life, the universe, and everything

NaNoWriMo actual serious thoughts

Three people have led me, this week, to the realization that I must start taking my writing more seriously. That is not to say I intend to take myself anymore seriously, because people who do that are dreadfully boring. But I know I write well, and I want to write well for others; giving them something to enjoy and maybe even cherish. 

I do not mean to say I am talented in the literary sense. I don't know if I can be, but that is mostly for others to judge. I write like I sing, though with more technical skill. I do not have a beautiful or powerful voice, but people enjoy the way I put over a song, and find my singing pleasant. 

So, the three people. One of them did some research and found that I could have a similar lovely typing experience that I enjoy on the family iMac if I invested in a new Chromebook. You see, my evening typing is confined to an old Dell laptop. This might sound luxurious, daytime machine and nighttime machine, but the nighttime machine makes me weep with mourning for my old terrible Powerbook. I like an Apple keyboard, and I like Apple software. 

But the new Samsung keyboard will have a similar feel, and I won't have to tear my hair out wending my way through the ugliness of Windows software and clunkiness of the Dell keyboard.

He said, "An artist needs proper tools." I like that. We use what we have, to create beauty. But when we can invest in better brushes and canvasses, it is wise to do so.

The second person said, "Write a children's story.  Children see magic in the world and create meaning from it. And everyone likes a good children's story." 

That's true. Everything a child sees is bigger and more magical and wonderful because they see it with newer eyes and a more roomy heart. I'm not sure I could write a good children's story, at least, of any significant length, but I will be keeping this in mind as I write the story I am organizing for November.

The third person is my seventh grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Juanita Grayum. The first two conversations brought her to mind, and I am so glad they did. If Google has things right for me, she is still alive and living in Arkansas, at the age of 92. Mrs. Grayum taught me to avoid helper verbs, and she also taught me a few things about dignity, drinking lots of good water, the importance of breakfast, about strong narration, and about seeing more literature in life than is written in the Great Books. I've never forgotten her or our conversations after class.

Informally, at least, I am dedicating this effort to her. She did a lot with her life, and I aim to do much more with mine, starting right now. 

All the things, part one

(I'm gonna post way too much tonight and maybe even tomorrow night as well.)

I'm just so unreasonably happy to have the iMac sitting on my desk in my private studio for the weekend, with its swift solid keyboard keys, no-fuss mouse, and all the sense-making that goes along with it. 

I do not give a single [redacted] if anyone has a problem with that. Joy! Balloons of Happiness! 

I miss my Powerbook. Working on NaNoWriMo without it last year was difficult. At the end of the year I was given a Dell laptop; sorta given, it's this whole thing, and oh my gosh do I hate writing on it. Or doing anything except looking at Cracked.com, really. So in case anyone reading this has been wondering why I've disappeared from Tumblr and a few other things, that's largely why. Most of the rest is Google Plus, but that's for another discussion. 

I never have conflict in my stories and that's what I'm thinking about right now. I have people do silly arguing, or wonder about how something will go, but nothing really goes wrong. And I just don't groove that way. So I'm thinking about other ways to create tension in a story, although I prefer just writing slice-of-life situations and conversations. 

I thought Jack and Charlie could meet up and go on a road trip. Charlie is sort of maybe a little obviously gay, so would Jack feel conflicted at the idea people would sometimes assume they're "together?" That could be something, and of course they'd have a lot of fun. I know I-70 west to Denver, and a few other roads pretty well. 

But just thinking about conflict makes me a little tired. I am often bored by it; I don't know why everyone else thinks it's so [redacted] necessary.

Okay, the reason I use [redacted] is so you can use the vulgarism of your choice. You might choose goddamned, fucking, bloody, or some combination thereof. As you like.

liliales birthday countdown: 2005

This one is a bit of a cheat. I'm not sharing a blog link from this year only, because they were transferred here with a whole month on each page. You could go find them if you were compelled to. The picture links are broken, though. 

In 2005 our world changed a lot. It was awesome, then it was awful, then there was some awesomeness in the midst of the awfulness. Which was awful. Oh, and I turned 40. 

Here's me shoveling snow in early 2005: 

And here's all the poetry I got written that year, but also it was the first year I tried NaNoWriMo, so that was a neat thing. 

Sipping Gotham

New York Harbor
slice of lime

I walk differently on New York streets,
everything hums erotic vibrations 
through the soles of my feet. 

Carnival of Words

Looking at you in a funhouse mirror
It's shatter-proof, smear-proof
distorted nevertheless

On a carousel spinning,
Artificial breeze soothes
Ride over too soon.

Ferris Wheel stops at the top,
car rocks and I sway, 
unsteady and unnerved til you point out the view
It's wide and breath-taking
and I never want to come back down. 

Slave/spoils

Slave to your will, or mine?
I can lean back and close my eyes,
or grip your shoulders and draw a sharp path
straight through your pupils.

The shouts are all shut up in my head
and I do not force them out by throat and tongue,
rather with fingernails, teeth, taunting pressure
holding, locking you into position;

It's always at least a draw 
where the spoils are shared, exchanged,
given in love and taken by need—
like rain, or shelter from cold.

This is from the prologue of my first NaNoWriMo attempt. I say attempt because I can write 50k words in a month, but never seem to write a complete story...

I couldn't help myself. As she headed for the newsstand, I scribbled on the back of a receipt I found in my purse and then got up, walked past him quickly, dropping the receipt at his feet, and kept on going out of the park. My heart was racing, but I didn't look back.

The note said, "Meet me in front of Trump Tower in an hour." And he did.

He just walked right up to me and spoke, "She's visiting an old school friend, and we're getting back together for dinner at 7."

I said nothing, just pointed toward Central Park, smiled, and took off across the street, as he followed behind, jogging a little to keep up.

I had never before spoken to him in person, and just didn't know how to begin. It seemed so important to get the words exactly right, even if they were meaningless. So I remained silent until that began to feel absurd. We had a few hours, this one day out of forever, not to be wasted away on shyness.

"An eternity in one long breath. That's how the days seem right now. Like we're all exhaling, and when our lungs finally empty, and it's time for drawing in again, well."

I stopped, realizing I must sound a little crazy, speaking the truth hardly anyone dared voice aloud these days. That's me, from shy to overly vocal in one careless move.

 

 

Sensory NaNo

There's always music. This year I decided to get a handle on how the characters look. I found an Italian actor and messed with his face a little bit to turn him into Jack. Still working on some of the others. I figure Charlie looks just like Michael Imperioli, but his eyes are so much like mine it's unsettling, so I want to fix that.

Here's Jack:

Harder to get the women right, because I see them a certain way younger, but when I try to find older versions of that, they aren't the same person. 

And here's a song Violet gave to Jack on a mixtape (yes, an actual audio cassette) that confirms his belief she's pretty much the coolest thing going. It's from 2005, at least, the recording I have. 

I don't know why I can't get it to work inline. I haven't done anything different than in any other post. Here's a direct external link: it will autoplay, though.

Peter Gunn (Max Sedgley Remix) — Sarah Vaughan

 

Here's an excerpt; feel free to not read it. As prose, it isn't any good. But I do think it says what it's meant to say, and that's all right by me, for now. 

Jack gripped the edge of his bathroom counter top and stared at himself hard in the mirror. Actually, he couldn't see all that clearly without his reading glasses, so he reluctantly put them on his still damp face. They fogged up slightly. He cursed under his breath. As they cleared, he tried again. We all do it, try to see ourselves as others see us, as though we're looking from the outside in. But he was too used to his face, and all he could really tell about it was that the skin around his eyes and below his ears seemed to have made a recent gravitational shift. Maybe it wasn't recent. These things aren't sudden, but they do seem to be suddenly noticeable, just when we're most optimistic that age hasn't yet taken control of our appearance. 

The corners of his mouth still turned up. Women always seemed to like that about him. He didn't have too many lines on his forehead, but that furrow between his brows seemed deeper. He brushed his hand through the hair on his crown; maybe it was a little thinner, but it wasn't receding. The grey hairs were sprinkled evenly throughout, but finely, so that it all still looked black from a distance, or at least when he took the glasses off. Stretching his hand along the length of his jaw, there was a slight heaviness he hadn't noticed before. Well, he'd never ended up on TV as he'd imagined so many years before. No one in Seaview was going to urge him to cling to youth by undergoing a surgeon's knife. 

Turning to the side to take a broader view of matters, Jack pinched the skin that pressed against and over the top of his towel. All men ended up with that, didn't they? There was even a name for it...but his stomach, though not actually flat, hadn't grown into what he'd exactly call a full belly.

Love handles! That's what it was. What a strange conceit. Anyway, over all, he wasn't fairing too badly for a man nearly 45 years old. No need to consider changes occuring beneath the towel. Violet could still have any man she wanted, if she bothered. If she wanted him, she'd take the whole package, as it stood, and he knew he could make it worth her while. His young girlfriends might find him hard to understand at times, but there was never any doubt he knew how to keep them around, wanting more, until he was bored with them and drove them off. 

That was his secret. People assumed he couldn't keep a girlfriend for long because he chose badly; young women who were excited by attention from an older man who turned out to be odd and difficult to love. It was more accurate to say he fell in love at both the turn of a phrase and the turn of a shapely figure, but he fell out of love just as easily, and gently sent them on their way, making sure they believed it was all their decision. 

If Violet knew that about him, she might think he was a selfish bastard, but he knew better. He knew she'd been doing the exact same thing every summer for years. And he'd always been attracted to her, same as everyone else, but it had been only over the past year or so, since last year's Labor Day picnic, that he'd thought of her with a sort of passion, deeper than he'd known he could go. 

 

We Gonna Do This Thing: Writing Sanctuary & the Malaise

Today is 20k word day at NaNoWriMo. This morning, my word count stands at 9k. I got bored with it, decided to give myself little creative tasks to do until I was ready to write again. So here I am, having brought the iMac to my little office/study/studio/library (tell me, what would you call it?) and having the weekend before me.

It isn't as though I ever have anything else to do, anyway. Well, there is a NaNoWriMo regional dinner tonight, but I changed my r in the RSVP because...

I also have the Malaise. This is an illness I contract about twice each cold weather season, and it's hard to explain. It's not quite a cold, not quite a flu; worse some seasons than others. Last year I first got it in late November and it turned into an extended bout with bronchitis. Probably mild pneumonia, but, like childbirth, the details are lost now. 

It starts with a headache, and some throat drainage. Then a slightly drippy or stuffy nose, heaviness, fatigue. But then it never turns fully into a cold. It rarely produces much of a fever. Yet I spend several days feeling fluish, bedridden part or most of the time, depending. The icky junk stays in my throat, sometimes wanders down to my chest, and eventually wanders off.

I think this'll be a mild one if I'm careful. So in a way it's a boon. I made sure the boys could feed themselves all weekend if I can't do it, though I'll try. I had one of them bring the iMac up here (now sharing it with only one of them, and he was warned he'd have low access this month,) along with clear juice, water, coffee, pain reliever.
My iPod,
my new scarf,
a new outlook,
and I'm all set to go.

Except I feel sort of shaky and quivery and stuff, so I don't know. I mean, I gotta do this thing.

It matters to me. Just gotta put my head down sometimes. 

And there's a William Holden movie on in a couple hours. I've set it to record, but you know, if I need a break, that'll be a good one to have...I mean, it's mostly about jets, but they're really cool, and the scenery is cool, and he is very, very pretty. I picked a negative review on purpose, but it's actually an okay movie. Jim Garner has 2 or 3 minutes of pretty face time, in his first movie role.

Not to continually digress or anything.

 

On listening while not writing...

Here's what I've written tonight:

Chapter Five 

Jack walked into his house that afternoon to hear strains of "Blue Rondo A La Turk" coming from the den. He knew what that meant; his mom was in a reminiscent mood, missing his dad. Jack's dad was a huge Dave Brubeck fan, and whenever Ann got to feeling sentimental, maybe a little sorry for herself, she pulled out his old records. When she was in a more cheerful mood, she played Herb Alpert. 

While listening to this music. 

There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder  Bobby Darin 
Why Was I Born? Frank Sinatra 
Sleepy Time Gal Dean Martin 
So What's New Herb Alpert 
I've Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra 
Mighty Lak' A Rose (78 rpm) Frank Sinatra
Blue Rondo A La Turk Dave Brubeck
I Didn't Know What Time It Was Bobby Darin
In a Sentimental Mood Count Basie
Bewitched Frank Sinatra Nothing But The Best
Arrivaderci Roma Gordon Jenkins & His Chorus 
I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart Count Basie 
Try A Little Tenderness Frank Sinatra
Gopher Mambo Yma Sumac 
Love Me Frank Sinatra
For Every Man There's A Woman Frank Sinatra
Azure-Te (Paris Blues) Frank Sinatra
I See Your Face Before Me Tony Bennett
Guys And Dolls Bobby Darin
The Best Is Yet To Come Frank Sinatra

I had iTunes on shuffle. I don't keep much of my music on the computer, and didn't have the iPod plugged in, so it was choosing from a list of 1223 songs. And yeah, about a quarter of that is Frank Sinatra.

But, an hour and nine minutes. 76 words. I'm in the wrong sort of mood, and there's too much going on around me, and I got to "The Best is Yet To Come," and oh, man, listening to that through the headphones, the edges of his voice, I mean, you know? I shouldn't even be here right now. I should be out somewhere, living or something, instead of trying to write about it. 

Okay, shuffle has done a bounce and is now playing "Mr. Blue Sky" by ELO. Maybe it's trying to tell me something, but I doubt it. 

Look, I really love my old blog posts, and I know no one wants to go back and read those on anyone's blog unless they're hilarious, and I'm not hilarious. I am dryly funny or not funny. But do you want to hear "The Best is Yet to Come" and be in that certain mood as well? Go here. About halfway down. Put on headphones; you hear the edges best that way. 

I dunno. Maybe I do this thing tomorrow. Too stuck inside myself right now. 

 

NaNoWriMo Character Study and Personal Confession

 This here below here is all the preparation I've done for NaNoWriMo so far. I have so much in my head, though, that if I don't put some of it down, at least in my daily or weekly list format, I'll end up in the middle of nowhere. And this year I really want the story to draw to some sort of conclusion.

My real goal is to make it as amusing to others as it is to me. Usually I hold back on that just to get to the word count. So what I have at the end of November amounts to a very detailed outline of what could be a good story if only I'd include all the atmosphere and setting detail along with the many pages of dialogue and omniscient head-shrinking...

Jack D'Abruzzo, 45, black hair, 5' 11ish, medium build, easily fit when he remembers to be, a little soft otherwise. Owns Donuts and Coffee in (semi-fictional) Seaview, New Jersey. Eccentric in regards to musical taste and the spelling of the word donut. Sometimes pretends the world is 1971 or 1958. Likes good scotch. Never married, takes care of his mother, who has MS. Father died in plane crash 20 years ago. Jack is also the director of the Seaview theater company, which puts on shows three times a year. He is, as are most Seaview residents, left-handed, and this matters to him greatly.

Violet Palm, 46, 5' 4", long dark hair, very sexy in form and attitude. Into metaphysical concerns. In the past couple of years, she's developed a kind of best friend relationship with Jack. She knows he's half in love with her, but this is fairly common for her and she and Jack have known each other all their lives so she pays no heed to it. Violet lives in her grandmother's Italianate mansion on the hill above Seaview. She has a twin sister Lily, with whom she gets along very well, though they aren't much alike. Violet is a grasshopper and Lily is an ant. Violet was widowed at a very young age, when she and her German husband were in a car accident in Switzerland. Violet was pregnant at the time, lost the baby, never remarried. Her sister is divorced, with one teenaged daughter. Their family name was once Palmiero, but it was shortened many years ago by an official who couldn't spell immigrant surnames.

Aaron Miller, 41, 6' 2", light brown hair, sort of skinny. Aaron grew up in a New Order Amish community in northern Ohio, now is a barrista and part owner of House of Pie in (fictional but based on a real place) Tucker, Michigan, an artsy enclave on the Lake Michigan shore. Aaron left his home at age 16 to become an artist and to avoid having to marry and produce quantities of children. Despite having little formal education, he has educated himself well over the years and speaks with no particular accent. When Aaron was 18, he fell deeply in love with a man who mentored him as an artist, and they lived together for a few years, but Aaron eventually left when he realized he was being dominated and limited as a person by his selfish partner. He spent the next ten years traveling before ending up in Tucker and going to work for Lena Spano, who later made him her business partner. Aaron is a strong person, but has a very old-fashioned, conservative view of romantic relationships, and isn't particularly trustful that he'll find someone who feels the same way. 

Lena Spano, 41, 5' 6", huge mass of dark curls, very fit-looking for no particular reason, owns House of Pie in Tucker, Michigan. She inherited it from her grandma, for whom she was named. Lena is kind of a loner, as she was orphaned by age 11, and tends not to trust that people will still be around once she gives her heart to them. She's been in several long-term relationships but never married. Lena spends her mornings making pie and soup, and her afternoons teaching cooking skills to a young mildly autistic woman who recently moved to Tucker. 

Charlie Spano, 49, Lena's cousin. 5' 9", a writer and editor who lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, freelancing for a New York publishing house. He, like Jack, is a connoisseur of good scotch and old lounge music. I don't have a good feel for him yet. The other night I was listening to an Al Martino record and drinking a glass of bourbon, trying to imagine someone with many of my interests and online experiences, as quietly eccentric as me, only masculine and gay. This isn't super easy. In my stories, Violet is usually the one most likely to express my thoughts, and Lily my feelings, but I want Charlie to be like a twin I might actually have, based on my and my brothers, only gay because I need Aaron to finally have some romance in his life (not that I'll actually be writing romance, just implications—unless I've had a double old-fashioned first,) and not very tall because I always make all the men sort of tall. So.

Charlie and Lena are very close, but he has met Aaron only briefly in the past. That is about to change, as Lena is bringing Aaron with her to the Spano family Thanksgiving in Ann Arbor. Back in Seaview, Lily is holding her own Thanksgiving, and has invited Violet, Jack and his mother, her friend Robert and his mother, and a collection of other Seaview residents. Jack is putting together a community children's play for Thanksgiving, and has roped Violet into helping him with it. Jack and Charlie are best friends online and will be discussing their burgeoning personal interests with each other during the holiday season. 

It is either a quirk of my brain or the nature of NaNoWriMo that I make Charlie, Jack, and also Robert very into scotch when I know way more about bourbon and gin. I can't even necessarily afford any scotch good enough that I'd want to drink much of it. Lena likes bourbon, which she learned about so she could cook with it. Violet and Lily drink wine. Aaron isn't all that particular, will drink Irish or scotch or Michigan red wine, but not too much, because he feels it leads him into bad decision-making...

So you see, this could be tenderly funny, at least if you lean toward the dry and/or ever so slightly absurd. But the question remains, will I allow it to be so?

In some of the corners of my mind these days

You can pretty much judge how depressed I am by how often I update this blog, because I can tweet or reblog at Tumblr no matter how things are going, but here, I want to have interesting stories to tell or thoughts to relate and I cannot do that when I'm feeling low. I also listen to less music, but you wouldn't be able to judge that. Take my word for it. It's unbalanced. And despite my abiding 4+ year love for Twitter and Tumblr, this is the place that's really all mine. 

So in the meantime, here's some vaguely personal stuff with details, but not really details. You know. I'm personal in only the most shallow ways possible.

I want to do NaNoWriMo this year but don't have my own computer. Partly that's okay; only one boy and I are sharing the iMac just now, as the other two were sent cheesy but useful PCs by K12. The thing is, all three of them sit on the dining room table and no matter how I adjust this chair, I end up with pain in my neck and sometimes nausea after sitting here for awhile.
So that's not super inspiring. I'm so used to a laptop, mostly all I've used for, well, quite a few years. 

The problem is that I need the chair all the way up in order to face the tall screen correctly. But when I do that, I am typing several inches below where that would be correct. So when I do NaNo, I suppose I'll set the keyboard on something to elevate it, but it needs to not slide around…

None of that has anything to do with feeling low. I just do. Too much is not at peace, though our house here is a pleasant sanctuary in most ways. 

I miss my desk upstairs. I created a cozy little studio for writing, painting, and listening to music. But the desk is empty.
It wants a new Macbook Pro, of course. Maybe someday. In the meantime, I stare at a canvas, listen to a little Frank Sinatra, then wander away to some other part of the house.

I need more poetry, classical music, and cushy furniture in my life. That wouldn't solve any problems, but it would be good. Of course, I can solve the first two needs easily, if I just think to. But the days are just packed, and so is my head. Novel reading has been my meditation lately.

Good things are that I live on the edge of two library systems; Cincinnati and Clermont County. There's a Cincinnati branch 3 miles west of here, and a Clermont branch 2 miles east. All media not at my fingertips is a short drive away, and completely free. 

And we found a great deal that allows us to bowl on Sunday mornings, and we found some parks; none you can get to by walking, as that doesn't seem to be a great priority in this area of the, er, area, but still fairly nearby. Just as in New Jersey, we live moments from a pike (historically; there aren't tolls these days,) which is a good path from way over there to way over there, but this one has almost no sidewalk, no shoulder, and has hills as well as curves, so we cannot use it for walking or cycling.

You see how flat and dull all this blather is? I'm not at peace, because others are not at peace, and I cannot make things better for them. Platitudes are useless. As well, little niggling "red tape" issues still invade my days. I'm no good at them, and they won't ever leave me alone. Avoiding them makes it all worse, of course.

Another good thing is that for the first time in I don't even ever, I have all the clothes I need, *and* I like them all. I've never been the sort of person who wants a huge wardrobe, and I don't much like winter clothing, so I tend not to prioritize that. But I now have two thin cardigans, two longer sweaters, several new tops, three pairs of jeans, two pairs of dress-up slacks, a half-dozen dresses, two jackets and a coat, and new underwear and bras. I even bought socks. I no longer have leather boots, which would be a welcome finishing touch, but I can manage without, if necessary. People do. And I still have good gloves and lots of scarves. I cannot abide bulky clothing, but layering can and will be done when it is too cold to pretend otherwise. 

So this is something moving to Ohio from New Jersey did for me. But we still have very many other needs here to be met. I'm out of focus there, but working on it. 

What I'd like to also do for myself is buy a Kindle Fire and let that be my go-between until I can somehow raise money for a new laptop. I had planned on a Tab or iPad, but they cost three times as much, and I can do with my phone any tablet function I wouldn't have with the new Kindle. It's a pretty great phone, though the next model along is what dreams are really made of, I guess.

Living in Ohio, I have found some people who are like those I met at the Jersey shore. I mean, of course, the real New Jersey shore.
People who live closer to nature, who still touch what they make, and who take in nature with the breath they can spare. But they seem to don't live on my street!
I wish they did. Because otherwise, it is very artificial here, and there's something I'm having trouble grabbing hold of. I can't go back to the sea, to the people who communed with it. Lake Michigan is 300 miles away; it was like that there, too.
The seashore, even an inland seashore, breeds the spirit to which I most relate these days. And there's no sea here.

There is a bit of color, though. So that's a very nice thing on a sunny warm day in October. Why ask for more?

Why start/finish NaNoWriMo? (wherein I copy and paste...

...because why on earth would it be healthy for me to waste word count explaining it? I have 1300 words to write tonight!)

This guy does a good job of it, instead. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, you received this in an email. Anyone else? Read up, it's worth it. 

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

Way down deep in the dark archives of my hard drive, I have a folder called Follies, which contains an impressive collection of abandoned stories: There's the zombie apocalypse novel about corn genetics, the sequel, the one about the Kuwaiti American bowling prodigy, the desert island novel, and many more. These stories have only one thing in common: They're all about 25,000 words.

Why do I quit halfway in? I get tired. It's not fun anymore. The story kind of sucks, and it's hard to sit down every day and spend several hours eating from a giant bowl of suck. And most of all, like the kid who spends hours preparing plastic armies for war, I enjoy setting things up more than I enjoy the battle itself. To finish something is to be disappointed. By definition, abandoned novels are more promising than completed ones.

You have likely reached the moment in this insane endeavor when you need a rock-solid answer to the question of why, precisely, you are trying to write a novel in a month. You have likely realized that your novel is not very good, at least not yet, and that finishing it will be a hell of a lot less fun than starting it was.

So quit. Quit now, or if you're among the many of us who've already quit, stay quit. Look, we are all going to die. The whole species will cease to exist at some point, and there will be no one left to remember that any of us ever did anything: Our creations, all of them, will crumble, and the entire experiment of human consciousness will be filed away, unread, in the Follies folder of the great interstellar hard drive. So why write another word?

Sorry. I reached the halfway point of this pep talk and tumbled, as one does, into inconsolable despair.

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

At this point, you've probably realized that it's nearly impossible to write a good book in a month. I've been at this a while and have yet to write a book in less than three years. All of us harbor secret hopes that a magnificent novel will tumble out of the sky and appear on our screens, but almost universally, writing is hard, slow, and totally unglamorous. So why finish what you've started? Because in two weeks, when you are done, you will be grateful for the experience. Also, you will have learned a lot about writing and humanness and the inestimable value of tilting at windmills.

Something else about my Follies folder: It contains the final drafts of my novels Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. They are follies, too—finished ones. Whether you're reading or writing, there is nothing magical about how you get from the middle of a book to the end of one. As Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.”

So here's the pep part of my pep talk: Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

Best wishes,
John Green

John Green is the New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns.

 

 

 

Ten days to NaNoWriMo, getting the workspace right, oh, mememe

Stuff goes wrong every year, but this may be the year it all falls together well.  

I have: 

• new software that actually works okay with my old Powerbook, because it's designed to!
• A new actual Apple power cord that works well
• A pdf of the book I'm parodying so I can use the structure of it for an outline and character sketches, and it can't be physically lost
• and Thanksgiving is a little early this year, so no last minute post-holiday rush

But I do also have a problem with my space bar that is driving me bonkers, and means I'm constantly self-correcting as I type. And, of course, my system can't handle too much internet at once these days; it's been rendered arcane. 

NaNoWriMo has become a sort of annual ritual for many people. Here's where the ritual takes place for me. 

Items of note include the Hendrick's Gin bottle caddy, which I use for scissors, pens, brushes, etc., my green and silver Swingline stapler, Greer flask, New Kirk and Old Spock BK toys, the Mach 5, the iPod, of course, 1964 issues of REDBOOK, and a mug that says PERFECT COFFEE, but which contains Stash Licorice Spice tea. It's good for my cold weather throat and asthma. It has no actual tea in it, so no caffeine. I can only handle a little caffeine ever; more than one cup of something makes me feel ill. Just as with alcohol, I'm physically unable to be immoderate.

I might open the deck of cards if things seem to be going well. Solitaire is one of my favorite cold weather activities. In cold weather, I am a hermit. Part of this is because there's little to do in winter where I live. And part of it is because I'm generally sort of ill in cold weather, with a touch of asthma and a touch of arthritis. 

But, just as with every other hibernation season, I intend to make this the best ever!