Writer-In-Progress

Those of you who know me in real-life (and know my dark secrets) will enjoy this…and for those of you who don’t, you’ll probably think I’m crazy–which is fine by me!

I hate/suck at math. We need to start there, then the rest will make sense.

Saturday morning, before heading off to the tailgate, I managed to write about 2300 words, all totaled. I finished about 1k on my laptop up here and the rest on my laptop downstairs while waiting for cookies to finish baking. But in the heat of the moment–my ride came about an hour earlier than I’d planned, I failed to update my excel spreadsheet and my nano wordcount meter with my accomplishment.

Enter a wildly fun football game Saturday and a day-long delayed Thanksgiving celebration with the family, both of which conspired to wipe my mind clean of those words I’d slaved over on Saturday morning. At my usual 4:45am yesterday, I was poised and ready to knock out the last odd 2k words I needed to finish nano. As a good writer, I checked my excel sheet, but something didn’t seem right.

I knew, somewhere, I’d had a word count of 1,077 that was missing. Don’t ask me why I remembered that particular number, especially since I despise math. But it didn’t show up anywhere in my spreadsheet, and the other odd 1k was missing as well. So I went back over the numbers, realized my error and plugged in my Saturday words.

Voila! I’d finished Nano. Except I’d finished the day before and didn’t know it …lol. So, the long story short version is…I’m good with words but not with numbers–which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

How are you all doing in your pursuit of Nano? Any good stories?

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In other writing news, yesterday was spent *not* working on my nano word count. Saturday, I had a huge burst of creative mojo and banged out a little over 5k words. Don’t be jealous–they’re probably mostly garbage. Sunday, instead of creating, I edited, revised and submitted–and here’s why.

The last week has been a very emotional one for me. My hometown, an amazing place where all of my family still lives, was the focus of news cameras all over the world for what ended up being an unimaginable crime: the kidnapping (and safe return) of a teenage girl but the senseless murders of her mother, her ten year-old brother and their family friend.

Even though I’ve moved to the city, an hour away from there, the shock and pain and anger and just plain surreality had me moving in a fog. The murders took place in a house one street over from the road that leads to my grandfather’s farm. The house where the girl was found bound and gagged was just a few blocks down the same street from a house where my aunt once lived. And the bodies, after much searching by selfless volunteers, were found stuffed in a tree trunk in a park on the same road where my sister and I once ran and played hours upon hours of tag and football with childhood friends whose dad was in the National Guard unit with my dad.

I just didn’t, and still don’t comprehend this. My high school friends and I try to figure out what made this guy–a man who moved in only his last two years of high school and has his name on a diploma from our school but who was not one of us in any way, a man who walked the same halls as us, went to the same football field and had the same teachers as us–commit a crime that defies comprehension.

My way of processing life events is, obviously, through writing, and that’s just what I did. I wrote pages and pages of questions and thoughts, which eventually morphed into an essay. It’s done and sent off to both the NYT and a local (but more meaningful to my small town) paper in the hopes that someone will print it, but it doesn’t come close to capturing what I really wanted to say.

I’m not fully out of the fog, but I am starting to process more. I hope that the essay is printed somewhere for something bigger than just giving me a credit or a byline, but for the readers and the world to know the sense of family, not community, that built and sustains this town. Hope against hope, really. The piece is too long for a letter to the editor and not nearly inflammatory enough for an op-ed. Still, hope.

Tomorrow I’ll get up and work again on the nano project. I am only about 12k away from the goal, but like last year’s nano, I will emerge from this one a different writer than the one I began as, this time through no fault or action of my own. Still, the writing goes on.

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I don’t have much to add aside from this. I am worded out. I’ve successfully written twice a day for the past two days, adding a couple thousand words a day. Nice. Just wish the words added up to interesting stories. Ah, well. I’m going for the routine and the experience, right?

How are you doing on your NaNo work? I’d love to catch up. Comments welcome. Writing crap is a lonely business

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This is all I have to say for today. Woohoo for me! I slogged through the crap of the other day and have a renewed excitement for my piece. Don’t be jealous. I’ll fall off the wagon again tomorrow. It’s the nature of the NaNoWriMo beast.

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I know what you’re thinking–this month is meant for writing 50K words on one topic, so why are you blogging?

I need a break, that’s why! I’ve wrangled a little over 1000 words so far this morning, a day I had not anticipated writing from home but am still in a lot of pain from my recent dental fiasco, so I took the day off.

And I’m not bragging about the 1K words thus far. Heck, I’ve written sentences longer than that. I just know how I write, and that for every thousand words, I generally need something to eat and a moment of peace and calm.

So that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. But just because I’m here doesn’t mean I’m done writing for the day. I have mentally chalked myself up to being able to do 4K today–no real excuses unless the pain meds wipe me out. From the looks of Twitter, my NaNoWriMo friends abound today and are there for moral support and butt kicking, should I require that. Plus, I’m still working on the introduction to the memoir–haven’t even started the meat of the piece yet, and that’s where my energy will come.

All in all, I think I’ve earned a piece of chocolate, a refill of coffee and another three Advil, in that order. And then I’ll be back where I should be…writing. How are you doing with your newly-minted NaNo piece?

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I’m all about visual when it comes to my writing projects lately–and the pending NaNoWriMo is no exception. Since I’m off today, I decided to sit down and plot out my NaNo project.

Mind you, mine is drastically different than most of you. I’ll be doing another nonfiction piece (like last year), this year an essay/memoir type book on education. At this point, mostly memoir but I’m sure I’ll have a few essay pieces in there as I can’t keep my (excellent) opinions to myself LOL.

Anywho, last year I prepped for November by making lists upon lists upon lists–on chart paper–of possible essay topics. It worked well for me but that blue-lined-yellow chart paper started looking more like a curse than an inspiration near the end of the month. I’m all about color, and I’m especially all about pink and purples, so this year I did something a little more vivid.

I started on the chart with a solid blue marker line (it’s there if you look) signifying my “journey” through education. This is a valuable trick to help keeping a memoir flowing if you’re inclined to do something chronological, as I learned from the wonderful Lisa Dale Norton in her “Shimmering Images” book.

Next, I used yellow flower Post-Its to signify the huge chunks of time and place in my teaching career. Those were basically just a post-it with a university name or a job location/title. I started with high school and ended with my job today.

The last bits I added were the pink flower Post-Its. Those are all of the stories I’ve been saving over 17 years of teaching to write into a book at some point. Better NaNo or never Above the yellow flowers are Post-Its containing individual names of the students whose stories have meant the most to me and jar specific memories and stories; below the yellow flowers are the people and teaching ‘events’ that have happened to shape me into the educator of today. Some are good, some are bad, some will not like me telling stories they thought had been forgotten in my rusty mind–but they have all had an impact.

Yes, I did blur the picture because I didn’t want to show all my secrets, like the name of the place I was most unhappy teaching, the administrator from hell who should have been relegated to mowing lawns instead of working with kids and the student of mine who is now doing a life term in prison for murder. It ain’t all sunshine and roses, but it can be pink and yellow Post-Its….;-)

How are you brainstorming for NaNoWriMo? Do you have photos? I’d love to hear your plans and see your ideas. Leave me a link & I’ll stop by your blog for more motivation! In the meantime, happy NaNoing!

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Yep, it’s that time of year again. Leaves color, crisp up and flutter to the ground. Winter coats start going to the dry cleaners after a year in the closet. I buy two bags of Halloween candy so we can eat the good stuff and pass out the other…and another session of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is about to commence.

Woohoo!

For the uninitiated, NaNo is a personal effort to finish 50,000 words in the month of November. Notice I didn’t say “a novel” or even “a book” or “a work”. Yes, certainly, the name is misleading, but the entire point of the activity is to get past all your excuses to writing and, well…just write.

Last year I won–a fabulous certificate I printed off with the title of my WIP after nailing my 50K words in about 27 days. Nothing glitzy or glamorous, just the feeling of real accomplishment and the thrill of proving to myself that I could do it–and if I could write that much in a month, I had no excuses not to write more in my daily routine.

Technically, you’re supposed to write a novel–which requires fiction–but I did food memoir & essay, which I’m still editing into a (hopefully) publishable piece of nonfiction. There are subgroups of all types for any genre you might write on the forum boards, and I’ve found my new group this year: I’m gonna be a Rebel. Yes, I’m doing NaNo again, but no, I’m not writing fiction. This year is a book of essays spanning all the insanity encompassed by 16 years of teaching English. Oh, yeah. I’ve got notebooks of notes. It ain’t gonna be hard LOL.

Why don’t you join us for the challenge? Hop on over to NaNoWriMo.org, sign up (for free!), add me (BuckeyeBeth) (for free!) and take a wild writing trip with some of your closest virtual friends. You’ll be glad you did. No, really! You will!

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