His Dark Materials

No amount of caffeine is keeping my head off my hand off the table, and even I am bored with the short section that I just finished writing. It's time to get some sleep!

Another successful NaNoWriMo day, all in all. My total word count is 9031 words, and according to the little spreadsheet Paul made for me, I needed to be at 8333 words to be on track. If I can keep this up, I might get a couple of days off at Thanksgiving! Or maybe just some lighter writing days to do more research and planning for the harder, later sections of the novel.

This is already the longest work of fiction I've ever written, by a hair. (I've written short stories, the first 5 or 6 chapters of a novel, and a longer pieces nonfiction/creative nonfiction/memoir, but most of my writing has definitely been in bite-sized chunks. I write a lot of beginnings before paralyzing in fear of failure. What seemed to me at one time to be great titles, great first lines, great opening paragraphs clutter my "Writing" folder.)

Moving on.

Have you read Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy? We loved it. And we're all looking forward to the movie of The Golden Compass, opening in December. By "we," I mean Paul, me, my whole family (mom, dad, two sisters, various brothers-in-law), and a couple of good friends.

I'm not sure I want my daemon to be a chimp, though. I mean, chimps are clever, and that's really good. But they're not exactly sexy animals. Maybe you can help determine if I've got the right daemon?

The Really Good Guy

The NaNoWriMo website is currently down. This is frustrating, because once I've finished my writing for the "day," I count on being able to log in and input my new total, in order to watch my little blue status bar move slightly to the right.

So far, so good. I have a rough outline, I have a timeline, and at the end of day three, I have 5264 words.

Orange asked me what I'm writing this month. The "it's late and I'm really tired" version is this:

I'm working on a literary fiction, very character-driven novel called The Really Good Guy. The title character is a married-with-kids, 36-year-old workaholic who has always been described as a good person. More importantly, that's how he sees himself. And then he does something that's pretty awful. He has to deal with the consequences, but most importantly, he has to see himself as the sort of guy who'd do such a bad thing.

This story presents all sorts of challenges for me, not least among which are that my main character is older than me, male, and a workaholic while I'm an at-home mom. (That's whole different kind of working hard.) It's hard for me to keep his wife and kids in the background where they belong.

"Write what you know" is good, solid writing advice. And I am writing what I know, just in a different way. Sometimes using a narrator who sees the world from a different perspective can shed interesting light on a story.

It really is impossible for me to write well this fast. It's not, however, a wasted exercise. I might not have a beautiful, lyrical novel, but I often put pretty stuff in later, once the outline of the story is in place. I shade after I sketch. I upholster after I construct, and so forth.

At the end of the month, I don't plan to have a publishable novel. I hope to have 50,000 words, the bones of a really interesting story, consisting mostly of scenes and summary without a lot of connective tissue: a great outline that can be fleshed out and lifted up a bit into something that I can be proud of.

3 days ago, I had a few notes jotted down at the Borders Cafe. Tonight I have more than 5000 words of new, original fiction typed and saved. I don't care which words they are; I'm proud of that.

Give It To Me

OK, I'm disabling the word verification thingie until I get fed up with the spam again. This lowers the bar for commenting. Let's chat!

Second day NaNoWriMo total: 3680 (slightly ahead of the daily requirement to stay on track for 50,000 words in 30 days).

Write On!

Yo yo yo, it's NaNoWriMo; here we go! In general, I do believe in quality over quantity. But when I'm paralyzed, any movement is a positive development, even if it's just a muscle spasm. And at the end of the first day, I have more than 1700 words on the screen. For the record, Ada does not feel that this is the best use of my time. In turn, I do not feel that being up and crying 3 hours past successful bedtime is the best use of her time either.

Ada did the funniest thing last weekend. I was playing Wii with my sister in the family room while my mom was playing with Ellie in her room, down at the other end of the hall. Our family room and Ellie's room are like the weights on a barbell, with other rooms (a bathroom, my room, Ada's room) shooting off the main hallway to the sides. So it's not like a barbell at all, but the family room and Ellie's room are at opposite ends of a hallway, see?

Anyway, Ada got bored with the way LilSis and I were neglecting her, so she crawled all the way down the hallway to Ellie's room for some more stimulating company. Once she got there, she got up on her knees (tall kneeling!) and looked at me, while defiantly shutting the door. Her reach is impressive, but she is only 9 months old. So she'd push the door a bit, crawl toward it, push it some more, crawl to catch up, etc., until the door finally closed. Until the last possible moment, she stared right at me, meaningfully.

I got the message!

Just keep swimming

Last year at this time, my life couldn't have felt much worse. I was in an indescribable amount of pain, though I did try to put it into words.

In some ways, the past year has been the worst of my life. But in other ways, it's been phenomenal. We had a new baby, and have watched Ada grow into the most incredible, wonderful, surprising little girl. We've watched Ellie make some amazing developmental leaps, including potty training! We've refinanced our house down to a 15 year loan, and eliminated all but the necessary debt (fixed mortgage, extremely low-rate minivan loan, and consolidated student loans). We've forged new friendships and taken on new roles in our communities.

We've both adjusted our work lives: Paul to a more family-friendly job and me to staying home full-time and writing more. I've been talking with magazines about some pieces, and I even have published pieces in a couple of actual books. This part is difficult for me, because I am paralyzed by my fear of failure, which often prevents me from submitting and sometimes even keeps me from writing.

Not least, Paul and I have worked very very hard on our relationship, and while we're not perfect, we're in a much better place than I could possibly have imagined. In my wildest dreams and all that.

Here we are, then and now:
Halloween 2006

There are no pictures of me from last October, except for ones in which part of me is captured in a shot of Ellie, but she's adorable enough for all of us.

Halloween 2007

By day we're Mummy, Deady, and two Little Ghouls. By night we're Nemo the clown fish, Crush the baby sea turtle, and two crabs. "Yeah, I saw him, Bluey, but I'm not telling you where he went, and there's no way you're gonna make me."

Silent Pens

This is hardly breaking news, but I'm still feeling a touch melancholy about it.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., more commonly known as Robert Jordan, died on Sunday. He was only 58 years old. He seemed really happy before his diagnosis with cardiac amyloidosis. And he wasn't done with his life's work; he had so much left that he was planning to do. Very very sad. Lots of people die every day, and there's a war going on. So why does this matter so much?

Perhaps because, as a writer, he touched a lot of people. Sure there are valid critiques of his work. Still, I have read many hundreds of pages of his writing, and so someone I know - however distantly - has died. Too soon, too soon.

Madeleine L'Engle (LENG-el, Mom, I was right) also died this month. She was 88 and died of "natural causes." She had a robust body of work, comprising writing for adults and children, poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. Her work touched me too, probably more so than Jordan's. L'Engle's husband and son were already dead, and she had moved into a nursing home. Over the course of her slow decline, she had osteoporosis and a cerebral hemorrhage. She accomplished a lot in her life, and did some really interesting things. It's not such a terrible way to end.

I had other thoughts, about the disparagement of fantasy literature and its importance in our society, but it turns out that I don't want this to be part of a larger point. Two writers died. I find myself celebrating the life of one, and mourning the loss of the other. That's your time. Pens down.

How's the writing going?

Well, since you asked . . .

I've been to bed earlier than 2:00 am exactly twice in the last couple of weeks. I can't remember the last time I was asleep before 1:00. This is largely a symptom of my own disorganization and poor prioritization/time management, but, nonetheless, it's exhausting.

Currently, I'm feeling enormous pressure to write (all of it self-inflicted). Simultaneously, I'm so tired that I feel numb and uninspired. As is the way of such things, it's hard to keep perspective and realize that one day I will be rested again, and I will have the energy to write. Because all of this is compounded by crippling self-doubt, where I'm so very afraid of failure that I can't even begin.

I know the correct steps to take to make things better: get more sleep, exercise more, make modest and achievable writing goals.

But if I had an easy time doing those things, I wouldn't be the person who's always running late, showing up with wet hair and bags under my eyes.