, I think that's what it is. It's either that, or some variety of Poultry Tourette's. Or it might be her way of incorporating the theme of road-crossing jokes into every aspect of her life.

So a conversation might go something like this:

"S, will you eat three beans or four tonight?" (a Hobson's Choice, to be sure)

"CHICKEN!"

or

"S, where does the wet towel go after your bath?"

"In the CHICKEN room on the CHICKEN rack." (pause) "CHICKEN!"

D asked me, "Why are our kids so weird?"

I think the answer lies in the question. Hint: note the possessive pronoun used and consider the speaker and listener.




CHICKEN!

Burning cheeks

From shame? From sunburn? From too much wine?

No.

Just from the last yoga class in the series.

I always leave there feeling completely different from the way I did when I arrived. Maybe I can narrow the lengths of time between being grounded, being focused, until there is something more closely resembling a continuum.

Mme. Best Intentions

...paving the road to h-e-double toothpicks, I'm sure. But the kids are on their way to bed and I am too. Mwah hah hah. My plan could work, yet!

NIMBY

What to do? The last family that lived next door to us was a tough act to follow: demographically our match, children the same age, similar value systems, and they had the added virtue of putting up with us.

(Yeah. Right up until they moved.)

And D and I know it's wrong to feel betrayed by them for selling their house to what appears to be a collective of families who own little furniture, speak little English, and have watched D literally slave away (sweating and panting) for days without saying "hello," let alone introducing themselves or acknowledging that he is single-handedly building a gorgeous and expensive fence between our properties without asking for either help or co-payment from them.

We have been talking about whether we are racist, about what it is that has worked under D's skin in particular about the new folks on the block. But it's hard to pin down without resorting to "there goes the neighborhood" statements. It's horrible. We want to welcome them. We want to break down cultural barriers by being kind and generous. We want to embrace diversity and we want to not care how different they are from us or we are from them. But instead, we're all kinds of bent out of shape and the relationship is not off to a good start.

Why? Here's what I think, frankly: we want it both ways. We want them to be who they are but we also want them to play by our rules. For example, we say sure, they can install their thumping subwolfers in their cars on the weekend, but them damn well better not play loud accordion-and-tuba music to test them. They can have a huge extended family (we don't even know yet who lives there and who doesn't) but we don't want 10 new cars parked on our cul-du-sac every day. We want them to acknowledge the tremendous effort that D is putting into increasing the value of both our yard and theirs with this new fence, and yet we don't want to consider that they might feel insulted by fact that as soon as we caught our first sight of them, we tore down the old fence completely and started building one twice as high. This was a coincidence, but how do they know that? Have we told them? No. Have we made an effort to get to know them? No. We respect that they speak only Spanish, and yet we expect them to be the ones to strike up a conversation with us in a language they don't feel comfortable speaking. We don't know how they could afford the house next door, which sold for about $500,000, without pooling their money (as I know is a practice in some cultures) and yet we expect them to automatically offer to pay for part of the fence.

So what does this mean? It means that in spite of the fact that we own cars and work full time and have children of our own, I think we're still just kids on the playground. And we don't care if they play their games but if it's near our four-square court, they'd better play those games our way.

So.

So I baked two loaves of banana bread this evening (instead of the one loaf I usually bake to welcome new neighbors), and I'll deliver them tomorrow. (If they're still there then - so far, they've only been here on weekends.) The teenagers may break the little hand-made swing my old neighbor put in the tree for his toddlers. The men may smoke and leave cigarette butts in their driveway. Maybe the pool will go to algae. But the only thing that will truly make the neighborhood ugly is us, bitterly resenting how the village next door doesn't "go well" with the castle we've put up.

Or, to go back to the elementary school analogy: we have no intention of taking our ball and playing somewhere else, and we can't kick them out of the schoolyard. We have two choices: to fume and rage against the circumstances, or to make room on the blacktop of our hearts. Did I write that? "The blacktop of our hearts?" Sheesh. But you know what I mean.


ps - went to bed at 8pm, got up only to post this. back to bed now...

Time alone postponed

Apart from right now, while D is picking up the girls from Parent's Night Out and I am on my way to get some sleep, I have not had the house to myself for days. Our neighbor (a 2-time Nanowrimo participant who is planning on writing her 3rd novel next month) is talking about getting an apartment so she'll have a place alone to write. This is because her husband has retired and her 11 1/2 year old stores more energy than most fully functional nuclear power plants.

Margaret Atwood has written about being able to write in the middle of chaos, of life with it's family noises and demands - kids doing homework while she typed away, etc. But I think the Room of One's Own approach is much more conducive to real quality work for me personally.

And so I find myself thinking of whether I would really consider writing 50,000 words next month, and wondering where? when? how? - and most importantly, what? and about whom? This is ironic. Many writers I know have tons of things they want to say and not enough time to say them.

It's been an interesting exercise wondering what I care enough about to put in a novel. It's a painfully short and unconvincing list. Do I not have any passion in me? If not, where is it, anyway? Have I never had it? Or lost it somewhere?

Musing brought on by a tired mind.

The advantages of sleep

Enough of this nonsense. The renewed goal? Bed by 9pm on "school nights," ie., the nights when I have to be up at 4:15 to get to work on time. This means getting the kids to bed by 8pm, which means bath by 7pm, dinner by 6pm, and blogging, ideally, before that. Let's just see how it goes, shall we? The declaration does have a deju vu quality to it...

But you see, more sleep would enable me to do justice to the story of S. shoplifting today, or of R having another existential mini-crisis. It could even enable me to better cope with the horrible acne *thing* on my chin that is giving me flashbacks to the worst moments of the most painful days of my adolescence.

On va voir.

In the meantime, kudos to Clare for sending out her manuscript!

And for those of you (not necessarily me & don't dare me, please) contemplating it, it's not too late to plan to participate in Nanowrimo this year. All you have to do is write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Yeah. That's all. And no, "blah blah blah" 50,000 times does NOT count. I already thought of that.

And thanks to Josh for the link to the Yarn quiz ("which yarn are you?")


You are Shetland Wool.
You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a
little on the harsh side. Though you look
delicate you are tough as nails and prone to
intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are
widely respected and even revered.


What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla