NaNoWriMo, Revisited and Wrapped

Another November has slid by like warm butter in a pan and here I am, no rough draft and no 50,000 words.  (At least, no 50,000 words in the novel.  I'm willing to bet the cash in my pockets that I cleared 50,000 words between my daily free-writing and my novel.)  Still, I'm grateful for the experience.  NaNoWriMo, ironically, has taught me a counter-lesson to what it's supposed to:  find YOUR goal and stick to it.  One writing goal doesn't work for everyone.

I started out at 2,000 words a day, and learned to resent the hell out of my novel pretty quickly.  The best thing to do with it seemed to be spending an hour of longhand with it a day (that's not counting typing yesterday's pages or any free-writing that I would do when I was stuck).  It was like getting to spend an hour a day with a spouse or child; you really should spend more, but the real world deems it necessary to financially support your spouse and child, so the job-hunting had to take precedence.

Like the way most people feel when they get to spend time with family, my hour a day zipped by like it was five minutes.  And, like variances from one family member to another, my family didn't understand when I wanted to work on the book instead of rotting in front of the television (shouldn't you get to keep one light on and write if your family doesn't want to talk to you and wants to watch "American Chopper" instead?  And when did the Discovery Channel turn into all drama all the time instead of, well, discovery?  But I digress...), so there were three hour blocks most nights sitting on my hands, staring out at the Carlsbad Lagoon, and trying to memorize dialogue between two infielders, as though I were writing from prison.  I knew this would happen, and I know that writers in my family are rare.  At one point I whipped out a book light and read Hem, looking for clues.  (Just to clarify, my family watches tv in the dark.  I'd have to go to another room to turn on a light.  I've had boyfriends who were like this, too--more interested in the television than in me, and then angry if I want to read.)

Would I have succeeded at NaNoWriMo if I hadn't visited my family?  Nope.  NaNoWriMo was a nice thought, but I probably would have been distracted by something else, if not cooking and watching tv as group activity.  And I don't get to see my family every day, every week, or even every month.  The important thing was that I learned passion for my fiction again, passion for my ideas.

And now, if you don't mind, dear reader, I have an hour coming to me today.

Onward.  :)

P.S. - To be fair, I came home last night and watched "Restaurant Impossible" on the Food Network.  Another network trying to drum up ratings with drama.  (Sigh.)  A ten-day habit that I am now trying to break.

Musings: Ernest

On Thursday my sister-in-love and I visited the Carlsbad Library briefly about a half hour before closing time.  She had forgotten to return some items when she volunteered that day, and I was in need of having to get out of the house without spending a fortune.

She walked to the books and magazines for sale, I walked to the new arrivals.  Several titles caught my eye, all thick and small-fonted; I needed something I could finish enjoying before Tuesday.  At the end of the section is the non-fiction, where I found Volume One of the Cambridge collection of the letters of Ernest Hemingway, which contained correspondence dated from 1907 (when he was eight years old) to 1922 (well, you can do math).  Normally I'm leery of these kinds of texts; I'm hardly a scholar.  But the book drew me.  I checked it out and took it home.

The next day, in breaks between pages and job postings, I began a marathon journey of deep skim of the book.  Reading academic texts like this are roughly on par with carving a turkey or visiting an art exhibit for me--there will be meat left on the bone, which I will either discard or place in a stew pot for a second pass, or there will be paintings and sculptures that I will miss entirely because their color or placement in the crowd was disadvantageous.  This is the way I enjoy art, food, and literature.  The book opens with what feels like sixteen different introductions and forwards and introductions to this volume and forwards of just this volume, blah, blah, and even more blah, with an introduction to why some typos were left in and others weren't, symbols for what kind of correspondence it is...OH, you say, ENOUGH ALREADY.  Hence, the deep skim.  Parts of the opening numbers were entertaining--Hem had the same problem that I do where he spells words with phonetics borrowed from different languages or different versions of the same language.  He also liberated his mind all the time, coming up with new spellings of words and winking at the reader, playing with the sounds of words, playing with defects of his typewriters.  These days we curse the Apple "auto-correct"; Hemingway had sticking keys, worn ribbons, and one typewriter that locked all of his letters into capitals.  "THIS MILL IS DIRTY AND ONLY FUNCTIONS IN THE UPPER REGISTER," he explained, "SO IF I NEED THE EMPHASIS USUALLY GIVEN BY CAPITAL LETTERS I WILL INSERT SOME PROFANE PHRASE OR VULGAR EJACULATION LIKE SAY HORSESHIT FOR EXAMPLE."

My auto-correct, by the way, tried to clean up his expletive.

All this was gleaned from the vast collection of smarts at the beginning of the book.  More treats were to follow.

*****

The downside to visiting family for vast amounts of time is that you don't get to exercise your art much--the upside is that the same family members don't give a flying fig of Hemingway's political correctness or his backstory.  You don't get to work on your own novel, but you do get to read things without thinking about whether you "should" or not.  I am probably the last woman who should be saying this, but screw Hemingway's masochism for, say, the time it takes to read 650 pages sometime and read him as a person. Don't get me wrong--every time I read "A Moveable Feast" I sincerely wish he didn't make Hadley look like his attending nine-year-old niece, but, as my brother so succinctly puts it, "People in hell want ice water."  You can't have it all.  I don't try to analyze Hem's issues with women.  At least, not this time around.

I have found that it is so much easier to read Hem than Naipaul, and they have been accused of the same things as writers.  Problem is (and it's highly likely I'll get shot by proponents of the ERA for saying this), Hem is a good writer and Naipaul sucks AND is a masochist, so he's 0 for 2 on the reason for me to read him.  Hem has to be read with my open heart and my naive mind.  I'm the date I want to take along for this ride, because I know that I won't say to myself that I should know better.  Other people have soap operas, following the Kardashians on Twitter, and watching movies with gratuitous vomiting and bodily function jokes.  I have Ernest.

The next six intellectuals who read this piece will shake their heads, giving up on my soul for the 986th time since meeting me.  You enjoy your high road, while I take the horse path.

*****

Things I Relate to Hem About:

• He was a fan of baseball as a rule, particularly of the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.  Guess who the New York Giants turned into;
• He knows Michigan geography.  I vacationed in Michigan as a kid, so when he says "bigger than Traverse Bay," I grin conspiratorially;
• He loves playing with language.  I walk around whispering "que milagro" when I'm alone because I like how it rolls;
• He loved cats, particularly weird physical specimens;
• He exaggerated.

Things I Can Understand About Hem But Am Trying to Overcome Myself:

• His misunderstanding of and getting hurt by the opposite sex;
• His "I am indignant to violence, not afraid of it" philosophy;
• His over-simplification of the world;
• His anger;
• His exit.

*****

These letters...I skipped most of the childhood ones.  I hungrily consumed the Red Cross ones, gave a passing glance to his post-war years, and am now soaking in his Paris years, like a warm bath brimming with bubbles.  His letters courting Hadley, by the way, were sweet and broken; the guy could be vulnerable and all humility, but too much of that would have made him, oh, I don't know, Fitzgerald?  Here's the secret that, as cummings would say, only the "mind could hide":  I LOVE HEMINGWAY'S EGO.  There, I said it.  I hate the resident expert in blogs but I love Hem, and these letters are teaching me why.  Someday, I'll be able to articulate why.

*****

I rarely write letters anymore, for who has time to read them?  My letters take the form of blog posts, which are too long to be read by anyone but me either, or journal pages, which I read even less than my blogs.  Some famous author (Anderson?  Fitzgerald?  Faulkner?  Who remembers...) remarked to Hem once that (I'm paraphrasing, hang on to your knickers) we write letters for posterity.  Hem thought this reason was ridiculous, as though we would keep the shell casing after firing a gun.  For Hem, the casing and the posterity would take care of itself, but the letter is designed for the here, the now.  Hem lived by the hour and LOVED LIFE SO THOROUGHLY you can nearly wring it out of his letters like pond water.  I am learning that he loved the Oak Park Library enough to have read, but how much did he read, how much influence did he soak up from the world around him, and how much was "F you and I will write my way"?  I'm reading that section now.  WWI shaped him.  His first heartbreak shaped him.  His time in Paris shaped him.  He let all of these things shape him but he didn't let the world make him a trendy writer--it gave him reason to be end up as THE Writer.  I don't know how to stop that censorship in myself--I have to read everyone recommended to me, accept, copy...and I want Hem's independence instead.  

I'm learning that.  I have an imperfect but strong teacher.  He may have a bum typewriter, but he's telling me about Paris...and it's late and I need to get back to him.  Good night, San Francisco Giants.  Buona sera, self-consciousness.

Dear Ernest,

Onward.

(Photo courtesy of the publication, which obtained it from Ermini Studios, Milan, Italy.)

That Song by Barbra Streisand, or, The M.R.S. Degree

When I went to college, there were two practical expectations from the world of what I would gain from it:  a practical degree that would put me into a job right after graduation, or, an MRS degree.

An MRS degree, in case you can't figure it out by lowering the case on the last two letters, is the equivalent of a husband.  "I met my husband in college."  Congratulations.  I didn't even belong to clubs, events, or ANYTHING extra-cirricular in college; I went to school in the morning, full-time, and taught call center agents in the afternoon and evening.  I fed my soul in the morning and burnished it into pure gold in my love of mentorship in the latter parts of the day.

My first lover in California was right when he said, "It was just bad timing for a relationship."  I wouldn't have called it bad timing.  I would have called it "do what you love and the rest will follow."

*****

Natalie Goldberg, in her memoir "Long Quiet Highway," talks about the daughter of one of her writing students in one particular passage:

It was April, but unusually cold.  My student's daughter was a [horse] trainer.  She was twenty-nine years old.  She'd fallen the year before.  She was hurt badly, recovered, and was back on the horses.
"Do you worry about her?" I asked...
"There's nothing I can do.  Once you're in this life, it's the only life.  She just lives horses," my student told me and shrugged.
"Does she go out, have relationships?" I asked.  I was trying to understand this life.
She smiled.  "Nope.  She doesn't have time, doesn't care.  This is her life."

This is my life.

*****

I bring this up because of two things that occurred at Litquake last weekend.  The first thing that happened was getting the opportunity to see writers married/partnered with other writers.  The second thing that happened was that two different men hit on me.
Clarification:  they hit on me between the short story and novel panels, within minutes of each other.  I'll come back to them.
I was struck by the husband/wife, wife/husband partnerships in the panel members because the partners had such widely varying approaches to writing, and still were respected by their partners.  I have never had the pleasure to be in a romantic relationship where my method of approach was just as valued as the other and completely different approach.  But, then, I've never been in a romantic relationship with a writer.  Hell, I've never been in a romantic relationship with a reader.  So you can imagine how exotic (and desirable) these partnerships looked to me.
As to the men who hit on me...somewhere, in another lifetime when I was a college student, I could imagine hearing older friends and aunts hoping that I would give both of these men some sort of access to my soul, since I so would love to find another writer to love.  But that kind of behavior looks hungry.  Mind you, I didn't cut either man off--I asked about them and their writing just as much as they did of me--but I didn't suggest that we form an alliance for dinner or the Litcrawl event later.  For a brief moment talking with first one, then later, the other (whom I ended up sitting next to--he looked vaguely like Nathan Fillion, so you would have thought I would have tossed writing out the window) I had a sense that I might get asked for my plans for the evening, but I didn't prepare an answer.  See, I live the horses.  If either of these gentlemen really wanted a writing partner, or if that was the paramount of my purpose, we would have made it so.
But my purpose was the horses, the words.  I live the words.  If someone comes along, YAY, but goodness, I'm good without the MRS degree now.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's title of Life For Rent.  "May I be worthy.  Amen."