A NaNoWriMo Carol

Maybe it was a hallucination born of one too many peanut butter cups on Halloween night, but methought I heard a noise. I bolted upright in the bed. Above the soft sounds of the house came a faint  tapping, a chittering of clicks and scritches. Far away at first, but getting louder, closer. I crept to the window. The floor was deadly cold. I peeked around the shade. The streetlamp gave an eldritch glow to the bare tree branches with their twisted, twiggy fingers. The clock on my nightstand read 12:01. A figure stood beside it.

She wore glasses and a backpack with a power cord sticking halfway out of it; she carried a paper cup with a plastic lid and smelled of ink and coffee. “Hey, How are ya? I’m the ghost of NaNoWriMos past,” she told me. “We met that time you went to Barnes and Noble for a write-in? We sat next to a window and typed.”

The Burlington B&N, with its long escalators. The cafe was full, and so was every chair.  “Humbug!” I muttered, remembering. “My back hurt for the rest of the day from being crouched on the floor.” I’d just found out about the annual event, in which participants try to get 50,000 words of some creative project on the page during November. (More information at NaNoWriMo.org!) I set up my free account, selected my region, read the motivational messages, and found a write-in.

“Nothing an ibuprofen couldn’t fix,” said the spirit.

“True,” I admitted. “The real pain came on November 30, when I hadn’t hit 50,000.”

“You had better luck some other years,” said the spirit. With a wave of her hand we were back in my home.

”Begone, spirit,” I replied. “I don’t have the time this year.” I gestured in the direction of my study. “Steve needs me.”  Steve being the first draft of a mystery novel that I finished this summer, now early in the revision process. “He’s just started teething.”

The spirit shrugged. “Maybe someone else can convince you. But I’ll remind you: you don’t have to hit 50,000. You can make your own goals: set a lower word count, choose a different genre. Maybe meet some new friends—there were more than 500,000 people writing in 2020. You included.”

“Points noted, but I’m not convinced,” I replied, getting back into bed. “I’m getting tired; how about you let me get back to sleep?”

She vanished. I pulled the covers around my ears and closed my eyes, only to have them snatched away. “Just ten more minutes, Mom,” I pleaded.

“I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo present,” said the spirit. He was an energetic man with silvering hair. He wore a gray NaNoWriMo word-slayer sweatshirt and was twirling a pencil. “We’ve been sending you emails for months. And now it’s go-time! We know you have some stories in there.”

“Normally I’d love to, but Steve’s not sleeping through the night,” I said. Steve has turned out to be quite colicky. I love him, I adore him, he’s always doing cute and funny things, but he’s a lot of work. 

 “Bring him along, then,” said the spirit, tossing his pencil into the air and catching it behind his back. “Come with me!” Across the world we flew. I clutched Steve’s binder to my chest as we peered into the midnight warriors’ windows. Fingers tapped on keyboards, two finger or touch type, as the writers raced with the dawn for their first thousand words. I saw some friends from an old writers group. Ed, sipping tea and watching the moon. Pauline, typing. Denise, writing longhand in her notebook with the flower on the cover.

Back to my bedroom. “Can’t I tempt you to join us?” said the spirit.

I peeked inside Steve’s covers. He needed a change. “Steve’s just not ready for a sibling. If I don’t raise him right he’s going to turn out like his sisters, stuck on a closet shelf.”

The spirit stuck the pencil behind his ear with a frown. “Well, there’s always time to change your mind. Remember, you can activate your account at any time. There’s no requirement to start on November 1.” 

“Begone, fiendish spirit. Not this year.”

The prospect was appealing. A shiny new story, a couple hundred pages by the end of the month…what a delicious prospect. But Steve can barely hold his head upright. I needed to be a responsible parent…maybe I could look through my poem files, work on some short pieces. Anything that would placate the third spirit. We all know the story: the last spirit is the most fearsome. A skeleton, maybe, or a big black nothing, eyes glowing with the fires of burnt books.

Or, as it turned out, my sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Lynch, all angles, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and laugh lines carved deep into her face. The first person in my life who thought of me as a writer. “I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo future,” she said in her smoker’s voice.

I showed her Steve. “I can’t shove 1700 new words a day into him,” I whined.

The spirit cradled Steve for a moment, then gave him back to me. The sky above us was gray, and the earth was crunchy with frost. Just beyond an iron gate were rows of tombstones. “Wait!” I said. “I don’t—“

“Don’t be silly,” said the spirit, and led me to the coffeehouse across the street. There were people writing, so many people, and coffee and donuts and not a mask in sight, just papers and laptops, and the happy, beginning-of-November chatter. Ideas ready to march onto the page.

“Begone, fair spirit,” I said mournfully.

Mrs. Lynch gave me a hug. Still wearing those scratchy sweaters. “Not this year,” she said, “but next year—all of this will still be here for you.”

In my bedroom, I hummed a lullaby. I took Steve downstairs to rest in my study.  In the moonlit kitchen, I poured tap water into my favorite glass and raised it to all the writers beginning their 2021 projects. Best of luck to you all, and see you next year!

NaNoWriMo 4: an educational week

Moving into the final full week of November, and I have not abandoned NaNoWriMo. Today’s my Sunday review. :ast week, after a frustrating week #2, I made these adjustments: write at the dining table. Write in the morning. Drink tea while writing. I achieved the time and location. But when Dave would ask “Do you want another cup of coffee?” I kept answering yes. I’m extra twitchy, but as of Saturday I had cut my word deficit from a bit more than 4K to just 2,006 words behind target. So…yay?

7:30’s turned out to be a decent time to write. There’s not much going on in my life at that point in the day beyond the breakfast dishes and the news that makes me angry and sad. Coronavirus triumphant, the loser of the 2020 election occupying his time with golf, complaints, and treasonous plots. Even on the worst days, the days when every word turns out to be crap destined to be deleted from the second draft, writing is better than news-crying.

When I was stuck (after I stopped swearing at the computer screen) I did research. This week’s discoveries included new-to-me information about

1. Cuckoos. Beethoven, Mahler, Saint-Saens, and other composers have written music where the cry of the cuckoo is given to the clarinet, so I’ve been imitating these birds on stage for years. One of the rabbit holes I went down this week involved cuckoos that practice brood parasitism, or laying their eggs in the nests of other birds (hosts). Which led to the term coevolution, which happens when two (or more) species reciprocally affect each other’s evolution. It works like this: cuckoos evolve ways to get better at sneaking their eggs into the host nest, but are countered by their hosts’ evolving defense tactics. The cuckoos lay more quickly, produce eggs that hatch earlier than the host species eggs, or eggs that look like the host species eggs. In response, the host species gets better at recognizing cuckoo eggs, proactively drives cuckoos out of its territory, etc.
2. Pretzel rides. As opposed to the fast scares of a roller coaster, a pretzel ride gives a slow scare. Pretty much anyone who’s visited a carnival or amusement park has been on one of these. You get in a car that moves along a twisting track through a dark building filled with spooky sounds and glowing scary sights. The inventors of the ride (which debuted in a New Jersey amusement park in the 1920s), Leon Cassidy and Marvin Rempfer, reportedly decided on the name after one early rider said he felt “twisted like a pretzel” during the experience. Voila!the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company was born. By the time it went out of business, in the late 1970s, these contraptions had become known more commonly as dark rides or ghost trains, and that’s how people refer to them today.
3. Queen bees. In the nature shows and books that I read as a kid–pretty much the last time I learned anything about bees–I absorbed the idea that queen bees (who have mated) and virgin queen bees (who have not yet mated) were each others’ mortal enemies, and that a new queen and the old queen would fight each other to the death, winner take hive. If one of them survived, she would have to leave the hive. Now I learn that there are often several virgin queens, and their greatest enemy is one another. It’s the virgin queens who fight each other to the death. A new mated queen doesn’t drive the old queen out. She doesn’t have to, as the old queen tends to weaken and die shortly after a new queen comes along. Also, queen bees and virgin bees communicate by “piping” (vibrating) in their cells at the pitch of G#. Also, to keep track of the queen, beehive keepers often dab her abdomen with a dot of paint, and this paint is frequently color-coded to the year that she was born.
4. The Berkshires. I first encountered this scenic part of Massachusetts when I drove from Chicago to Boston. (I wanted to shake up my life by moving to a coast, so I flipped a coin and drove east. It turned out great.) The Berkshires in August, when I first saw it, is a place of rolling hills, hiking trails, and arts festivals. Even with all the tourists, it feels laid back. However, in the 1770s the Berkshires was a hotbed of civil unrest. A citizen uprising prevented judges from meeting in 1774, just a few months after the Boston Tea Party. The Berkshires were also the forbidding terrain through which Continental Army Colonel Henry Knox moved 59 cannons from New York to Boston in the winter of 1775-76. The cannons had been captured from Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and the journey entailed 300 miles in the miserable conditions familiar to anyone who has suffered through a New England winter. Facing frozen lakes, mountains, and swamps, Knox still managed to deliver the artillery to Boston by the end of January.
5. My writing preferences. When it comes to pantser or planner, it’s been a scary time pantsing. I enjoy the moments when some interesting twist comes out of my back brain, something I’d never have included in an outline. When I blow yet another tire on a plot-hole, though, I regret that I hadn’t planned things out more elaborately in October. Still, I like pantsing enough that I’m going to alternate writing and planning on my next project.

So that was my week: ghost trains, queen bees, and revolution, along with a moderate amount of catching up. On the bright side, if I can stick to 7:30 at the dining table it looks as though a 50K manuscript might be possible I hope, dear readers, that things are going well with your NaNo projects/other creative work, and that you also learned some cool new stuff this week.

NaNoWriMo diaries–part trois

When, and how, do you eat your vegetables? (If you eat vegetables) If you love vegetables, substitute whatever element of any meal that you least prefer. I have the palate of a five-year-old, so vegetables are my least favorite. Do you mash everything together on your plate? Alternate bites between main and side dishes? Eat all of one item before moving on to the next dish? The last is what I do, saving my favorite for the end. I’m a vegetables-first person. (Or, if the meal involves a sandwich, crust first.)

This week in NaNoWriMo there were vegetables all over the plate. Vegetables first, in the middle, last, fork-sculpted into carrot houses surrounded by broccoli trees. I’ve been putting words daily into the novel project, but fiddling around with my work time, location, and accoutrements. Setting thirty-minute timers, or writing until I felt like I had to stop. Noshing on coffee, tea, water, wine, cookies, sandwiches. Morning, afternoon, evening, three a.m. (which I don’t recommend). Dining room, study, bedroom, living room with the TV blaring and Dave and Sonny talking about their day.

As of Sunday morning, November 15, I’m a little over 21K words in. To stay on track with 50K by month’s end, today’s target is 25K. I’m not confident that I can add nearly four thousand words over the course of the day, so I’m behind, if not impossibly so.

I write on my laptop, which means research is just a matter of popping to another tab. This week I read even more articles on famous authors’ writing routines. It turns out writers like talking about their habits. I was hoping for something more doable than Balzac’s 50 (or however many) cups of coffee, while also enjoying tales of habits like James Joyce, belly down on his bed, filling pages with blue pencil; Schiller and his writing desk stuffed with rotting apples; Scott Turow’s yellow legal pads on the commuter rail; and, of course, Victor Hugo locked, naked, into his bedroom. We’re having a warm November, but it’s not warm enough for that…

It turns out that many writers work to a somewhat more pedestrian formula: write, every day, in the same location, with the same starting and finishing time. Start writing in the morning. Take a break for some exercise, most usually a walk or swim. Maybe write some more. Finish the day with something fun or social. Go to bed early enough to do it again the next day. Even when the words don’t come, stick to the schedule. Of course there are many writers who don’t work that way at all. There are night owls, writers who have full-time jobs and obligations who write in the little cracks that surround their jobs and obligations, and writers who get stuff done without a schedule.

My paid work is generally done in the afternoons and evenings, and my long habit has been to think of mornings as fun time, when I do some reading, work out, drink coffee and watch the news, scribble in my journal, etc. And practice my instruments. But, as I want the daily novel-writing habit to extend past November, I need a plan that sticks. I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits a few weeks ago. One niblet of advice was to set up a habit in a way that works with your tendencies rather than against them. And this week’s tests showed that for me, writing is a vegetable. Not a main, not a dessert. It needs to be tackled early in the day, when my energy level and tolerance for frustration are the highest.

The experiments did find the sweet spot. (The hard thing is knowing when to stop fiddling around; I decided that 4K words down is that time.) Write in the morning, in the dining room, with a cup of tea. There are three windows for my viewing pleasure, two facing the glittering morning sun. As the day progresses, I can peek at my neighbors and see what the kids and dog are up to. The third window faces onto the oaks in our back yard, so that I sometimes catch the moment when yet another russet leaf journeys to join its brothers on the ground. I have a spare face mask in case anybody rings the doorbell and am near enough the kitchen to brew tea and be reminded of the vegetables from time to time.

Will it be enough to make up the word count? We’ll know in 15 days.

Stress test

NaNoWriMo report, a quarter of the way through the month. The good: I worked on the novel every day and am now more than 10,000 words in! A little behind a straight line to 50,000, but not so far behind that catching up will take a herculean effort. Every day I’ve brewed tea, set up the laptop in the dining room, and put words onto the screen. (A lot the words are lousy, but that’s to be expected.) My story is moving forward. The bad news: spending time writing didn’t disconnect me from the world, as I’d hoped it would. It didn’t send politics and the pandemic and human rights scuttling to the edge of my awareness. Every day still felt like a year.

I managed to keep up with practicing my instruments as well as with writing. As part of my 2020 music practice I’ve been going through the orchestra parts I have in roughly chronological order. This week I was up to 1815-17, which included several Schubert symphonies. Talk about staying productive under stress…

By 1815-17, when Franz Schubert was writing his third through fifth symphonies, Vienna had suffered major losses in the Napoleonic wars. The government reacted to the loss by cracking down on all forms of dissent. The state’s secret police and censors prohibited and punished political speech and made restrictive new laws. For example, males had to make a certain income in order to get married, which kept Schubert single. There were spies everywhere. Citizens reacted by putting their heads down. Or by joining various underground revolutionary movements. The protective, inward-looking choice was to perform a cozy home life with “Hausmusik” around the piano, letter-writing, painting, crafting, and novel-reading, and never any talk of revolution or how societal problems could be managed differently. It reminds me of the apolitical domesticity on display in today’s lifestyle and family channels–and, yes, often on this blog. Artists in Vienna had to avoid any norm-questioning content or risk being forcibly silenced. This must have been incredibly stressful.

Schubert, living in those interesting times, doesn’t seem to have had his creativity much stifled. He wrote piano music and chamber works, much of it appropriate for the Hausmusik set, as well as symphonies and other big pieces. And he wrote songs, quite a few of which put dissenting lyrics to music, which were performed as Hausmusik. He seems to have gotten away with that, maybe because the songs themselves tended to be gorgeous. By the time he died at age 31, he had composed around 1500 works.

I’m also living through interesting times. My anxiety level for the past four years has mostly been stuck at three-days-before-finals. For the past couple of months, as the election approached, it’s risen to nightmare-where-I’m-being-chased-through-the-house-by-a-knife-wielding-maniac. Watching my country inch, and sometimes sprint, away from democracy has been draining. Instead of creating things, I’m consuming things: cheese, chocolate, merlot, television.

Yesterday’s projection that Biden will be the winner of the presidency had people dancing in the streets. I danced in the grocery line and put the peanut butter cups back on the shelf instead of in my shopping basket. I wrote in the afternoon and woke up this morning feeling ready to write some more. I will never be a Schubert, but NaNoWriMo week two: here I come.

NaNoWriMo’s a Go-Go-Go

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts in two days. I decided to participate last week, on the day I cast my 2020 election vote. With my most important civic duty accomplished, I felt able to commit to try writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Ideally, then, I’ll spend election month buried in my book.

I’ve spent yesterday and today prepping, mostly by watching Authortube (YouTubers who make videos about the writing process). Over at Authortube they’ve been prepping all through October, shuffling index cards like riverboat gamblers, screen-shotting nifty programs and apps, covering kanban boards with Post-Its, and sharing their intended writing schedules and novel-tracking spreadsheets. NaNoWriMo’s website is also packed with helpful advice, pep talks, links to writing software, and online support groups.

These questions are of academic interest only, as I’ve decided…to join the pantsers! For book-length projects, writers tend to divide into plotters and pantsers. Plotters write outlines, draw maps, fill out character sheets, identify research topics, etc. Pantsers sit down at the keyboard and start writing. Plotter is natural to me. It reduces the chances of getting stuck a few chapters in and, often, the time required to complete the first draft. But it can also make the writing part of the process feel less exciting and spontaneous. As a pantser, I will probably hit some dead ends and meander, but I think I’ll have a bit more fun.

So there will be no index cards or Scrivener downloads for me. No NaNoWriMo blocks on the schedule, and especially no trackers. (Tracking rouses my internal rebel: I just hate it when I order me around. Who do I think I am–the boss of me?)

The key questions left to settle are matters of environment and equipment.

Laptop, typewriter, pen on paper? Laptop. I’ve seen a couple of authortubers with manual typewriters from the 1950s; cool aesthetic, but also finger-tangling and off-putting, perhaps, to one’s family.

Sitting down or standing up? Sitting down.

PJs or day clothes? Very probably both.

Headphones or playlist blasting? I can’t listen to music while I write. I’ll be blasting white noise videos–rain, waves, crickets, flames.

Coffee or tea? I love coffee, and it’s been important to the work process of many artists, but I don’t want to suffer French writer Balzac’s fate, especially with as much time I’m planning to spend writing. Bad at managing his money and needing to produce lots of content to get out of debt, Balzac wrote about 13 hours per day and fueled this grind with many cups of black coffee (five or six? 40 or more? nobody knows for sure, but 50 seems to be the upper limit of the guesses). When he died in 1850 at the age of 51, caffeine poisoning may have been a contributing factor. It’s harder, though not impossible, to die from drinking too much tea, so: tea.

Snacks? Only if I start writing in the kitchen, which has no places to sit.

Writing in a room with others (family and/or pets) or alone? I’ll try a mix of solitary and writing in a corner of the family room. As far as pets, the authortubers I’ve watched have had dogs, so I assume their pets are happy to stay close by. I pose the question to Capone the cat. He flicks an ear and settles himself more firmly on top of the TV remote. He’s been lying on it a lot lately–I believe it’s in protest to how I’ve been yelling at the news–but I’m going to interpret the gestures as some kind of tolerance for the idea.

NaNoWriMo FOMO

November’s almost here. Holidays, elections, snow…and National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo for short. It’s time for the annual debate: should I enter?

The challenge is to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. Anybody who gets to the 50,000 word count is a winner. You could type “All work and no play makes [your name here] a dull person” 5,000 times and win, though I doubt anyone does. It’s tempting at times, because 50,000 words is a lot, an average of 1800 words per day for 30 days. This means, essentially, that you spend the month writing rather than rewriting or revising.

The writing period extends from one second after the stroke of midnight on Halloween and ends at 11:59:59 p.m. on November 30. Writers can prepare in advance with notes, outlines, etc.–giving rise to the “Preptober” phenomenon–but the actual writing is supposed to start in November. Participants register on the NaNoWriMo website (this is free), and the prize for winning is a certificate plus a badge that displays on your account. Some years the prize has also included the option of one bound copy of your manuscript.

NaNoWriMo makes the isolated process of writing much more sociable. There are online discussion and support groups and also in-person meetups, which include social events at restaurants as well as write-ins at bookstores, libraries, cafes, etc. Unfortunately in 2020 many of the in-person meetings have been canceled (thanks a bunch, Covid-19).

I found out about NaNoWriMo about 10 years ago. Some of my snobbier writer friends quoted Truman Capote at me (“that’s typing, not writing,” Capote said about Jack Kerouac’s free-flowing, no-revisions style). Maybe so. But I had a bunch of novels in my closet that had been abandoned anywhere from 2 to 40 pages in, and I wanted very much to have finished a novel. I registered my project. Thousands of people around the globe would make the same decision. In 1999, when San Francisco author Chris Baty came up with the idea, there were 21 participants that July. ( November was soon chosen to be the annual novel-writing month because the weather is worse, so outdoor activities are less tempting.) The 2020 NaNoWriMo website lists 798,162 active novelists and 367,913 completed novels. NaNoWriMo also has a bunch of other months that feature other kinds of writing and other writing activities: editing, poetry, playwriting, etc. And–my writer friends’ disdain notwithstanding–rather than being stuck into closets, some NaNoWriMo novels have been published, everything from self-publishing to contracts with major publishing houses.

Things I hoped to get from NaNoWriMo, that first time:

1: 50,000 words of a novel, or maybe even more!

2: Some real-life writing friends, as my writing friends from grad school had scattered to the ends of the earth.

3: Creative momentum and discipline.

My results were mixed.

1: I got 40,000 words into my novel, a big enough chunk that it generated a sort of gravity. I eventually did finish the first draft.

2: I went to one of the bookstore write-ins at a big Barnes and Noble. Every chair was occupied, as well as the floor space by the walls and windows. Everyone sitting and typing. No eye contact. My shyness kicked in, hard. I walked briskly around the store, bought a couple of books, and left.

3: I wrote every day in November. Not 1800 words, but always at least a few hundred. Discipline achieved! Then on December 1 I took a day off. On December 2 I took another day off. I picked up the novel again…in February. Draft one is resting in the closet.

Most of my NaNoWriMos (I’ve done four) have provided similar results. But as November approaches I feel the itch to activate my profile. I daydream about what could happen if I try just once more, especially since I have extra time this year (live-performing music business: still basically dead). Of course I make a list. Pros: might get a novel out of it; could be the Great American Novel?; could meet some compatible online people; would have answer to the question “what are you doing these days?” Cons: could rack up a pathetic word score and fall into depression; maybe will be so shy that can’t meet people even online; am running out of closet space.

I think that by December 1, I will definitely have made up my mind.