Category Archives: NaNoWriMo

Madame Vara

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Several years ago, I lived in The Center of the Universe, also known to those who have never lived there as the Fremont district of Seattle. Back before gentrification ran off the used book and clothing stores and brought in Adobe and yuppie day spas, there used to be a very cool vintage clothing store a few blocks from my house. Sometimes when I visited on the weekends, I would notice a very small woman sitting in a corner of the store behind a small round table. On the table read a sign: “Madam Vara, Tarot Readings.”

I could only pass by Madam Vara so many times before I had to say hello. And then one thing lead to another and soon I was forking over my five dollars, paying a woman with the longest hair and the smallest hands I had ever seen to tell me my life in pictures.

I actually liked Madame Vara a lot and I think she liked me, too. After that first introduction, whenever I was around on the weekend, I’d go into the store to say hello. At first Madame Vara honored the mystique that comes with her job and her conversation was always professional. Over time, though, as we got to know each other better, she loosened up a little. I learned she was in her early thirties, lived on Vashon Island with a bunch of other hippies, and that she had what more conservative people would call a boyfriend but that she called a special “soul friend.”

One day I decided to have another reading. At one point, Madame Vara held up a card that had appeared upside down in the layout. “This is the passion card,” she said, waving it a little, “and you’re not living it.”

Given that at the time I was filing paperwork for a nonprofit I had zero personal interest in, this was not exactly a revelation. I told Madame Vara that I felt about passion the same way I felt about art: I know what I like, but I don’t actually know how to do any of it.

Madame Vara smiled and shrugged. “Every time I start a reading,” she said in her squeaky little voice, “I think to myself ‘I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.’ None at all. I just deal the cards and trust the universe.”

These days, every time I sit down to write my story, I think to myself that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. None at all. Then I put one word in front of the other and trust the universe.

I sent Madame Vara a card every Christmas for years until the last one came back “not at this address.” I hope she and her soul friend are very happy, wherever they are.

[tags]writing, NaNoWriMo[/tags]

Grounding Elphaba

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This morning I woke up at 3:00 am. Half an hour later, I was still awake. So I got up, went downstairs, turned on the coffee maker, and wrote for about four hours.

And I am still 2,324 words behind schedule.1

I’ve been more successful this year than last in keeping Elphaba, my inner editor, locked in her tower.  But one of those flying monkeys must have a key because every now and then she sneaks up on me.  “Poppies! Poppies will make her sleeeeeep!” she whispers, and half an hour later I wake up to find she has been fucking around in my story ten pages back.

Who would have thought a little witch like her could destroy my beautiful word count? What a world, what a world.

[tags]NaNoWriMo, writing[/tags]

  1. Da math:  50K / 30 = 1,667.  1667 x 11 = 18,337.  18,337 – 16,013 =  2,324. [↩]

Pigs are flying

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thickens.pngWell, folks, the impossible has happened – and I don’t mean Sarah Palin supports women.

I went into a bookstore yesterday, perused the books on writing, saw a couple interesting ones… and didn’t want to buy them.

“Want” is the critical word here. I often come out of bookstores with empty hands and a heart full of sorrow for the books I have forced myself to leave behind.

“Never fear!” I tell them, “I will come back and lavish money upon you and then stash you under the bed so that certain a killjoy I live with won’t give me that look.”

This year in particular, since attending Ed’s Fill Dirt & Writing School, I’ve bought or lusted after so many writing books, I’ve seriously considered arranging an intervention.

But yesterday, after writing my NaNo novel for a couple hours in the Starbucks, I took a walk around the adjoining Barnes & Noble. Many books looked very interesting, including some books on writing. And I did not feel any urge whatsoever to buy these interesting books.  I walked away from the shelves feeling almost relieved.

Then I became alarmed.  I felt my forehead. I examined my tongue.  I checked my pulse.

But I’m not sick, poisoned, or dead. I believe I’ve just reached the point where I would rather be writing than reading about writing.  By jove, I think she’s got it!

[tags]writing, books, reading[/tags]

Chugging down the fifth

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chucknorris2.pngThe good news:  I hit 10,000 words yesterday. I’m officially a fifth of the way done. Woot!

The bad not-as-good news: I’ve lost my lead, ending the day about 500 words behind the 1,667 words-per-day schedule. But I’m not worried because this weekend I am channeling Chuck Norris. My word count shall blot out the sun.

Work has been ridiculously stressful lately. You’d think that the timing of NaNo would make things worse, it being another source of pressure (albeit self-imposed) and all…but it’s actually been nice to have something totally different to focus on.

It is physically impossible, against the laws of nature, to be utterly absorbed by two things at once.  One cannot write and worry at the same time. Unless one’s character is worrying, but then it’s about whether you’ll be able to thwart the bad guy’s evil plan for world domination. This is much more exciting worry than whether the legal team will get back to you in time to have the technical documentation done by the deadline that they themselves imposed because you really don’t want to work 24 hours straight on the last day and still have it be half-assed by the time it goes out because that just causes more fires to put out and god knows we wouldn’t want to prevent them when we can run like chickens with our heads cut off for the next month, now, would we?

I really need to get back to my novel now.

[tags]NaNoWriMo, writing[/tags]

We’re off to see the wizard

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rubyslippers.jpgIn terms of my writing, NaNoWriMo and its aftermath have given new meaning to “Surrender Dorothy.”

In our last episode, we said a not-quite-tearful goodbye to my 2007 story. I wrote 50K words last year so technically I “won” NaNoWriMo, but I wouldn’t call it a novel. Now if there were a National Mess Writing Month…

I started out last November with a vague idea of a plot and characters that were deliberately silly. I figured one can’t possibly become paralyzed with fear and laugh their head off at the same time.

Which may indeed be true. Unfortunately, my muse doesn’t want to write a silly story and she’s damned stubborn about that. So my story started out one way and ended up veering wildly in a totally different direction, with me hanging on for dear life.

But I didn’t understand this at the time. I figured my story went all mavericky on me due to a lack of knowing what the hell I was doing.

So after NaNo, I enrolled in what I started to think of as “Ed’s Fill Dirt & Writing School.” In the past year I’ve read a ton of books on writing, everything from general essays and memoirs to specific topics such as plot and character. And besides learning a lot, I’ve really enjoyed it.

As I learned, I tried to rewrite. But I got caught up in plotting and creating the specifics of my fantasy world, which required changing my characters’ histories and personalities around (they’re connected in a complicated way). Eventually my characters, though essentially the same at the core, were covered in layers of contrivance. The plot had a premise I still couldn’t make work.

I decided to throw it out. Even though I still had some fondness for the baby, it and the bathwater seemed like a package deal.

But Rib Readers objected. What about that poor baby? It’s done nothin’ to nobody!

So I took another look. I remembered something I’d read recently in on of my course materials: “follow the heat.” Write those things that make your pulse speed up, grab your emotions, burn in your heart. I knew it was true the moment I read it. If you don’t follow the heat, your writing soon goes cold.

So I went back and felt around for the hot spots in the story. I took those, tossed the rest and started again.

To mix my metaphors yet again: now that the muse and I aren’t fighting over the wheel, the boat’s actually getting somewhere.

I still have a long way to go; in fact, I hear no one ever actually graduates from Ed’s Fill Dirt (writers check in but they don’t check out). And I have no idea how this year’s NaNo story will ultimately pan out. There’s truly no place like home, but my muse has only just gotten started down the road.

Coming next: Welcome to my paranormal romantic urban fantasy suspense horror mystery! AKA: Let’s Play “Musical Genres.”

[tags]writing, fiction, National Novel Writing Month[/tags]

Here there be dragons

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One of my resolutions for 2008 is to re-write the “novel” I wrote for NaNoWriMo. It has a great basic idea and I adore my characters and the world they live in. Still, the story lacks a certain something, a something that happens to be a requirement for a publishable novel: an ending.

Of course the manuscript ends – right around the 51K words that earned me the NaNo bragging rights. But I estimate that’s only half-way through the actual story. The main reason I stopped writing it after NaNo is because though I have a general idea of where I want my heroine to end up, I no longer know how she gets there.

I wish I were one of those people who could hop in the car and just go – thatta way! like Captain Kirk. But I’m not. Most of the time, I need to have at least some notion of where I’m headed and what the terrain may be like along the way. I need a map.

I adore maps. Old maps, new maps, computer generated, hand-drawn. The backseat of my car is strewn with all types. A well-made map is a thing of both beauty and utility.

Maps make me feel safe and, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, free.

I can go anywhere I want, by myself if I choose, if I have a map for it. There and back again, I am self-reliant, depending only on my own ability to know north from south.

One of my best memories is of a road trip a friend and I made to Alaska several years ago. Just me, Diana, all her worldly possessions and a cranky Siamese cat stuffed into a Suzuki Sidekick, racing the snow up the ALCAN from Seattle to Anchorage.

A two-thousand mile drive is a bit intimidating in itself, but doubly so when its the Alaskan-Canadian Highway. It cuts through the vast Yukon territory, and has long stretches of absolutely nothing resembling civilization. If you are lost in the Yukon, baby, you are fucking lost.

But we had a good car, an extra can of gas, water and a sweet map. As Diana likes to say, it was all good.1

Plot outlines are maps for writers. At least, writers like me. Some writers can jump in the car and go, eschewing any kind of premeditated plan. They think maps stifle creativity, keep them from seeing the funky detours that might lead to amazing adventures. But that’s confusing planning with control.

Maps are not about control. On the contrary, they are about options. And that’s what makes them so great. The ability to plan a journey is often what gives us the courage to take it. Then we aren’t afraid of the detours because we know that if we don’t like them, our map can lead us back.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I read a few books on using plot outlines and then sketched one out for my story. Anxiety quelled and courage bolstered, I set off down the road.

My story started out as a light-hearted, almost farcical occult fantasy, with ironic characters and sarcastic one-liners. Somewhere along the way, though, my muse got a wild hair and took a hugely unexpected detour.

While she started out cruising down the sunny highway of the mind, she now finds herself navigating the dark alleys of the soul.

Thus the journey has halted for the time being, as my muse camps out at the side of the road to revisit the map. The good news is, its main road and final destination are fairly solid.

That and a can of gas in the trunk gives her the confidence to keep going.

[tags]writing, fiction, fantasy[/tags]

  1. Of course, anyone who’s every used MapQuest knows that all maps are not created equal. A bad map can turn a fun road trip into the Yukon into a foot-eating survival ordeal. Do your homework and find a map you trust. [↩]

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

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And I have come to the conclusion that that’s too long to not live the way I want to live.

I wouldn’t say I’ve had an epiphany, as there’s been no single moment of revelation. More like a few recent, seemingly-disparate events culminating in a subtle but life-altering shake-down.

In August I turned 39. Which means next August, I will turn 40. Yeah, forty might be the new thirty and all that stuff, but do the math – it still means that one’s life is roughly half over. Which means goodbye to the comforting delusion that one has all the time in the world.1

I am not afraid of “aging.” What scares me is aging desperately. I’m not there yet, but it would only be a short trip.

If you read my NaNoWriMo rant in November, you know I’ve had a troubled relationship with my writing – oh hell – with my creativity in general. My studies in Armchair Psychology lead me to conclude I’ve been unconsciously waiting for Someone’s approval.  NaNoWriMo gave me “permission” to write crap and enjoy it. The experience was bittersweet: submerging myself in imagination and creation was wonderful, but getting out of the pool left me cold and goosepimply.

Once life had the Writer in me by the short hairs, it grabbed for the Artist. I got a new job – one that not only pays me to write, but also to play around with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I am equal parts thrilled and chagrined. I’ve wanted to learn both programs for a long time but couldn’t justify buying the expensive software “just for me.” 2

Another dip in the water – it’s bracing this time of year.

Of course, just as my metaphorical heart begins to beat again, my flesh and blood one starts giving me trouble.

There’s a chance my congenital valve problem may be coming back to haunt me. Until I see a cardiologist on January 8th, I won’t know if it’s truly serious. But I can say right now that whatever havoc is being wreaked in my chest has brought a new appreciation for my health.

I’m not just talking about the 5ks and barbells. I mean the general physical well-being I’ve had for the majority of my relatively pain-free, fatigue-free life. Some days, pain and fatigue make aiming for the wastebasket seem impossible, let alone the stars.

Well, nothing lights a fire under an uppity Rib like the impossible.

Today is the first day of the first year of the rest of my forty or fifty-odd years.

I can spend them working for The Man and passively consuming other people’s creativity, then retire with my gold watch and second-hand memories.

Or I can get back in the pool.

Now for the important question: Bikini, one piece, or birthday suit?

I’ll try them all. I have time.

  1. I heard a similar clock-ticking when I turned 35 and realized if I wanted kids, I needed to get on the stick, so to speak. But that crisis was resolved in one trip to the mall. [↩]
  2. I don’t even want to talk about how lame that looks in print. [↩]