Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, I am cooking. No, I'm not shopping.

Heretical Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

Last week I saw this post on NaNoWriMo by Rebecca Ryals Russell who blogs at YA Authors You Never Heard Of. She addresses the fact that some writers just aren't interested in NaNoWriMo, and I read it because I've always included myself among them. I write every day, I have long-term plans for what I'm going to do and don't need outside stimulus, and word counts? Not only do I not do them, there are times when I actually want the word count to go down, not up. Most of the first two weeks of November looked like this: read six-sentence paragraph. Rewrite. Now an eight-sentence paragraph...(hold music plays, 45 minutes pass)...now a four sentence paragraph. Move to next paragraph...(more hold music)... At end of day, think how I have ruined the story. Next morning, read it over and decide it's not so bad.

I saw something similar at my critique group on Saturday. Someone suggested doing writing prompts or flash-fiction contests as part of the group. Several people perked up immediately, "I'll do that! Sounds like fun!" Two other people, as well as me, didn't want to. "I've done that, and it takes time away from what I'm supposed to be working on."

I think it comes down to the basic question, why do you write? Because it's fun? Because you like to tell stories? Yes, and yes, and yet...writing is Work. It's hard. It's sitting down every day to face the dragon of failure and fearing the day you won't be able to fight him to a draw anymore, because on that day life will hardly be worth living. And honestly, for all the community that exists in the writing world, you face that dragon alone. You have to, because your dragon is not like anyone else's. (OK, official end of dragon metaphor!)

What I'd like to know is not, does NaNoWriMo help you get started or help you write more easily, but, does it help you get serious about your writing? Does it help you improve? Does what you start turn into something finished?

Stitch by stitch

Last December I decided I wanted to learn to knit. It was during the dead days at the end of the year, and I was feeling flush with Christmas money and gift cards. I bought a book on knitting, and a lot of supplies and I watched a lot of online videos demonstrating various knitting stitches. (It is impossible, by the way, to knit and move the mouse to hit the pause/start button as needed, so those videos are not very useful.)

Now, don't throw things at me, but what I'm working for here is this...knitting is a lot like writing.

1. You're going to screw up a lot before you get it right.
Most of my early scarves had this weird tendency to get wider. I'd cast on 18 stitches and a certain point find myself with 26. When this happens, what do you do? You do what you do in writing. You revise it. You go back to where you went wrong and you pick the bad part out and you start again and try to keep the count right.

2. Follow the rules, even when you don't think you need to.
The knitting book said "some people count stitches," which lead me to think that it was kind of a nerdish thing for uptight people and hey, man, I don't need that kind of headache, man...
Now I count stitches. And my scarves don't get bigger. *crosses fingers.*

3. You keep going because you fall in love.
Early on I went to a small yarn store and saw such beautiful yarns that I spent more money than I'm willing to confess, even now. The first scarf made from one of those yarns, though a little...uneven...in shape, has drawn a bunch of compliments mainly for the color. As I drove home I thought, now you've got to make sure it comes out right. And every time I looked at the yarns I was led on to create something. I wanted to try new things, just so I could live up to the yarn.

4. Know your limits.
I joined a new church and someone asked me if I could knit and next thing I knew I was knitting a prayer shawl, in slightly scratchy green acrylic Wal-Mart yarn. (My own fault -- I picked out a shade that looked nice in the sunlight.) The prayer shawl fell victim to the same enlarging phenomenon that the scarves did. But it will be done...someday.
Here's what else I can't do. I can't purl. I can't do circular knitting. I can make scarves. Lots and lots of scarves.

Everyone needs scarves.

Count Marco

Ah, research in the old newspaper archives! An alternate universe, in which Martin Luther King is still alive and Barry Goldwater might be elected president.

Actually, when I'm doing research I don't pay too much attention to really big historical events. I'm looking for the small stuff, the little things that make up ordinary life. Sleazy films at the drive-in ("Child Brides," "Slave Empress"). Fancy downtown stores like Ronzone's and Chic Hecht's vs. Penney's and Kresge's.

And Count Marco's column. I speed up the microfilm machine and try to avoid getting sucked in by Count Marco and somehow I can't.

Count Marco -- supposedly he was Italian -- ran an advice column in the San Francisco Chronicle which was widely syndicated in the 60s and early 70s. (His claim to modern day fame is involvement in the Zodiac killer case.) And basically, he makes Dear Abby seem like a hippie.

Count Marco's sole target is women. Women are lazy. They sit around all day buffing their nails and look like hell when their men come home. They give their husbands tv dinners instead of bothering to cook. They won't date a man unless he has a large pocketbook. They have no sense of responsibility and they teach their daughters to be just like them. Probably most interesting (poignant?) is a column that scolds women for continuing to date men who don't propose right away. "Remember, you can love any man," Count Marco says, "Be open-minded..." (I don't know why, but I hear a hint of wistfulness in that tone.)

At first it kind of startled me that stuff like this could run in newspapers all around the country. But then, if the Time magazine article above is to be believed, Count Marco was something of a joke even in 1959.

As far as research goes, Count Marco, like a lot of forgotten figures, is not very useful. I'd have to explain who he was if I introduced him by name and he's so obscure it just wouldn't be worth it. But as an example of the times he's invaluable.

The In-between Season

So it's dark just about dinnertime now. When I clear the table light from the back door shines in the yard. Pajamas and hot tea have come back in style. The alarm goes off in the morning and I think: must be a mistake, it's too dark. Baseball is always on. I pull the slow cooker out from the back of the pots and pans.
I love in-between seasons. Winter and summer have their virtues but something about the mixed nature of this time of year, the light and the dark dancing with each other, the storms of the equinox, make it come alive for me.

Month of Holidays

In five years of working at a Jewish-sponsored university, I've learned that two things are taken very, very seriously: kosher food laws, and holidays/Sabbaths. April and September-October bring days off -- some years, like this year, a lot of them.

I tend to spend these bonus days doing research. During Passover I shut myself up at the UNLV library, listening to oral histories (on a tape recorder!) and going through archives of the Sun and the Review Journal. Neither newspaper is indexed, so I had to read them page by page, which was extremely distracting (pause to see how different "Rex Morgan, MD" was in 1964 (not very)...pause to read prices of stereos and Danish Modern furniture...pause to consider a picture of LBJ and Khrushchev in fake Beatles wigs.) I think I got through about 2 weeks of February 1964, all told.

I started this set of holidays by going to the Museum of Atomic Testing. Atomic testing is emerging, maybe, as a motif in the book. It opens with one of my protagonists remembering watching atomic tests from the playground of her elementary school, and the other protagonist has a father who works at the Test Site. It's an interesting museum, combining serious information with some atomic kitsch. (The old "Duck and Cover" movie is played.) I noticed that the sections devoted to the later underground tests attracted much less attention from the visitors. I tried to look at everything, though I didn't find much information on workers at the site. (There's also a reading room and a public archive, which I might go back to later if I have more specific questions.)

There's a fine line with research. Too much can drag you down, quell the imagination. But finding that odd gem of a detail gives the book authenticity. When I come away from the research library, heavy-headed and a little sleepy, I'm usually aware that somewhere in my notebook is something that will lead me in a direction I never thought of.

I was watching Mr. Rogers.

In the past couple of days the where-were-you-when-it-happened stories have swept over me. I didn't want to join in. I find it painful to talk about 9/11, and it's sometimes strange to me that no one else finds it so painful they won't talk about it. Perhaps I'm still at that stage of grief when you just try to go on, day to day.

So I'll say it. I had a three-year-old at the time and as soon as I got up I put Mr. Rogers on. I never watched the news in the morning then. Now, I watch the news every morning, ever since, and I've learned to recognize that tone in the announcer's voice that means, something very, very bad has happened. Then the phone rang.

We'd left New York six months before. My husband was born and raised there and it was my adopted city, where I went to college, lived and worked. In all that, I never went to the World Trade Center. I never had to. Didn't have business there and wasn't a tourist interested in the view.

But the World Trade Center was the modern city. There's a video -- a very primitive, early video -- for the Blondie song "Heart of Glass," which basically shows the band, playing on Saturday Night Live, intercut with shots of the World Trade Center and the Manhattan skyline. The Trade Center was the city, for those who came to it in the bad years and lived through them. It wasn't the past, like the Empire State Building. It was our city, the one we had trekked to.

My one thought, out in Las Vegas, was I should have been there. I should have gone through it with my city. I wasn't glad I had escaped -- I felt guilty.

The towers have never meant to me what they seem to mean for other people. I don't think of "first responders." (A horrible coinage.) Or freedom, that being a word that is so twisted around sometimes I don't recognize it. I take nothing away from the people for whom it does mean those things. We all have our own experiences of grief and our own methods of dealing with it.

This Sunday the streets of my town will be filled with people running a triathalon in honor of September 11. Running/biking/swimming is great, especially when do it for your own health. But part of me wonders how running a triathalon does anything for the dead. (Or the "fallen" -- another new coinage.)

After 9/11 my church orchestra got together, learned, over several weeks, Faure's Requiem, and, on a certain Sunday, performed it for the congregation. I remember listening to it, hearing the words, "Lord, give them peace, give them peace." And I thought, it's not peace for them we want. It's peace for us.