NaNoWriMo: How Can THAT Be a Misspelling?

Clickety clickety clickety. Caught up in the writing-verging-on-mindless-keyboarding warp-spasm that is the essence of National Novel Writing Month, a weird thing started to happen.

You know that phenomenon when you find yourself reading way past your bedtime and your eyes start to cross a little?  And suddenly, common words don't look ... right?  You see the word "and" and it looks like the publisher goofed up. You think, "That should say 'and' and it says, wait ... what?!  It does say 'and.'  How could that be?" And then (because of my age) I think, "Wow.  I might be having a mild stroke." so I put my arms over my head and stick out my tongue (because, according to the internet, if you can do those things, chances are you are not having a stoke.) Then I turn off my clip-on reading light, say my prayers and generally go right to sleep.

When I wake up the next day, I check the last sentence I read.  "And" is "and" ... and appears to have always been that way.

Now I have this thing going on where I type a word and Word doesn't like it.  That normally doesn't bother me in a first draft; misspelling stuff is part of the "get it out, get it out fast, get it out now!" But twice so far I have stared angrily at the monitor, feeling strangely victimized. "There's nothing wrong with that," I think, almost seething with resentment. I do the right-click thing to have Word offer me some correctly spelled options, but the word I want isn't there.  The word I want is already on the page.

The first time it happened, the word was "annoyment," as in: Vicki felt a flash of annoyment.

"Annoyment" is a damn fine word.  What's the problem, Word?  Jealous?

The second time it happened, the word was "functual," as in: "I'm sorry.  That restroom isn't functual."

"Functual" is an even better word!  If it were one, that is.

Look at NaNoWriMo, for crying out loud. That's a word.  Blogger doesn't even flag it as a misspelling anymore. And don't even get me started on the word "blog."

Time to stop squandelling word count here and get back to work before my eyes cross for the day.

Last Post Before NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is not coming a moment too soon.

Currently, I am floating on the flat, listless sea of writer's doldrums, not jazzed at all about the upcoming keyboarding marathon.  I was so excited a couple of days ago.  What happened?

Occasionally, I suffer from the most intense lack of confidence imaginable. For years, I have tried to pinpoint the source of this numbing mindset. What an exercise in futility, because I found out that it doesn't matter why I slump.  It doesn't matter that I sometimes hate what I write.  It doesn't matter that I feel utterly uninspired a good deal of the time.  It doesn't matter that there are probably deep, underlying causes for a visitation from the lumpen lethargy goblin who bumbles in through a window and lolls about, discouraging me from doing anything that requires fortitude. His special focus: "Writing? Are you serious? And really, an entire month?  Who do you think you are, anyways? A writer?  Give me a break!"

The hardest thing I've had to learn over the last two years is this: the more uninspired I am, the more crucial it is for me to write.

from contrarymagazine.com

NaNoWriMo is important for writers like me because I have made a pact to write approximately 1667 words per day.  I used to think word counts were kind of stupid, but that was back when I waited on inspiration to write anything, even the nuts-and-bolts-yeoman stuff.  Inspiration is a frothy, ethereal thing.  Lovely and necessary at different times, but it can also be misleading.  What writer has not had the experience of writing a couple thousand words, thinking, "Oh, this is good.  Yes, indeed ... this is just amazing!" only to look the next day and see all kinds of problems.

Inspiration is a fair-weather friend. Perseverence is the virtue that holds us close for the long haul.

Perhaps on the morrow, inspiration will make a little visit, but it won't keep me from writing those 1667 words if she doesn't, because perseverence never lets me down.

And a happy and blessed All Saints Day to everyone!

On Relevant Blogging and Tucking in the WIP

I just read a post at shark literary agent Janet Reid's blog that talked a bit about writers and their platforms and whether or not agents read writer's blogs/tweets/tumbls, etc.  Ms. Reid says busy agents don't have time to muck about in social media unless they are toying with the idea of taking that particular writer on as a client.  She did go on to say that just because time-strapped successful agents don't generally blog-surf, a writer's blog should not be a mess.

In other words, the blog should be well written.

Also, the blog should have something to do with the writer's work, and that's where this blog is deficient.  Here, then, is a post about my WIP (including some hastily thrown-together artwork)—

My work-in-progress is a YA dystopian novel and the working title is Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead. I've spent the summer knitting it together after a rather long period which I will call a hiatus ("hiatus" is to "avoidance" as "research" is to "Netflix binging.") Here's the working blurb:

When a suspected international cyber-attack disrupts power and communication, bookish 13-year-old Lena Ladimer is stranded along with her mother and their neighbors in a small rural neighborhood on Tootin Hollow Road in Gibeon, Connecticut.  As her mother withdraws into an incapacitating depression  and death stalks a neighbor, she attempts to chronicle the neighborhood's day-to-day efforts to survive.  Armed with a blank leather book, a supply of pens and her great-grandfather’s 1947 Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, she tries to make sense of events by writing about them.

The fear, uncertainty and inconveniences of daily life seem as nothing when she learns her father is dead.

She sets off for New Reading, Massachusetts to exact revenge on her dad’s killer.  She enlists the help of her best friend, neighbor Gus Lennon and two others, but does not reveal the real reason for the twenty-mile journey.  Instead, she tells them she wants to make sure her father has been properly buried. They all have their own reasons for wanting to go, and when the others finally find out Lena’s intentions, a startling connection to her father’s killer is revealed.

Back in Gibeon, the neighbors have welcomed Dana Griggs, a refugee and old college acquaintance of Lena's mom. When the children return from New Reading, they discover that Dana also has startling connections, connections that could mean the destruction of the neighborhood on Tootin Hollow Road. Lena and her friends must play a dangerous game to thwart Dana's plans and time is running out for all of them.

Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead will be an entire first draft by mid-January.  My critique group in Windsor is now reviewing finished chapters and the feedback has been wonderful.  For the first time in my writing career, I'm starting to get smiley faces about pacing.  Pacing!  Me!  "Hello, my name is R. T. and I am a recovering info-dumper. I have come to believe I am powerless over backstory, and my penchant for exposition has become unmanageable."  Compliments on pacing is a really big deal for me!

There. I have now blogged about my WIP.  Soon, I have to figure out how to do a little tab so I can post the first 1000 words of Bury the Dead, which I'm putting in for a nap with eight chapters good-to-go for review.  That will get me through November when I'll be participating in NaNoWriMo; 50,000 words in 30 days makes for a WIRP—Work In Rapid Progress. Last year, NaNo was the perfect break from all my WIP problems and gave me an opportunity to write the NaNo way: wanton, unfettered and heedless of spell check.  Yeehah! I should probably put a tab on here for that effort as well, Drum Witherspoon and the Shepherd's Treasure.

(And Janet Reid ... if you ever read this post, I just want you to know I constantly abuse adverbs here on purpose because I totally love them and if I use them in my WIP, my critiquers gleefully slash them with red pens.)

Cleaning for NaNoWriMo

Today I began the process of cleaning my house. I've had a long and productive summer of writing, but I've goofed off a lot as far as my domicile is concerned.  It's to the point where I'm not happy.

Part of it is due to a larger issue—we have to put the house on the market by spring at the latest.  Ever since my husband and I came to this decision, I have felt myself withdraw from the house emotionally. Unfortunately, when I get a good rationalization brewing on the back burner—"withdrawing from the house emotionally"—my penchant for sloth kicks in and the next thing I know, I'm living in a hovel.

The situation is now affecting my writing.

When the physical environment begins to sneak into my peripheral vision, I start getting writer's block. But really—it all started with cook's block, gardener's block, launderer's block and cleaner's block. All of those things I do to keep house went right out the window and I thought I was exercising freedom! R. T. Freeman, unshackled! Writing! Throw in a wonderful vacation! And a really fun wedding! And then ANOTHER wonderful vacation! And over the last few weeks, I've exacerbated the situation further by binging on the best-written show on television: Breaking Bad. (Father Barron's website reviewed the show here.) Warning: this show is not for everybody.  It's fraught with unspeakable violence, sorrow and even insanity, but there is not one gratuitous scene.  A small non-spoiler example: In Season 4 one of the main characters, recently enriched by huge meth sales and laundered money, buys a house and soon, it becomes party central.  It doesn't take long, however, for the endless party to change and after a few days, the only people showing up are strangers and hopeless addicts with their bad teeth, their urine-soaked clothes and their madness.

Netflix.  Aaaargh.

What I just did there ... that's what I do all the time.  I digress.

So, as soon as I post this, I will get back to housework. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I need to have everything spit-spot. Last November, I had another writer over and we did the middle-aged version of an all-nighter: we wrote from 7 p.m to 1:30 in the morning.  I plan to have more writing nights, plus our Library is having a writing night ... more details on that in an upcoming post.

Alrighty, then.  I can't believe it, but I have to dust the vacuum cleaner before I use it.  Pretend you didn't read that.

Bad Television Will Prolong Your Cold

I have a rotten cold, and have spent the last few days reading and watching Netflix.

The reading has been wonderful ... I read some travel lit, a book called Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr.

On the very day his wife gives birth to twins, Mr. Doerr returns to his home in Boise, Idaho to find a letter telling him he's received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  For one year, he will receive a stipend and a writing studio in Rome.  This luminous, beautifully written account of a young family's year in the Eternal City almost cured me of my cold.  Mr. Doerr intertwines the writer's life with marriage, parenting baby twin boys, the dense, majestic history of Rome, Romans themselves, the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the sensory experience of Rome and Umbria beyond.  It seems that his guide through much of this is Pliny the Elder's Natural History, from which he quotes liberally and with reverence and understanding.

I also started re-reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes.  This book is playing a rather large part in my NaNoWriMo project, but I must say it's been a delight to reaquaint myself with the gods, goddesses, titans, nereids, satyrs, naiads, heroes and monsters of the ancients.  The Introduction to Classical Mythology at the beginning of this work is one of the most clear-eyed assessments of the Greeks and their relationship to their deities that one can read.  At age ninety-one, Miss Hamilton said this to an interviewer: "I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today." (Quote found here)

So my "resting-up" had been going along swimmingly.  The things I'm reading are uplifting me.  And then one day, I'm tired and alone.  I'm in that place where I'm not sleepy, but I can't read anymore.  So I turn on the television and start watching a show on NetFlix.  The show is called Life Unexpected, and it's considered a "family dramedy" ... something that a family with older children can watch together. I watch the first episode and it's kind of quirky and heart-warming so I get hooked.  It's about a Juno-like teenager (smart, self-deprecating, wise beyond her years) who has been in the foster care system her entire life.  Born to a teen mom who had a one-night-stand at a school dance, she was given up for adoption at birth.  She was never adopted because she had a heart condition that required surgeries, so she was not available for adoption until she was three and then nobody wanted her.  She's now sixteen-years-old and would like to be legally emancipated, so she tracks down her biological father because she needs her birth parents to sign off on this proposition.  He knows who her birth mother is, so they find and surprise her.  They all go to court and ... guess what?  The judge puts the girl (whose name is "Lux") into her birth-parents custody.

Okay, so I know what you are thinking. An adorable three-year-old with a freshly-minted clean bill of health is unadoptable?  For the sake of the story, yup.  She finds her birth-father with relative ease.  Yup.  She's smart and cute and appears to be pretty unaffected by years of rattling around the foster care system and group homes.  Yup.  A judge is going to grant joint custody to two people who appeared in her life a couple of minutes ago.  Yup.

As I sink into the morass of this fantasy of the modern family, I start to feel sick again.

This is what dissipated, promiscuous alcoholic parents look like on television.

The birth father appears to be an alcoholic womanizer.  The birth mother is a nuerotic co-host of a morning radio drive show with a guy (who's secretly her love interest) and the banter is all about sex, sex and more sex.  And Lux has been listening to this program for three years and has felt a "connection" with this woman who ultimately turns out to be her mother.  The mother is sleeping with her cohost.  They have a fight.  Then the mother sleeps with the father.  They are not ashamed, just horrified. He's mad at her about Lux, thought she had "taken care of it" all those years ago (and he's the nice guy in the story.)  She's mad at him for not being there for her.  The mother and the cohost get back together, they even get engaged.  Lux goes to live with them. The mother's mother is an alcoholic, her father has been missing for years.  The father's father is a cold, successful businessman with a would-be-mousy-if-they-weren't-rich wife, one aunt is a promiscuous psychotherapist, another aunt is a promiscuous, alcoholic, pot-banana-bread baking and eating homeless thief.  Oh, and the father owns a bar which he lives over in a walk-up with two roommates and they drink and play video games a lot.  And ... the reason Lux wants to be emancipated is so she and her boyfriend can live together.  Oh, and did I mention Lux is sleeping with her boyfriend, who's name is Bug?  Didn't anyone research this?  Doesn't anyone remember Bug from Uncle Buck? Then the father sleeps with both aunts (not at the same time), the mother asks the father if he still loves her the day before she's supposed to marry the cohost, he says "no" even though he does, it turns out the cohost slept with his ex-girlfriend during the breakup when the mother slept with the father, and Lux becomes romantically involved with a teacher at her school (they met before he started teaching ... she was tending bar at her father's place of business, so the guy thought she was much older). The teacher wants to "have boundaries" and "help" Lux, so he just necks with her. Then the father finds out his new love interest had an affair with his own father, thereby cheating on his mother. Throw in lots of soft porn and fake "alternative" music for the soundtrack and a finale that utterly suspends belief and feels like something thrown together in a hurry to tie up loose ends.  And all the allegedly cathartic interactions between the characters cause a curious effect on the overall story—it's not very cathartic.

The only nods to conventional moral behavior are the foster care situation where Lux was abused and the justice meted out as it comes to light.  Then there's the teacher ... he's confronted by Lux's parents about the wrongness of being romantically involved with Lux, for which he takes responsibilty.  These two things are the only small banners that are run up the flagpole of morality in this maelstrom of sex, drinking, lying, stealing and cheating.

Since the only consequences of all this outrageous behavior are emotional ones, there's an intrinsic lie in the physicality of the program.  No one is fat or even out of shape, even the fat guy.  The only medication anyone is on is birth control pills, and no one is suffering any of the symptoms of long term excessive drinking. No one is missing any teeth.  All dwellings are pretty clean and very hip (the setting is Portland, Oregon).  Lux's foster kid friends are emotionally resilient.  All the adults are unbelieveably, monstrously selfish but it's portrayed as complicated and textured, with everyone "working through issues."  And, once again, nobody's missing any teeth, not even the mother's alcoholic mother who goes to bed with a box of wine every night.

I spent about a half hour this morning looking at reviews of Life Unexpected.  "Heart-warming" ... "emotional" ... "fulfilling" ... even the New York Times said it had "sharp writing" and "appealing performances." I know that a lot of folks will say, "You have to suspend belief and just go with the characters." I can't. I have a hard time with a "story" that seeks texture from its writer's perception of "emotional reality," which is the idea that if feelings are dealt with properly, there is really no need for justice.

Prometheus Bound

It's the opposite of the world the ancient Greeks perceived, the world where even if you "work things out," a price must be paid. Prometheus bound to a rock on the mountain with his liver consumed daily by an eagle, Orestes losing Eurydice forever, Icarus plummeting into the sea with his melted wings and the fall of Troy are but a few examples of what happens when that price comes due. 

 Life Unexpected has its characters acting as if they don't believe in the soul's immortality or that an immortal soul even exists as the writing and acting puts the cast through their emotional paces. If that component is missing or trivialized all the sharp writing or appealing performances in the world cannot compensate for a story with a missing soul.

October? Oooops.

October is the month in which I did not blog and I am NOT proud of that.  I have been doing a LOT of writing and critiquing, however, and now I'm doing NaNoWriMo.  It started November 1st, but I started ... TODAY!

That's because I had to clean the garage.

I know that doesn't sound like a particularly compelling reason to not blog, but our garage was an embarrassment, a horror of sorts and an eyesore.

Two years of not cleaning a garage creates a turning point. Instead of cars it starts to house things like an old washing machine that's lost its bearings (for real), a dryer that screams (for real) but does not dry, a busted dorm fridge, broken garden tools, cracked snow shovels, summer tires for a vehicle we haven't owned in years, dead birds (pretend you didn't see that), dry, cracked pieces of horse tack, a lawn tractor that hasn't run in two decades, a small generator that doesn't work, pitchforks with missing tines, mallets with ill-fitting, flying heads (eek!), a tent with a hole chewed in it by a puppy who grew into a dog who's now been dead for over a year, empty containers, hundreds of plastic plant pots, dozens of old rotting shoes and boots and over one hundred dollars worth of empties.  That's two thousand empty cans and bottles.

We started Friday, cleaning the two bays where the cars go.  My husband and I both wear pedometers and I registered 18,000 steps on mine.  His registered 20,000 steps.  We sorted, culled, cobwebbed, swept, shopvacked and went on a "bottle return date."  We donned latex gloves ("snap" "snap") and prayed we would not develop repetitive motion injuries - bend, grab, put bottle or can in "bar code tunnel", repeat.  Over and over.  The machines got sick of reading bar codes, they filled up, they overheated.  We went from store to store, finishing at Geissler's in Granby where we met the nicest kid who told us about financing his school D.C. trip with $800 worth of cans and bottles.  He had to come out and help us twice.  The guy at Stop and Shop had to help us three times.  We came home with $68.  I sorted the rest of the cans and bottles for the couple that raises money for our church's cleft palate repair ministry down in South America somewhere.

Who needs gold and silver when you have a couple thousand of these lying around?  Just make sure there's enough air in the bottles so the machines can read the bar codes.

Saturday we emptied out the "tack area" of the garage ... the place where our daughters keep all their horse stuff.  More sorting, culling, cobwebbing, sweeping and shopvacking.  No bottles, though.

Even though the whole garage thing only took a couple of days, it's been hanging over our heads for months.  It's a beautiful post and beam building that should be an organized place, serving the purpose of housing cars and outdoor supplies for lawn and garden.  And horse stuff, since those rather large mammals live exclusively out of doors (although both girls, on occasion, have tried to get at least the front feet of their horses into the mudroom.)

It really is a nice feeling to know that I know where everything is, especially with winter setting in.  Shovels.  Rock salt.  Sand.  The generator that works. The snow rake. Sleds.  And when spring comes, all the gardening stuff has been sorted and stored for easy access.  As soon as the peonies bend a little, I'll have those nifty peony supports up and doing their job in a flash!  My gardening box is all set, all the tools gathered up and tucked away for the spring.  The tomato stakes are in a bundle and tied, along with the rolls of landscaping fabric and netting.  Uncle Elmer's one hundred year old French hoe is up on the wall, along with all the other long-handled garden tools.

And I can write.  It's like something that was holding me back has been cleared away.  Lovely feeling, I must say!