Nanowrimo - Libraries

A student cancelled her appointment with me today, which freed me up for one hour.  I should have used the time to grade essays, but I'm all about putting those on the back burner this month in favor of dedicated writing time (I will get to it, but I'm going to be selfish about my grabs for writing time).  

I could have stayed in my office, but the risk of getting interrupted or distracted by the duties of my job (of which writing is one, I keep telling myself) was too high.  So, I packed a yellow pad, a pen, my coffee mug, and I set out for the library.  I was pleased to find it almost empty at 10 o'clock in the morning, and I had my choice of tables on the second floor.  I chose one near to a bank of windows but still in the shade.  The sunlight outside radiated that golden quality of fall, and I was able to witness the colors of the season from where I sat.  

I wrote.  

It was great, and it reminded me of how I used to write when I was in grad school.  Escaping my house, I would often drive over to hospitals or libraries so I could concentrate away from the newborn.  The technique still works today.  I began the next scene that advances my revision work from the other day.  See this post.  I started and stopped a few times to let my hand rest, and this is where the library comes into play.

In order to stretch my hand, my mind, and my body, I got up out of my seat and began walking the aisles.  I found myself in "American Literature 1961-Current Shelved by Author's Last Name."  This is my section right here and it felt great to read the spines, to finger the individual volumes, and to read a page here and a snippet there.  I wound up returning to my seat with Charles Bukowski's Factotum in hand.  

I opened it to find tiny bursts of chapters.  Chapters a paragraph long, a chapter dedicated to a setting, a tiny observation, and it inspired me.  I loved the idea that a chapter could be a tiny unit of measurement and not a volume, a catalog of thoughts.  This got me writing again.  

His language, the poetry of his lines, got me inspired and I set back to writing my own manuscript.  It was a mini-lesson in craft in the middle of a writing session.  

A dear friend and fellow writer, Katey Schultz, wrote about "writing through it" on her own blog the other day, and her lesson seemed somewhat appropriate to how I was using the library.  Without the immediate access of writing friends, mentors, or advisers, how does the writer sustain his/her focus/energy/ambition for a project?  Sometimes the answer is another writer's work.  And where do we find other writers' works?  That's right, ladies and gentlemen, in the library.  What a lovely free resource!

Nanowrimo - Moving Forward

Now that I've gotten my first 50 out of the way for my writing group, it is time to move forward.  While I have the first act of the novel plotted in a general sense, there are lots of little nooks and crannies that have yet to be explored.

I struggle with the concept of outlining when it comes to my creative work.  For essays I can understand it in a way, but I have often felt constrained by working from outlines in the fiction.  I don't know why that is because I haven't done too much of it in the past, maybe some outdated, unproven bias that I've convinced myself of over the years.

As I push into the next pieces of new work, I will be referring to this loose outline and trying to gauge whether or not I have been denying myself a useful tool due to a previous and unproven assumption about my own process.  We'll see.

All in all, today was a good day.  I wrote 776 new words on the story today and I'm looking forward to marching ahead in the coming days.

Total Word Count: 21,573
Favorite Sentence/Sentences:

The headache that struck Oliver that night might have been the first migraine in what would become the ever-increasing line of vomit-inducing blinders that lead up to him lying in bed and snooping on his neighbors. As he surfaced from his recollections, he observed that the neighbor's patio was empty, his opportunity for eavesdropping gone, and, in the lingering wash of stale cigarette smoke, Oliver again wondered if his father would be disappointed with his actions.

Nanowrimo - The First Fifty

The last couple of days have been anti-Nanowrimo in some senses.  I've been revising.  National Novel Writing Month is all about production, forward momentum, and not looking back.  I've broken that rule.

But, what happens when you need to know the beginning before writing the middle.  I've been working on this novel in many different ways over years now and I have a lot of little inconsistencies in my early pages.  Carol is the aunt, no she's the mom.  The mom is alive, no she's dead, nope alive, but she has cancer.  With all of this reversioning, I was a bit confused.  So, I printed my first fifty pages and I set about revising the good ol'fashioned way with a comfortable chair and a pen.

I had a lot to work with, or should I say on?  With so many inconsistencies in the draft, many a page was marked from tip to tail.  It felt good.  I also have a much better sense of how this thing is going to open.  I've sat down now and worked through the first 14 pages of my marked-up draft.  I've made a lot of cuts, but my word count total for my session today still amounted to 1,298.  I'm doing a lot of cutting, but I'm starting to add a little more of the necessary texture to the draft.

My first drafts are often quite lean with dialogue and action accounting for most of what's going on.  The setting, the time, the context for the story all get added a layer at a time as I move through revision.  I've got notes in my margins saying, "Describe house here."  Or, "Avoidance!  Make the conflict happen here."  Each time I come across one of these notes, I write.  I push the draft forward to a tighter, more cohesive whole.

So, while I broke the rules of Nanowrimo, I'm feeling good about the work I got done this weekend.  I don't think I'm going to get anywhere near my word count this month, but I think this time I'm setting aside is some of the best I've spent on the novel in months.

Nanowrimo - New material and Taking Stock

The last couple of days have seen me produce a couple of new pages of material, but not enough to meet my quotas.  I'm behind for the week, but I'm going to make a couple of pushes over the weekend that I hope will bring me back up to speed.

What I have done, which has been interesting to me, is to take stock of the work I already have compiled.  I've printed off the first 50 pages of my manuscript and I'm reading through them for continuity.  I'm using Nanowrimo to fill in the gaps of my first act, and to give me a sense that I'm moving closer to a more cohesive whole of a first draft.  So far, it's been working. 

Two things happened as a result of the work I've done this week.  First, the review of the early pages is giving me a solid sense of my opening and where my characters "live" when the novel opens.  The other is that this increased sense of structure and continuity has influenced my writing of new material.

The three complete handwritten pages I wrote today is a thread that needs to be woven into the story.  I wrote a couple of small scenes, little pieces of the storyline today and I had a solid sense of where each of the pieces would fit into the larger work that is already typed and part of the manuscript.  This is the first time this specific brand of intentionality has crept into my work, which is exciting.  I'd like to see that happen a little bit more as I work to complete my first act.

I hand-wrote everything over the past couple of days and haven't transcribed it to my Scrivener software, so I don't have word count updates.  I do have some fun sentences, I think.  This is a passage with the main character's best friend Willy.  I love writing his character.  Oliver has just told Willy that he can't hang out on Friday, but he won't say way.  He has a date with his ex-girlfriend.

Favorite sentence/sentences:

Willy stood over him as he worked, waiting for an answer.  Once it became obvious Oliver didn't intend to respond, he said, "Wow.  She must be one ugly bitch."

"Shut up," Oliver said and shook his head to show he wasn't going to take the bait.

"I mean if you won't tell me, you're best friend in the entire world, then she must be hideous."  Willy let the words hang between them.  "Unless," he said and raised his finger as if experiencing a great epiphany, "she's fat.  That's it."  Willy waggled his finger and his face broke into a leering sneer.  "She's enormous, isn't she?  How much?  Two bills?  Three?"  Willy drew his fact into a mask of disbelief.  "Four?!  You gonna have tons of fun this weekend, Ollie?"


The scene goes on in much this same vein until Oliver blows up and gets in trouble for cussing within earshot of a customer. 

Nanowrimo - Crushed Momentum

I had what I felt was a great writing day.  It was so good in fact that I was going to leave after dinner and everyone was settled in bed, but this didn't work out.  The priorities of the other parts of my life intruded.  I realized that I had to review some student papers for a lesson plan, read a manuscript for my senior thesis student, and be available for my family.  I have a wife who was exhausted (woken twice in the night by a screaming child with nightmares) and a sick child (who coughed so much she actually threw up twice this evening). 

Sometimes the energy simply dissipates a little.  As you can see by the time of the blog post, the hour is slipping into the late evening and energy is slipping fast.  I'll simply have to recapture the flow tomorrow.

Starting Manuscript Word Count: 15,985
Daily Word Count: 2005
Ending Manuscript Word Count:17,987
Favorite Sentence/Sentences (Not sure if the joke works, but I'll try it out here):
“It really was a nice party,” Carol said and peered at a photo of Sarah’s cake smeared face. “You did a nice job, Cassie.”

“You did most of it,” Cassie said, redirecting the compliment.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Oliver said, repeating his earlier apology. Dillon didn’t even try to mask his snort. “I am,” Oliver insisted.

“Whatever, man,” Dillon said, “if you wanted to be here, you would have been here.”

“You’re right. Why wouldn’t I want to come home to this? It’s so much fun.”

“It’s not about fun. It’s your niece’s birthday party.”

Cassie snorted at this and Dillon glared at her until he realized his mistake.

Nanowrimo - Writing Past the Censor

I've been having problems writing past my censor lately.  Something about constantly being on editor mode makes me hyper-critical about my own writing, so I've had to find creative ways to get the juice flowing again.  Most of the time it's as simple as stepping away from the computer and writing by hand. 

When I apply the pen to paper, it doesn't seem as "finished" as when I work on the computer.  I don't have autocorrect trying to tell me where my errors are.  I don't have the quick backspace key calling for me to fix this or that.

The page is a little friendlier to the creative process for me, and I've been trying to take advantage of that.  For instance, I sat down tonight feeling a little uninspired, but I knew I had to get something down.  So, I sat in front of the computer and typed out about three lines.  Then, it stopped.  Nothing more came.  After a couple of minutes of staring at the screen, I grabbed a pad, a drink, and went to the living room. 

I spread myself out on the floor with a couch cushion under my chest and I set to work.  The dog even came down and sniffed at my ear, wondering what I was doing.  I wrote a full page for a scene that is causing me problems.  It didn't unlock the scene, and it wasn't very much writing, but it was more than three lines.  Sometimes I need to shake it up to shake something loose.

Since I wrote by hand, I don't have the statistics broken down for today, but here's today's sentence:

"Children's birthday parties disrupt a veteran's calm more than any other civilian endeavor, and Oliver Thompson knew this before he stepped inside his mother's house.  If any doubt existed before he arrived, it retreated the moment Oliver saw eleven children, from toddler to tween, crammed into his mother's living room."

Nanowrimo - False Start

I've decided to do National Novel Writing Month again.  Last year saw me produce 150 pages in 30 days.  It was a momentous and thrilling month that taught me a lot about production and craftsmanship.  While I will not be pursuing the novel I wrote as a long-term project, it unlocked a related project that has been stewing for years.

Since last year I have written something like 72 pages on the new novel.  I am rededicating myself to National Novel Writing Month in a limited capacity this year.  While, yes, I want to do as much writing as possible, I need to have a more nuanced approach to a novel in the works.  I don't want to simply throw words at the project; I want to work in more calculated ways.

What this means is that I am cutting the Nanowrimo goals in half.  I will be working to complete 25,000 words in the month of November.  This will lead me to another 75 or so pages, which will leave me back at 150 pages of solid manuscript to work with.

I have the first act of the novel already worked out, but I'm a little less clear about the second or third acts of the novel.  This month should see me finishing out the first act and then diving into the unexplored territory of the second.

Wish me luck and here we go!!!

Novel's Starting Word Count: 15,159
Word Count for the morning: 898
Ending Word Count: 16,057
Favorite Sentence/Sentences:

The boys grew up under the whine of a skill saw and the compact bursts of the nail gun. Their father roofed the house, his first. He spent an entire summer peeling the old shingles, re-papering the roof and tacking new ones down. Although it might have come from the picture Carol snapped of a shirtless Michael standing on the roof in his tool belt and cutoff jean shorts, Oliver and Dillon both swore they remembered that summer in vivid detail. Weekend afternoons spent in the yards around the house, Carol elbow deep in the flower beds, Michael on the roof with the pneumatic, and Dillon and Oliver free to entertain themselves within the bounds of the property.

The image of that summer spent as a family sustained them for years. It is how they saw themselves as a family up until the moment Michael died. Like all car accidents, Michael’s slapped them in the face and left them whirling.

Determined

The family has entered into the phase of determined thinking.  Things are not requested, or simply wanted, these days.  They are needed, mandatory, non-negotiable, and even traumatizing if denied.  It's been a tough transition for the family because Shea has always been somewhat mild in her personality, polite, malleable, even reasonable (if one can say such a thing for a child under 6). 

This new phase brings along all kinds of new family dynamics, many of which I thought I would avoid.  But, it is now the fifth year of her life and I find myself saying things like, "Because I said so," "If I hear one more word about it," and, even, "I'll give you something to cry about."  I've morphed into the universality of parenthood, I've become cliché, a sitcom dad of the worst variety, driven there by the insistent whims of a five year old.  Who knew this day would come?  Stop laughing, mom and dad.

The flip side of this determinism, this fixed mindset, is that Shea is beginning to drive herself, to want things so badly as to work for them.  I took Shea to a friend's pool a couple of weeks back for an afternoon of play.  She loves the water.  She's been taking swimming lessons for a couple of months now and she's getting pretty good.  At the friend's house, she didn't want to wear a life jacket in the pool.  Enter determined moment.

The pool has a shallow end, but Shea can only touch the bottom right near the stairs, so I'm not entirely comfortable with her swimming without some kind of flotation device.  She insists.  She swears she can swim.  I'm not buying.  Again, she insists.  Which leads us to this moment.

I'm amazed.  Shea has never swam that well before, but she wants to show me something, to prove herself, to move past the "no."  She's determined, self-confident, brave.  

It's then that I realized that sometimes I get in her way.  I'm not meaning to do it.  In fact, I mostly believe I should be doing it.  It is that portion of the parent that is alert to danger, aware of consequence, and wary of water.  But, and I remember this about my own childhood if I allow myself that deep reflection, there is nothing more frustrating to the child than that "no."  That doubtful expression of ability, that assessment that says you aren't ready.  Shea pushes back against that often.  I simply listened this time and that was the result I got.

This will be the struggle of a lifetime.  Her pushing, me wary and pushing back.  I don't think it will ever end, but I can try to be self-aware enough to let her try.  In the end, it will lead her further and to higher heights, until she is ready to take a greater leap.  Maybe even like this one:

Proud Dad

When I went to my mother's house to pick up Shea today, I discovered a street full of kids.  They love my mother, and they're warming up to me now as well.  The girls played in the garage with my mother and my daughter's Rapunzel doll.  The boys sat on the curb across the street with their motorized scooter, skateboard, and remote control car.

I parked in front of my mom's house and the kids all gathered.  Shea asked if she could get in the back of the truck with her little friend.  Without saying yes, I picked her up and swung her into the bed.  Her little friend "Amy" took her place at my feet without another word, and I swung her up as well.  Grabbing the loose bungee cord from the back of my truck, they pieced together a swing that would allow Rapunzel to descend from her high tower (they hooked the bungee cord to Shea's bicycle helmet).  The girls laughed and brought Rapunzel up and down.

Amy, a girl a little younger than Shea, climbed up and down from the bed of the truck multiple times in order to fetch the doll.  After a while, I stopped her from getting the doll and told Shea she had to climb up and down.  She looked at me, down to the ground, and back.  She gave me a brief look like, "Do I have to?"  But she walked to the back tailgate and swung her first leg over. 

This was the easy part.  When she went to bring the other leg over, her brace caught on the bedliner.  She struggled to get that other leg over the tailgate and it floundered for a moment behind her as she held on to the tailgate with both hands, staring down at what must seem like a big fall down to the concrete.  I helped her unhook the leg brace and she pulled the other leg over the top.

Shea had both her leg braces on and her hand brace.  The hand brace prevents her thumb from burying itself in her palm, but it makes her grip a little slippery.  Standing with both feet on the bumper, Shea whined for a moment that she might fall.  I stood behind her, my hands hovering near her ribs and promised her I wouldn't let that happen.  With her grip slipping due to her hand brace, she extended her left leg down from the bumper toward the ground.  I heard her whine for just a moment as she felt her grip slip, but then her foot was on the ground.  She paused, brought her other foot down, turned, and smiled up at me.

"I did it, Daddy."

"I knew you could," I said.

"That's it," my mother said and gave her a high five.  When we turned around again, Shea climbed back into the truck from the ground.  Then, back.  She did this for the rest of the time I stood talking to my mother in the driveway.  It may not seem like much, but when my daughter tries things that are outside of her comfort zone, that push her physical boundaries, even just a little bit, I swell with pride.

This is a normal parental reaction, I know, but I often spend time worrying about her adaptability to physical challenges.  She doesn't have an easy road like her mother and I did, and the reason I get scared sometimes is that I don't know what it means for her, what challenges she'll have to face, what form they will take.  So, when I see that she is willing to try, to push her boundaries, and to give it her all, then I know it doesn't matter.  I know that the form of the challenge won't matter because she is perfectly capable.  She is perfectly capable of dealing with her world, and I have one less reason to fret and worry.

She makes me proud.

Her attitude makes me proud.

And, most of all, I'm proud of her potential, because I see it in everything she does.

Morning Wood

We've been noticing some symptoms of allergies in Shea over the last little bit and have been discussing it a bit around her.  She doesn't necessarily have a runny nose, but her nose and eyes are always a bit itch.  She's constantly running her fingers into the tight corners of her eyes against her nose.

Because of this, Shea has started to diagnose herself with "allergies."

"I'm allergic to the butterfly plant," she said the other day.

"I'm allergic to Neera," she said one morning as the two of us got ready for the day with the dog lounging at the end of the bed.

Each time she brings up a new cause, her mother and I poopoo her wild notions.  It wasn't until tonight that things took a turn for the bizarre.  As I washed the dinner dishes, Tracy came down from upstairs with quizzical look on her face.  I raised a question mark of an eyebrow at her, and she laughed briefly.

"So," she said, putting a finger to her mouth as if physically restraining her laughter, "guess what Shea just told me."

I love these moments because there is no way a rational human being can guess what a five-year-old is thinking.  I say, "What?"

Tracy says, "Shea thinks she's allergic to morning wood."  The both of us pause for a moment and look at each other.  Then, we both laugh.

"Well, I would hope so," I say.  I've never been grateful that someone else has an allergy before.

Ronny

After having drinks with my wife's Italian relatives in the backyard of my in-law's, Shea began playing with a toy cellphone.  She lounged in a white molded plastic lawn chair, talking absentmindedly into the headset.  She said things like, "Thanks, Ronny," and "Yes, Ronny," and hung up shortly afterward.

She milled around the yard a bit until she wound up next to me with an exasperated look on her face.

"What's up, honey," I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and tipped her head into my shoulder, kicking at a loose pebble at her feet.

"Who is Ronny?"

"My husband."

Taken by surprise, it took me a moment to respond.  I shook my head, my bottom lip jutting out like I'd just heard a fascinating bit of information, and said, "Is he nice?"

Shea sighed dramatically, like the relationship was on the rocks and she was debating her long term plans, and said, "He's obsessed with work."

I successfully managed to not burst out laughing on the spot, not wanting to spoil her fantasy, and told her that I didn't think that was a good thing.  Shea didn't appear to mind as she then skipped away into the grass where she picked a couple of blades and sprinkled them onto the sleeping dog's head.

Repurposing

I've been spending a lot of time with Shea lately.  It's been nice, having the summer to explore and do fun things with her.  We've been swimming, bike riding, shopping, etc.  This is the last summer before she begins full time school and that feels big to me.  Her time won't be the same again after this summer.  Nap times, days spent in frivolous (and important) play, and alone with her grandparents will be a thing of the past (mostly).

This change in Shea has also coincided with a certain crisis of purpose for this blog.  I don't know what I want it to be right now.  Haven't for a while.  So, I ask myself, what is the one thing my blog followers ask about most?  Shea.  I've decided to focus myself around the purpose of documenting her life and the experience of parenting her. 

I don't want to overcommit in terms of how often I will be blogging in the next couple of months, but I do want to begin producing.  It is a good exercise in consistent writing that isn't writing on the novel.  So, for the next little bit, I will be focusing almost solely on Little Miss Thing.  It will be good for her to see how much I was paying attention when she was little, how invested I am in her childhood and well being.  Until then, folks...

Pages

Many of you who follow this blog have been sweet and asking after it.  For the last couple of months I have gone offline.  I've found pages in the space left when I walk away from my computer.  I've taken to handwriting my pages, to composing on paper, and there is something about the change that is significant, something tangible and real, and like the writing process of my younger self.

When I first started writing, in preadolescence, I always wrote on paper.  I would sprawl on the carpet, on the grass, on the sofa, and I would write.  I wrote poetry then.  When I moved into the realm of fiction, I found myself typing more than writing, and I think in some ways this might have been a mistake.  I'm working to correct it.

For over a year I have been working on a novel, and it hasn't been the smoothest ride.  I wrote 150 pages during National Novel Writing Month, but I have scrapped all of those pages now.  I am building from the ground up again, and I am finding my yellow lined pads to be a great help in this regard.  I am mobile and "wireless" in the best possible ways.  I find myself outside, in coffee shops, and out in the world as opposed to locked in my office.  I can write anywhere.  Which is exactly how it used to be before I "formalized" my process. 

Yellow pads feel like play, like rough drafts, like freewrites, like it all doesn't matter so much, that it all isn't so serious, and I need that in my writing.  I need a sense of play to keep me going.  I love doing this stuff.  I love writing, so I need to remember to take it out of work-mode and get it back out in the world where it can play. 

I spent two hours this morning writing three new pages, single spaced in small print.  It feels great.  I've started a folder of these pages.  I write them, type them, staple them, and then keep them.  The folder is starting to fill a little bit, thickening with each yellow page I pull from the pad.  It feels like play, it feels like progress, and I am all the better for it.

Another Homemade Comic Strip

I've always loved to draw, but never thought I was very good at it. Forcing my students to draw in my graphic novel class has worked to give me some permission.  Here's something I did tonight because I couldn't quite sleep.

Moves Like Banner (Apologies to Maroon 5)

Like Bruce Banner buried under beakers of gamma experiments, I too found myself buried under academic duties.  Also like the BB of comic book legend, I felt something stirring inside, something I felt forced to hide and contain.  I did everything in my power today to hold back the force that began somewhere in my diaphragm and threatened to work its way outward with a manic fury.

In an effort to contain it, I redoubled my focus on my assignments, clearing two sets of student work off my desk by around lunch.  I buried myself in a wall of music, using my earphones to stream music from my computer, it didn't work.  I was like a victim of restless leg syndrome, but it spread quickly to my hands as I drummed atop my desk, using my wedding ring as the occasional cymbal stroke on the Formica top of my desk.

I began to worry about the other people in my building.  I didn't know what form this force would take if it was allowed to burst free from its containment.  I plugged my headphones into my phone and streamed music there.  Music is supposed to tame the savage beast, but it wasn't working.  It was exacerbating the problem.  I found myself walking in time, faster to the hip hop beats, slower to the bluegrass.  It didn't matter what song it was, it felt like an incantation meant to draw forth this unstoppable inner force.

I fled the building.  I fled campus.  I took myself on a walk around the neighborhoods of Forest Grove.  I snapped and whistled to the music, anything to stop myself from succumbing to the monster inside me who threatened the very sanity and safety of those around me, but I inevitably failed.

Like Bruce Banner morphing into his alter-ego the Hulk, the inner force broke free.  Instead of bubbling my flesh in monstrous transformation of my physical self, a single bubble rose in my chest, up my throat, and out through my mouth.  I found myself singing out loud in the rain in the tricycle ridden neighborhoods surrounding campus.  I was transformed into Singing Idiot, hero of the mundane and defender of the ridiculous.  I belted my tunes through the snow mixed with rain and traced my way through suburbia, ever glancing at the buttoned down windows of the surrounding houses.

It has yet to be determined if there were any eyewitnesses to verify Singing Idiot's appearance, or if he might simply vanish into the tomes of urban myth.  The beast was set free today, but eventually I reigned him under control.  Who knows when he will strike next?

Nietzsche, Incoming Freshmen, and Me

I've been grading Pacesetters essays for days on end now.  It's an essay contest for incoming freshmen at Pacific.  It's a scholarship contest and the students are quite diligent in their responses.  It's been interesting reading these last responses because many of the students remind me of myself when I was that age. 

The prompt is, "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."  As a result, I've been reading essays that are all about peer pressure, individual identity, and that overwhelming feeling of difference, both positive and negative.  


The contradiction of difference at that age is something I remember vividly.  It was the thing I treasured most about myself and the thing I hated the most.  I wanted to be different from those people I didn't like, but I wanted people to see me as a unique individual and to treasure that difference.  


Reading through these essays has taken me back to that time and place.  It's rekindled some of those feelings for a fleeting moment and I am glad for it.  The rose-colored glasses have been in effect this afternoon.  I'm sure I will return to my curmudgeonly ways after about fifteen more of these handwritten numbers.

A Dirty Flash

I worked from home today.  I have stacks of essays piled up around me and I'm swimming in undergraduate writing.  So, naturally, I took time off to write a piece of flash fiction today.  It was Diiiiiiiirty.  I don't know what came over me, but the character in that story was having a quickie with a guy at the bar in a stanky bathroom in a dirty part of Old Town.

The main character electrified me and was a ton of fun to write because she was so unrepentant of her sexuality in the beginning. Of course, the ending took a turn and everything got flipped on its head, but those dirty bathroom moments blew that guy's (and this guy's) hair back.

Sex scenes are hard to write.  They need to have just enough and not too much.  They need to reinvent sex via language in a way so as to not sound like a Harlequin romance or a letter in Penthouse.  I'm not saying I was able to accomplish any of that, but it was a hell of ride trying to give it a try.  I almost needed a cigarette after that one.

Prompts

"The Truth That Tells a Lie
The Lie a Truth Tells
The Lie That Tells Truth The
The Truth the Lie That Tells
The That Lie Tells a Truth
The That Lie Tells Truth
The Lie That Tells the Truth

The Lie That Tells a Truth"

This is the front cover of John Dufresne's book on writing.  It is a fantastic sequence of motivational material and prompts.  It sits directly to the right of my computer screen at home and I use it often.  I say this because I've been thinking about prompts lately.

A Pacific MFA student, Hannah Pass, passed (not an intentional repetition) along a link to Tin House's Plotto competition, which provides a prompt for flash fiction.  I followed the link casually.  I like to know what people are doing out there in the writing world, but I didn't really expect to enter.  After reading the prompt for the flash fiction piece (500 words or less), I decided I wanted to respond. 

I sat down with the prompt in mind and hammered out two different versions of a story that fit the contest's criteria.  The whole process maybe took an hour.  At the end, I felt great.  I had a whole story in front of me and the hour was probably one of the best I've spent all week in terms of honing my own craft.

This is the beauty of prompts.  They can be short, immediate, and, even, disposable.  I didn't put a lot of pressure on myself.  It didn't feel like the novel project; it felt like play.  The result, after a quick peer review and a dose of revision, was a quirky little compressed piece that I'm actually quite proud to have finished.  I've sent off the piece to the contest and will probably hear by next week if I won or not. 

I need to remember prompts.  They are a good palette cleanser.  They are a great reinvigorater.  I get a little too big for my britches sometimes and forget to practice my craft in the most sincere form of that word "practice."  There is nothing wrong with taken a few cuts at the batting cage and there is definitely nothing wrong with making a few strokes on the keyboard.

Farewell to Doctoring

Here is an un-posted post from earlier in the month.  I don't know why I held onto it and didn't post it, but here it is.  I think I wasn't ready to tell the world and to have people want to discuss this with me. 

Today is Shea's birthday.  As such, I've been to her preschool to hang out and help out.  We've done lunch, presents, and all of the other birthday madness we could fit into the first part of the day.  The reason for this is because the second half of the day was dedicated to doctoring.  My mother uses that word sometimes, and I like the sound of it.  "I gotta do some doctoring," she'd say.

Well, this doctor's appointment has been a year in the making.  Shea had surgery last year and today was the day where we found out if it "took."  The answer is yes.  Sort of.  The best case scenario, the one that I have, of course, been playing in my head for the last year while all the while denying the fact that it was my secret hope against hope, isn't the scenario that played out today.  But, the news we got today was the second best news we could get.  I am grateful for it.  I am.  Truly.

My daughter is healthy and happy.  She may encounter some issues when she is older when it comes to her kidneys, but there is nothing in the present that can, or should, be done.  She'll grow and develop normally, but will only have a partial "spare tire" in that one of her kidneys won't be fully formed.  It is a blessing, and something she may never have to consider or worry about.  So, the pediatric urology specialist told us we are done with him.  We no longer will have to worry about surgeries, ultrasounds, scans, or infections.  We can say goodbye to that phase of Shea's young life.  Happy Birthday, Shea.

I Saw a Poet Today - A Different Kind of Joy Post

I turned on my computer
to find a poet standing there.
I took a walk through campus
and heard the soft pads of the poet
perambulating past.

I filled my coffee,
returned to my office,
full of papers ungraded
and lessons unplanned,
but I found myself returning
to the computer
and the poet I'd found standing there.

Mixed of video and audio,
she metered her matters.
I began to type outward,
to punch the keys digital
and to play within the post.
I stuttered a "P" on the keyboard
and turned it over on my tongue
like candy for the sweet sound of it.

The act felt like reaching
like yearning and desire,
like the skin of a cheek cupped
in a bare hand,
like touch and water
and sky and tree
and all the things I can know
in a syllable.

I found a poet on my computer.
The bits and bites
of arranged data brought her to me,
but the miracle of her poem
is that it made me want to make one too.

In the hollow cave of my mouth
I found the hibernating tongue
rising, hungry, blind with sleep,
but the desire, the need for food,
the sustenance of a syllable,
drove it from the darkness
only to stand dumbly blinking
in the light of her poet's dance.

My First Critique in Months

I sent a chapter of my NaNoWriMo project to a friend this week.  She is a friend from grad school and an insightful writer and editor.  I knew the chapter wasn't "done," but I needed to get it off my desk and into a reader's hands.  I wasn't disappointed.

For me, there comes a point in any writing project when I need a set of eyes to tell me if what I am looking at is true.  For instance, the chapter I sent out had two of my main characters in it.  The chapter began in the head of one, but finished in the head of another.  I suspected that I wasn't executing this well, but I felt I needed a reader to let me know if my impulse was right.

It was.  One of the first things my reader commented on was the fact that the chapter seemed fractured and that she wasn't sure who her emotional allegiance was with.  This confirmed the fact that my writer's intuition is still working.  You see, when you sit for a long time with a piece of writing, you can become too comfortable with it, you can overlook things, and you can become complacent with the way it looks because you wrote it and, personally, you think you are kind of awesome.  Don't lie; we all think we're pretty awesome at some point in the day!

Now the chapter is back in my lap and the work of revision begins again.  For this chapter, it means rewriting it two different ways so that each of the characters is given their due.  It also showed me something else about my book.  While the novel will follow four characters and each of them will have dedicated chapters, there is one character who will be written in first person.  I had written him in first person before, but abandoned it.  I think I will be returning to those older pieces and resurrecting his personal voice.

As my grad school advisor and the children of Narnia used to say, "Onward and upward!"

Arguing with a Four-Year-Old

I'm in the car with my four year old, which means the verbal flow is on output for the little lady.  We're on our way to the store to take back some Christmas gifts and some lottery tickets so I can buy a controller for my PS3.  We're riding along and Shea is talking about this or that, there's no rhyme or reason that connects her thoughts when we are in the car. 

It starts out with her singing a song that she's made up, but soon she's calling out to me, "Daddy.  Daddy."

"Yes," I say without turning around. 

"I call Purple, Purp."

"What's that, honey?" I say.

"I call Purple, Purp."

"Okay.  That's pretty cool," I say.  "You're pretty street."

This is where she gets incredulous.  "What?!" she says.

"Street.  It means like cool or hip, like you know what's going on on the streets."

"That's not real," she tells me.

"Yes, it is," I say.

"You're making it up to trick me," she says.  We go back and forth a couple of times in that way that only four year olds can do.  It's the "uh-uh" defense.  No matter what you say, it gets a "uh-uh."  It's the most maddening thing.

"Okay," I say.  "Let's agree to disagree."  I'm getting close to pulling into the parking lot of Fred Meyer's, so I'm cutting it short.

From the back I hear her whisper to herself, "Tricking me."

Ah, my daughter the skeptic.

More Hilariousness from the Mouths of Babes

Shea's been on a roll lately.  She's been coming up with some one-liners that have had Tracy and I rolling on the floor.  I'll give you a couple examples.

The first one happened when I took Shea to her physical therapy appointment.  We were waiting in the lobby and Shea was talking with the receptionist Melissa.  They love each other and always banter back and forth when we arrive.  I actually didn't know if we were there for physical or occupational therapy, so I asked Melissa who we were seeing that morning.

Melissa said, "Oh, you're seeing Cressa and you can see her baby bump now."

Cressa had apparently recently announced her pregnancy to her office.  This wasn't exactly good news for us because this meant a new therapist, which was the third new one for us due to pregnancies.  I put on a happy face and said, "Oh, Shea, isn't that exciting?  Cressa has a baby in her belly."

She swung her gaze over to me and in the driest deadpan said, "There goes another one," and then swung back to Melissa.

I about lost it.  I didn't even understand where she would have learned to even say such a thing, but the timing and the delivery on it was absolutely perfect.  I was ready to sign her up for improv classes.

The next instance came later.  It was the end of the night and Tracy and I had were getting her ready for bed.  We had just shuffled her off when Tracy accidentally let one "fly."  I was teasing Tracy and telling her it stunk really bad.  I was being overly dramatic and loud in an effort to get her to blush.  I was having a good time with it and hurling jokes at her when, from the other room, Shea says, "You married her."  Just like that.  Nothing else.  Again, it was said in the most matter of fact tone you'd ever heard.

It took Tracy and I a minute to recover.  In that moment, silence reigned until we both looked at each other with tears welling up in our eyes.  Tracy laughed so hard she fell on the bed and buried her face in the pillow.

We just can't get over how big she is getting and how out of control we are in terms of the things that are starting to come out of her mouth.  We have no idea how she is putting thoughts together now, but it sure is keeping us entertained.

The Sin of One

I sat on the floor of the nail salon where my mother was getting her nails done. Shea had already gotten her mani-pedi, and we were simply whiling away the time chatting with my mother.  Shea was being her adorable self, as always, and the ladies in the salon began talking to me about her.

"How old is she?"

"Is she your only child?"

I hate this question.  It often leads to awkward explanations and sour faces.  I said, "Yep, she's our only one.  One and done," I said, drawing my flattened open fingers across my neck in a swift, killing gesture.  This is my fallback position.  I say this whenever people ask me about the number of my children.

"Oh, no!" People exclaim.  "She needs a sibling."  Or they say, "No, you need to have two."

I don't know what it is about people and their aversion to the only child, but I have never in my life had an aspect of my personal life that people feel more comfortable criticizing.  Shea is a happy little girl, and her experience is not diminished by her lack of a sibling.  Her experience is different than other children who have a sibling/siblings, but it is not lessened.

There are many reasons my wife and I have decided not to have another child.  These reasons are our own and I don't feel like I need to offer those up to strangers in a nail salon, but, the funny thing is, I do.

I sat on the floor of the nail salon and I found myself reciting my reasoning for one child to a room full of women, some of whom spoke only in broken English.  I want to say it's none of their business.  I want to say that I shouldn't need to justify myself.  I want to say read this article by Bill McKibbon here.  I'm not sure any of those responses would be effective, but I'm once again left feeling like I've made a bad call, or a selfish decision, and I don't think that is what I've done at all.  I've made a balanced and mediated decision.  I've made a slow, careful, and thoughtful decision as the result of conversation, sharing, and debate with my spouse.

I just can't get over why I'm still talking as I sit on the floor of the hair salon, like a sycophantic flatterer sitting at the feet of a wise man.  But I don't know these women.  I don't know the mistakes they've made in their own lives, in their own parenting, but I should take comfort in the fact that I've looked at my options, I've debated the possibilities, and I've made a sound judgment.

When I turn and look at Shea, she's got a mint stuck to the roof of her mouth.  She sticks her finger in there and the peppermint pops loose from her mouth and onto the linoleum floor.  I get up from my position on the floor, pick up the mint, and find the nearest garbage can.  I talk to Shea about keeping her mouth closed while eating hard candy and she says, "But it was stuck to the roof of my mouth," and her eyes get all wide like it's the strangest thing she's ever bore witness to.  In moments like these, I realize she's absolutely fine and the anxieties belong to me, and possibly those women who can't see beyond the possibilities of their own experience.

Christmas Break - Day Four

It was the fourth day of our California vacation before we went to Disneyland.  Tracy and I were dying by this point.  I couldn't sleep the night before.  We'd put together a plan for how we would reveal our true purpose for coming to California.  It all hinged on a stuffed Dumbo doll.

For those of you who missed it, there is a commercial on television that shows Dumbo flying to children's homes, picking them up, and whisking them away to Disneyland.  Shea has seen these commercials.  She'd also asked on multiple occassions, "When is Dumbo going to pick me up?"  This was the initial spark for our idea. 

So, after a near sleepless night for Tracy and I, the morning finally came.  We woke Shea up and brought her to our bed to snuggle.  We let her watch some cartoons and wake up with some juice before we really got things going.  She was in a great mood already as can be seen by this picture.

Shea's Morning Silly Face.

After she'd sufficiently woken up, I got out of bed, got dressed, and made some excuse for why I needed to go to the lobby.  Tracy and Shea were going to wait for me to return.  As I made my way out of the condo, I grabbed my phone and set it to camera mode, and I grabbed the video camera as well.  In the condo's dryer, I grabbed the stuffed Dumbo Tracy bought before our trip.  I made my way out to the hallway and waited.

I could only stand the anticipation for a minute.  I placed Dumbo in front of the condo door, knocked, and backed up to the far side of the hall with two cameras at the ready.  Tracy told Shea I must have forgotten my key and that she should open the door.  She did so dutifully.  When she opened the door, she was curious as to what I was doing with all the camera gear, but she soon noticed the stuffed animal at her feet.

She knew something was up and she swung herself into the hallway a bit by holding on to the door jamb.  She was looking to see if there were any other unanticipated surprises waiting for her.  It took us a while to get her to understand what was really happening.  Even when we told her she was going to Disneyland, she was a bit unsure.  Over the last couple of weeks/months, we told her that only five-year-olds got to go to Disneyland. When it sunk in, she said, "When I'm four?!"  We agreed and she ran to her mother and said, "I'm a big girl now!"

The message finally sunk in and she was overjoyed.  She hugged Dumbo tightly in her arms and ran to Tracy and I each individually and gave us hugs.  She said, "You're my favorites" in that sweet, tender voice she has.  If you want to see it for yourself.  Here is the video:

Coming soon...First day in the park.

Christmas Break - Day 1

Tracy and I are both suckers for a good surprise.  We like throwing each other surprise parties, getting the perfect unsuspected gift, and blowing the other's mind with festive sleights of hand.  So, it's a double gift to our daughter, who gets our full concentrated efforts directed at her.

This Christmas break afforded us the opportunity to travel to California and to surprise our daughter with a trip to Disneyland.  This trip was months in the making and Tracy and I meticulously planned each detail with our daughter out of earshot.  She had been asking for a trip to Disneyland for months, but we'd told her that only "five year olds get to go to Disneyland." Her birthday is in a couple of months, so the anticipation was building, but she didn't suspect the time frame.

We didn't even tell her we were going on vacation until the morning we had to leave for the airport.  When she woke up, we told her she was going to the beach in California on an airplane.  She was overjoyed.  The only time she'd had experience with an airplane was when she watched her mother and I jump out of one with parachutes.  She was over-the-moon excited.

We jumped on the airplane and Shea took to it with no problems whatsoever.  She loved takeoff and landing and even asked if we were going to jump out of the airplane with parachutes.  I told her, "It's not the kind of airplane, honey."  She was captivated by the process the whole way.  Tickled by salty pretzels and a glass of orange juice, she nestled into her seat and watched a movie on a borrowed portable DVD player.

When we landed in San Diego, we had a bit of driving to do before we got our resort and Shea was a bit restless, but she held on through our stop to the grocery store and the check-in process.  When we finally managed to get into our condo, this was the view that greeted us.  For rain-soaked Portlanders, there isn't a better view to be had in December (well, unless it's the top of a snow-covered peak).  Our adventure together had begun.

The End of Vacation

I've been indulging myself for weeks now.  It's begun to show in my waistline and my writing time.  The last couple of weeks have been hectic with a vacation, the holidays, and family time, but I have no excuse for not coming to the page sooner. 

I will say that the last couple of weeks feel like I've been "filling the hopper" as one of my former teachers once said.  I've been out in the world, living, enjoying, playing, being a person, and it has been wonderful.  As the holiday vacation begins to wind to a close, I find myself thinking about work.  About my work and wondering what the next step will be.  I have yet to revisit many of the pages I wrote during Nanowrimo and I hear the faint call of Willy, John, Katie and Misty beckoning me back into their lives.  I've heard them having conversations like hearing their voices from another room and I know I must return.

I also need to work on an article/post about my experiences with Nanowrimo for a friend.  There are a ton of opportunities for me to revisit the page right now, so I can't wait to get the new year started by typing out the first few lines here on the blog. 

In the coming days/weeks, I'll be posting about my vacation to Disneyland, the holidays, and other experiences, but for now I return to my life for a scant few more hours of delicious vacation.