Nanowrimo Day 5: New Glasses Will Definitely Help

I got new glasses today. I'm going to not write until I get them tomorrow. I am pretty sure that all of my difficulties are located in these old glasses:

I tried on some new glasses with my seven-year-old son helping me:

At the moment that picture was taken, he was helping me by quietly playing Crash Bandicoot on his Nintendo DS. I decided I am over the black plastic. Like totally done. So, bronze or silver?

When I put the silver on, Benny said, "Mother! You look like an angel! Well, you look like you just got done being an angel and you still have your glasses on!"

I got the bronze. As soon as I pick them up from the glasses store, I will recommence writing the novel. I don't think an angel who forgot to take off her glasses could possibly grapple with my ugly crank of a novel. So. Tomorrow I totally promise to bring you more self-indulgent pictures to go along with my self-indulgent skylarking on my novel. All self-portraits! All the time! The new Harpoonist is sensitive to her own angles.

Nanowrimo Day 4: Who's a Hateful Cynic? Who? Who?

I took my children to the park yesterday so they could, as my blind great grandmother used to say, "Blow the stink off," and also so I could get away from the computer for a while and think. I took my gay little notebook with me so I could write down all my gay little thoughts. Yes, it's possible to stop two children from dying on the monkeybars while having a completely unrelated idea playing out in your own head. I have learned this by necessity. Main character, take a hint.

There was a couple there with a two-year-old girl, and the man was clearly not her father. Among other clues, she and her mother were calling him "Jim." Jim was carrying on like nobody's business -- climbing trees, playing hide-and-seek, in general being that awesome guy that really cares about the child that's not his, really tries to be a good simulation of an actual father, cavorts and gambols and capers to please that cute little girl. The mother was a tall drink of water in a tight hippie cardigan and skinny jeans. Buckle boots. You know what I mean. Not entirely sleazy but standing right across the street from it.

So, I am there thinking about my miserable train wreck nightmare horrorshow of a novel, and these people are tittering and clapping and distracting me, and the only thought in my head is that that disingenuous asstard is making so nice with that kid just because he wants to get into the pants of that grinning mother. And then I think, "WHAT KIND OF MONSTER AM I?" Maybe he's just trying hard, maybe he really likes the kid, maybe he is perfectly excellent person with not a plotting thought in his virtuous mind.

I realized I am still a hateful cynic. In spite of all the ways I have tried to revise my view of the world to reflect the fact that I've brought two children here to live in it and it better not be as bad as I think it is, I still think it is bad. As much as I try to locate all of my negative thoughts about people in Dan's brain, thereby making him the misanthrope and me the good person, it is still me assuming the worst and judging, judging, judging.

In the spirit of this new/old cynicism, I will now predict that I will not finish Nanowrimo this year. Last year I finished, the year before I finished, but this year I will not finish. I am already chokingly behind. What's to be done? I'm at 5000 words. I may as well give up now and just play Civilization IV like I want to. Because you know that guy was just trying to land himself a date. You know he was.

Nanowrimo Day 3: AHA!

Today I had my first big AHA moment. AHA moments are so juicy, so ecstatic, so indescribably satisfying -- they may be the only reason writing is at all pleasurable for some of us. Today a neighbor character, who was to be just a generic manly-man, appearing in only one scene to act bemused and shocked and then go away forever, turned out to be a local newscaster with a very interesting backstory, including the fact that he sleeps upside down.

Last year, Dan and I put a bid in on a house that we thought we'd like to renovate, owned by a local newscaster. What Susannah and I saw when we walked through the house was so shocking, so paralytically fictional, that we just knew that it had to be used in a novel. And now it will be. Because when Carl the neighbor turned up at the scene of the accident, it was actually Carl the anchorman. That was a big deal, today, especially when the words are coming so slowly, and I keep having to rip out paragraph after paragraph because it just doesn't work.

Good for me.

Nanowrimo Day 2: Violating Nanowrimo Rule #1

I edited. I threw out about 1500 words from last night, boiled my first three paragraphs down to one, and redid what I had of chapter 1. I know it's wrong, and I hate myself for it (not really) but there was no way I could continue my adorable novel with that steaming pile of excrement sitting at the beginning of it. If I end up on November 30 with 48,500 words, I'll feel a pang or two. Or maybe I'll just dump those 1500 words back in, I wrote them in November after all, and celebrate with everyone else.

I don't know what it is about writing female main characters. Last year's novel had a female MC that I just loved so much I could have eaten her in a flauta. She failed to translate that on the page. Nobody liked her but me. I thought she was resolute, fragile, militant, tense, knock-kneed, and great. Apparently I wrote something that made her seem like a grey robot. There may be some kind of personal lack, here, with my inability to inhabit female characters. Let's see, would that be self-loathing? Stifling self-awareness? Or... not enough self-awareness to determine what my problem could be.

Dan is putting the children to bed so I can word-war my way back up to par. It's my sincere hope that I can avoid any more dumps of that nature, but it's a possibility. It may wreck my Nano, but because of the subject matter and what I've chosen to get myself into, I can't just power through this one. Great choices, me!

The Mother Story

There's a book I've been trying to write for a long time. It's a lunatic book to write because it has a lot of elements that are close to my insanity. I've been trying to write this book, in various forms, since I got pregnant with my son, let's see, that was in 1999. What a wild, untrammeled success this book has been so far! Inspiring.

The first time I finished Nanowrimo, I chose a plot/idea/genre I thought I could handle easily in a month, that I could plan meticulously and then mechanically execute. I succeeded at the 50K, so that was maybe me figuring out that I could do it. Last year for Nanowrimo, I wrote a hard, huge story I'd been tossing around for a long time, and in writing it, I extirpated it, and now it's gone. I mean, it's still here, but it's no longer in my skull. Then, for Script Frenzy, I did that very same thing. And now that thing is out of my skull. So, Nanowrimo and Script Frenzy have proven to be valuable in getting rid of those stories that keep clunking around in my brain, wanting to be written.

Why not apply this magical benefit to the mother of all clunkers, which has been known through the years as "the cul de sac story" and "the sister story" and "baldy goes to burma" and "the mother story." If I can get this one out of my system, I might just achieve enlightenment. I might just solve all the world's problems, or at least my own problems, which as so few and so unobtrusive that I have to fictionalize them to make them viable enough to affect me.

So, that's what I started writing at midnight last night. For better or for worse, I have cannonballed into the deep end of the pool, where the ghouls keep drowning, and now I have to fight my way up. I guess I'm only 500 words in, so I can't say yet that my head has gone underwater. Maybe later today though! Wee!

What would I be wearing, in this extended metaphor? I think I would be wearing a little girl one-piece, with a frill in rows along the butt.