halfway to something

It's mid-November, and for all of the folks diligently plugging away with National Novel Writing Month, that means 25,000 words. Maybe it means having reached that mark and a little bit of triumph or a sense of security against less productive days or weeks. Maybe it means a renewed sense of determination to catch up to that fleet wordcount bird. Whatever it means, NaNo swabbers, sail on.

In the first sixteen days, I do have a count for what I've done so far: a little more than 18,000 words. Like I said before, I'm not really trying to hit the 50K mark in earnest, and I'm certainly not aiming for a complete draft, but simply having the everyday connection to the project has made a huge difference. I've even hit the point at which I get impatient for the next bout of writing as soon as the current day's is over.

One cost of that is feeling like I'm wishing time away, something I try very hard not to do. For one, time is already speeding along, every year seemingly faster than the last, and while in a conversation with the young woman who cuts my hair, we decided that every year feels that way. Every year is going to feel that way. There is no point at which the clock finally seems to settle. For the other, I need those daytime hours; it's mid-November, the tipping point of the semester.

(I actually counted the other day: we have only twelve more actual class days before finals week. It doesn't bear thinking about.)

Though the leaves are still stubbornly sticking here and there in thick clumps of gold and red—a stubbornness I much appreciate—there's no pretending there's much autumnal left. Some Thursday "raindrops" drifted down and spattered small crystals across the windshield, and some high enough hilltop nearby sent out cars dusted white on Friday morning.

I talk about the weather all the time. I complain about it, too, because I'm always cold, the kind of cold that doesn't warm up, no matter how many layers I add, no matter how I move. But even when the weather is hot and lovely, even when the weather is so room-temperature benign that the very air is beige, I want to speak of it. It fascinates me. Maybe, too, at this time of the year, I want to make conversation from it and find what's interesting in the alchemy of moisture and temperature and the wind's list so I won't hate it so much. If I'm busy looking at how the first wet flakes fracture, I'm not as busy feeling something shiver loose in my chest. Every year is a struggle not to lose each long night entirely. I try, again, to take Annie Dillard in her winter at Pilgrim Creek to heart:

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. 

There's nothing that will get me to write at night, I think, but the same happens in the chill, dark mornings, when the only sounds are sleepy cats moving to take my warm spot on the bed and the shower kicking on in the next apartment. Some days, too, what blooms in that cold morning space grows on through the day, picking its way clear in the minutes between meetings or while I drink an afternoon tea. It's important to remember: the novel is both greenhouse and plant, as am I.

variations on a leaf

I turned on the heat in my car the other morning as I drove to campus, and I have worn jackets. But this leaf was on the apartment complex sidewalk while neighbors still sweltered poolside, I took the photo because the leaf is lovely, peach-tinted instead of aflame. But I didn't notice the piece of dead grass lying atop it, and I didn't want to pick it up and press it flat between book-pages because I didn't want its loveliness. I never want fall. It comes anyway.

My days are bookended by thirty minutes in the car, which is new. I listen to music, setting my digitized music collection to shuffle, and while I drive, every musical whim I've had confronts me. Sometimes the randomization creates patterns—three and four songs by the same artist in a single drive, out of hundreds of artists and two thousand single tracks—and I sink into when and where and everything is fleeting. The player is set to fade tracks in and out, so the beginning of one song overlaps with the end of the previous, partly for the unexpected juxtapositions, but mostly to avoid flat air.

There isn't much music I've ever grown out of. Some things fade out of intentional listening patterns, but when the music I loved best at ten and fourteen and twenty-four cues up, I usually let it play. When there are too many things to think, often on Monday mornings and Wednesday evenings, I turn the music louder and louder and it isn't until I park that it seems far too loud.

I drive with the windows open. I remember that I actually like the smell of skunk, and I remember how close the scents of manure and earth and drying cornstalks. With the windows open, sometimes bits of leaf and chaff blow in, sometimes rain.

Sometimes the air here smells like melting chocolate and roasted almonds, but I still only want to eat peaches, all summer-tasting and sunrise-hued, the colors of this heatmapped leaf. 

There's no sense in me saying not yet. Waiting until I'm ready only means dead time between tracks.

another not-NaNoWriMo post

It's the six a.m. hour, and I've decided that the short piece I drafted at the beginning of the week is finished. So before I had a second cup of tea, I submitted it to two places, and it doesn't feel as unwise as maybe it should. (Of course, I trust my decision-making at this time of the morning far better than I trust it at two in the afternoon.)

At the same time, all over the world, NaNo'ers are leaping into beginnings, including my friend and colleague Jill. She came to dinner last night with notebook in hand, and it made me so happy to see that. Last night, at midnight (when I'd been soundly asleep for two hours), a local writing group had a NaNoWriMo kickoff write-in. I envy them. I envy their fresh starts sorely. I have never done NaNo, not in any way that is "correct," though I have made attempts of varying kinds to keep in the spirit. There is a buzz in the air about it, and anything that spurs one forward in any writerly way is a marvelous thing.

This, I suppose, is another of those keeping-in-the-spirit posts, though the last thing I can/should do this month is start anything new. My goal is more now in line with my 2010 November: do something that I need to do as a writer every day. Sure, that means sending out work, but more importantly, it means finishing.

I have folders of unfinished things, fully drafted short stories that don't quite work; half-written things that I'd forgotten I'd even thought of, let alone written; two-and-three word ideas that still blister and crackle no matter that I tossed them into a file years ago. I have kernels of pieces that can only become poems. I have a novel to be written, all furled potential; I have a full, old, old draft of another whose re-vision I'm starting to be able to see. More importantly, I have the novel I'm still working on, the manuscript I keep thinking is finished and keep understanding is not and the only right thing to do by that book that I love, the book that made me completely forget that there was a November last year, is keep working until it's right. Until it's as good as it deserves to be. And that is terrifying. It takes a kind of patience I don't have, that I have to make, and maybe I'm doing that kind of stepping back that Michael P. Nye wrote about earlier this week. I know good work takes time. I spent big chunks of my summer taking that time, considering things, and the revision I did in August did leave me with a better book than I had in July. I'm now understanding that "better" is no substitute for "right."

It's not right yet. I'm not sure what "right" is for it yet, but I know it deserves to be right.

So I will try to be patient and listen and if I can't do either of those things gracefully and contentedly (and I can't), I'll finish smaller works. They've been waiting longer still, and they deserve to at least get where they were going. I won't set another artificial deadline to finish another revision by a date or a time: I understand that my problem is not getting myself to work. It's not about spurring forward this time.

I do want it to be, though. I want to be part of the dash. I'm good at the dash--even elementary school gym class showed me that.

I loved gym class. The period was never more than forty minutes long, and in forty minutes, there was never enough time to get into the things I couldn't do. The longest we ever ran was a mile and a quarter. More often we sprinted. More often we dove after a ball, the goals quite clear, the scores clearer.

Novel writing is not gym class. Even my own process is not the one-size-fits-all yellow mesh pinnie, appropriate for all activities, no matter how much I want it to be. But there's something to learn from thinking about gym class--about exertion, in particular, because what is writing except exertion of one kind or another--no matter what shape I'm in, no matter what shape this novel or those drafted stories or those little poem seeds are in, I can do something. And so I must.

long walks

I've taken some longish walks lately, and the photos turned out all right. Because it's officially September, that also means I've entered official mourning for summer, but the scenery's lovely and I'm trying to focus on that instead of how spine-crushingly depressing I find fall to be. 

Aspens on Casper Mountain, showing the frightful start of autumnal leaf-gilding

The view from Casper Mountain's Bridle Trail

 I've written about the Bridle Trail before. My general not-in-Casper-ness this summer has made it so that I didn't get into the near-daily traversing of it, but I made a point to go on the second day of classes, after I was done for the day. It's so very different in the afternoon--and it's functionally different, too: while I was away, the trail was re-done so the ascent/descent are actually in different places, and the surface of the trail has changed. (The sandy/rock-peppered parts have expanded and deepened, which makes it a bad choice for me to run on it, as I tend to trip on the relatively flat parts.) But the view, the sunlight, the Wyoming blue--that's always perfect.

On Labor Day weekend, we went to Denver to collect my parents and brother, who visited for the week, and we made a very brief stop at Rocky Mountain National Park, taking a six-mile round-trip hike to Jewel Lake. That's the source of the rest of these.

This chipmunk--just scritching away, a foot from my shoe.

Another tree, turning its colors.

Just before Mill Lake, Longs Peak in the distance.
(I want there to be an apostrophe in there, but it seems there isn't one.)

It was in the mid-nineties here in Wyoming for the entire week my family visited, and today, it's only been about eighty. The rest of the week, the temperature is predicted to hover in the seventies. Fall is falling, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

What I can do is keep busy. My intention has been, with the start of the semester, to start the next novel, and I worked on it the first two mornings. But the old book is still in readers' hands, still waiting a bit, and I'm still tweaking it in my head. Those characters are still absolutely omnipresent. So I'm going to try, instead, to finish up some old business. I have essay bits hanging around, a few short stories that need a good hatchet-job. I spent a big chunk of today cleaning out my office so I have a place to work again. (While my family visited, it became the room where I threw everything I didn't have a place for, everything I usually put on the edge of the upstairs sofa or piled in my papasan chair.)

Every end-of-summer, I end up writing a post a lot like this--this is the academic's New Year. But the last year wasn't like all of my other old years, so this one feels a bit different because of all of my time away. I wouldn't trade my travel this summer for anything (and to be perfectly honest, I wish it were still going because obviously), but it changed the rhythm of the summer on me.

I bought more new music this year than I've done since the middle-school days of the Columbia Record Club, and a lot of it is, even by my own standards, a little ridiculous. (For perspective, my favorite band that isn't The Clash has an album called Polka's Not Dead, and I admit to curating a love of peculiar music.) But this year, I bought things I heard on the radio (Canadian radio, out of Vancouver & Ottawa, but still). I bought things I should have heard twenty years ago but didn't because the nineties didn't actually get to my hometown until I graduated and went to college. (I also bought t.A.T.u.'s greatest hits album. I bet you didn't even know they had a greatest hits album. But they do, twenty songs, and I can sing all of it now, so, so badly.) It turns out I will forgive music almost anything if it takes me to a narrative place, and that's a chicken and egg: does everything I listen to now become narrative--important to my characters or illustrative of something in my writing or amusing to my characters who have opinions about every.damn.thing.--because that's what I'm thinking about ninety-seven percent of the time? I'm guessing that's the truth, and I absolutely don't mind. I will listen to all of that Imagine Dragons album with ears that I'm apparently sharing.

And that's been fun.

So this is me, trying again with autumn, to do what I did with some of that music: shut up. Sink in. See where it takes me.

...and hockey starts soon. So there's that.