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Does it get any better than that??
I apologize for leaving so many of you in suspense–I “won” NaNoWriMo on November 29, writing 54,810 words of a novel, with an ending! Still another 40,000 plus or minus words to add for it to be a complete novel. That’s net words, not total words. For every word I add to the novel, I anticipate deleting or replacing at least two words. This is all supposition on my part, as I have never completed a full-length novel in my life. Ever.
After I ran out of the outline I developed in October and I had to transition from plotting to pantsing my NaNoWriMo novel (creatively titled “Gabby” after the protagonist), I anticipated that the writing would become tortuous. It didn’t.
While writing from an outline (plotting) was faster than writing without one (pantsing), it just wasn’t as much fun. For me. Pantsing allowed me to develop plot turns and character personalities, as well as add new characters, as “Gabby” took on a life of her own. I found myself writing what the novel asked for, what the plot needed, what the characters were calling for, and not what I had predetermined through an outline.
I know, I know, I have just created an outline of my novel by writing a first draft. I get it. If I had only spent that time writing an outline instead of a first draft of a novel, I would now be ready to write a not-so-rough draft of the novel. One that is closer to being ready to publish than “Gabby” currently is. But I know it wouldn’t be the same novel. (And would I even be able to stick to an outline for an entire novel?)
With “Gabby,” I experienced a major breakthrough. I allowed my husband to read it. No one, except for my dear writing group members, has ever read anything that I’ve written. He read it, said he loved it, and claimed he was not biased in the least. The biggest compliment from him? He said I had him on the edge of his seat, anxiously turning pages to find out who did it. Does it get any better than that??
You Belong in the Upper Valley If…
…your first thought when you need to buy something is, ‘I’ll just run down to Dan & Whit’s.’
Dan & Whit’s General Store
If you live in the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River, you don’t think twice about Dan & Whit’s Country Store of Norwich, Vermont. You just go in and get stuff as thoughtlessly as you open your fridge for a Coke. Or you explain where somebody lives as ‘about ten minutes from Dan & Whit’s.’ Maybe that’s why we locals sometimes forget how quintessentially Vermont D&W’s is.
The principle
In fact, you can’t get absolutely everything there, as the front window is careful to point out. But you can get all the important things:
The application
Once you’re in, you encounter what looks like a small grocery store. You can get Spaghetti Os and Tide, sure. But you’ll also notice a high percentage of Vermont-made food items. Not all of them are kale:
Adds 3/4″ of pure Vermont to your hips
The Red Door Bakery of Marshfield Vermont does not make mimsy, everything-free baked goods. These are cookies that intend to be cookies. And succeed.
Across the aisle, you’ll find a product so packed with Vermonticity, you’ll be glad you moved here. The Cabot Creamery Cooperative is owned by the farmers whose milk it processes — a very Bernie Sanders set-up.
Cabot co-op cheese for your apple pie
Cabot does make more than one product. It’s just that cheddar cheese drives all thought of yogurt from a Vermonter’s mind. Remember, come-heres, that cheddar is not an ingredient for dainty pastry puffs. It is meant to go with apple pie, eaten with a knife.
Now the grocery aisles are fading out. As you wander, the goods morph toward pans. And salt shakers. Thread. Glue. Cartoon stickers for the kids. Cork screws. Exactly what you imagine was spread from a Yankee peddler’s pack around 1850 (ex the stickers), enticingly open on the back porch.
The gizmo department fades away in turn. Clothing appears. Yes, you can get a Dan & Whit’s sweatshirt, if you insist. You can also get a big, touristy mug that proclaims all the traits that identify Vermonters.
Inevitable tourist kitsch.
(Many of these statements are true. Especially the one about taking your wife hunting for your wedding anniversary.) On the other hand, real Vermonters come in looking for these:
Only real Yankees can wear these out.
This is where Dan & Whit’s becomes eerie. As you circle back around the little office, a door appears on your right. Another on your left. You pick one. You wander through a corridor that seems to have left the building. You turn right, left, right again. Stairwells gape in unexpected places. Physicists at nearby Dartmouth College have demonstrated that Dan & Whit’s back premises exist in hyperspace, and the store’s inside is larger than its outside.
After your first right turn comes proof that Dan & Whit’s does indeed carry all the things you actually need:
The first of the back rooms. These fall in the same category as beer: you need it, Dan & Whit’s has it.
Just remember that real Vermonters install these things themselves.
Press on, past topsoil, bird seed, dog food and above all Halite for winter sidewalks, 50 pound bags of it stacked almost to the ceiling. You will need this. Buy several.
Another doorway. The floor has been roughly — very roughly — horizontal all the way, but you know you are now in an underground environment, the bowels of Mother Earth. Here you find just what She believes you need.
In the suburbs you had grass in the back yard. Here, you have vegetables.
Please do not disgrace yourself by asking for “green bean” seeds. There are seven varieties available. Also, please read the instructions on your new pressure cooker carefully before canning. Newbies may experience poisoning or explosions. It ain’t easy becoming a Vermonter.
What you do with all those vegetables
You’ll find your way out eventually. (If you turn right one door too early, you will find yourself, embarrassingly, standing behind the meat counter.) Plunk your pressure cooker down on the counter, pay for it, and remember to take your new socks out before you use it.
Welcome to Vermont. Welcome home.
Surviving New England Crime Bake, NaNoWriMo, and Babysitting
Already the middle of November and this is my first blog post of the month. That means you’ve had two full weeks of not listening to me extol the pleasures of NaNoWriMo participation soon followed by my wails of despair as my word count lags behind my goal of 1,667 words a day.
This year was going to be different, of that I was confident. First of all, I started with a detailed outline of approximately the first ten thousand words of the minimum fifty thousand words required. Imagine the shock of this pantser turned plotter when I discovered that writing from the outline was easy. When the outline ran out, I transformed back into a pantser. And the writing transformed into it’s normal state: hard work.
I didn’t let that minor obstacle slow me down. Ignoring most everything else going on in my life, I focused on my novel, racking up well over the daily minimum word count. The New England Crime Bake, an annual mystery conference for writers and readers, was coming up, November 11th through the 13th, and my goal was to spend those three days in Dedham, Massachusetts, without even thinking about my NaNo novel. Except for those moments of pure inspiration when I had to jot down a note for my novel, I almost achieved that goal.
I don’t recall anyone mentioning NaNoWriMo at Crime Bake…There was plenty else to talk about, many wonderful people–published authors and wannabes like myself–to meet, and much to learn. Hallie Ephron’s master class, “The Character Web,” provided a unique way of looking at character development. Julie Hennrikus, Bruce Coffin, and B A Shapiro, among others, enlightened and entertained. My attention never wavered from the Guest of Honor, William Kent Krueger, during his talk, “High Roads and Low: A Writer’s Journey.” He looks like the twin of one of our writing group members–and even Kent agreed!
Eleanor, William Kent Krueger, and Karen
As soon as I returned from a weekend away with adults I was immersed into babysitting for our two New Hampshire grandchildren for a week. Luckily they are in school all day, as I needed a full day to recuperate from Crime Bake as well as a full week to get caught up on NaNoWriMo. Enough said.
This afternoon, typing away on my laptop, I happened on the “Ultimate Survival Alaska” show on the National Geographic Channel. I’ve never seen this show before, and technically I wasn’t watching it, I really was working on NaNoWriMo. I quickly identified with some of the competitors struggling to win their race. One of the women fell into the whitewater she appeared unequipped to handle. She floated down to her raft that another team member had stopped for her and climbed into it. They took a break on shore where she emptied out her boots of water and removed her wet socks. I realized that if they could put themselves into physical danger to win a race surely I could write a book sitting on my couch in the comfort of my home with the furnace running and a snuggly fleece blanket wrapped around my legs, a hot cup of tea for sustenance.
I can do this.
The Morning After
“I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them, 1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy: 2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against: And, 3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.”
— John Wesley, October 6, 1774
I found this quotation the day before the election, too late to learn from it for the period of the campaign. It was on the Facebook page of Professor Charles Manekin of Princeton, a philosophy professor, a dual Israeli/American citizen and an activist for Palestinian rights. All I can do now is to try to apply it during the Trump administration.
Some help with this task came from an African-American writer (didn’t catch her name) who was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition today. Her first comment was that she “had not listened enough” to Trump’s supporters, had not understood the depth of their fear and their anger.
Why wasn’t I listening more carefully? Our town foodbank is always short of food. I have neighbors who can’t afford proper medical care. Their parents, not wealthy, were nonetheless in a much more secure position. Though they work as hard as their parents did, they can’t give that security to their own children. They know, as we all do, of the dizzying heights of wealth accrued by a few in the course of globalization and of the political corruption that weaves through that process and battens on it.
Not that I know what to do about it all. Over the last decade, as I followed the trade wars, the drug wars, the war wars, it has seemed to me that every apparently reasonable policy step, every best try or least-worst idea, has backfired to create more misery. The far left wants us to become Sweden. The far right wants us to vanish the government, except for the ones with guns, and let it all hang out. The middle muddles, producing slight variations on what already hasn’t worked.
The best I can come up with on policy questions is to think my way through, give my considered opinion and reasons to my neighbors and, if I have the opportunity, to someone who might be able to put them into practice, and then apply myself to healing the wounds that will be inflicted on human beings, as they always have been.
In the course of that effort, I hope I will be able to apply John Wesley’s advice, to speak no evil and let not my spirit be sharpened.
SLEEP. . .
SLEEP THAT KNITS UP THE RAVELED SLEAVE OF CARE
No, that’s not a misspelling, that’s Shakespeare in one of his many insightful perceptions into the human dilemma. I’ll give you a bit more. It’s from Macbeth: Act 2, Scene 2:
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
I was inspired to write about one of my sore labors, sleeplessness, after reading the Maine Crime Writers blog yesterday. Kathy Lee Emerson was reporting and I read, under the heading ‘Sleep, Glorious Sleep,’ about her trials and tribulations with her insomnia. She wrote humorously of her trips to a medical center to be hooked up to a thousand wires and monitored for sleep apnea (a pet theory among doctors, but really, there’s so much more that can cause insomnia). But at the end of her long night’s journey into thrashing around on a very narrow bed and at the end of her rope and of all those wires and things, poor Kathy still didn’t know if she had sleep apnea.
I don’t have apnea, asleep or awake, but I am a chronic insomniac, or, as a friend calls it, sonic inchromniac. That’s sort of like that old nut; “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”. Some days I wish I had both, but wine keeps me awake. So does chocolate, my favorite food group.
Oh, you say, think of all the stuff you can get done while you’re awake. Not so. Chronic insomnia is like having perpetual jet lag. Try doing something, anything, after flying for 24, 48, or 72 hours straight. Impossible. I’d write if I could, but even thinking about what I’m in the middle of while I toss and turn actually keeps me awake. My writing is that exciting.
On the labels of over-the-counter sleep aids you will find this disclaimer: if sleeplessness continues for longer than ten days stop taking this product, there may be a serious underlying cause. Please see your doctor. I’ve had this for twenty-five years! How serious could it be? Hasn’t killed me yet.
Kathy, I hope to meet you at the Crime Bake next weekend. We can compare notes, because if there’s one thing we both know it’s that time waits for no man. We have to keep cranking out words even if our heads are muddled and our vision blurred. We have to be inventive and funny and clever. And we have to be better than the day before. We can’t wait for sleep to catch up, or to catch up on sleep. We have to carpe those diems as they come.
Good luck in figuring out what causes your insomnia. And let me know!
ZEROING IN ON CRIME BAKE, 2016
ZEROING IN ON CRIME BAKE, NOVEMBER 11-13, 2016
This will be my first Crime Bake and I’m a little nervous about pitching.
The editors and agents at Crime Bake who have signed up to be pitched to, must have done this before; many times, even. How can they sort through this jumble of prospective first time authors, each of whom thinks that their baby is the prettiest one in the room? How can they keep separate the different sub-genres of crime that they will have to hear? They will be blasted with a new story every three minute for one hundred minutes, non-stop, maybe only pausing for a sip of water or coffee to keep their stamina up. A power bar? Will the person I get to pitch my baby to need to take a comfort break during my three minutes and completely throw me off stride? Do I, will I, have a stride?
There will also be a roundtable session. Each table will be ably manned, woman-ned or child-ed (and believe me, at my age there’s an awful lot of professionals out there who look like children), by either an author or agent who will listen to log lines and first pages. Will they be able to help me with my pitch later on in the Bake? When I presented my experimental log lines to my own personal group last week I came away knowing I was lacking in pizzazz. When I presented my first page I was found lacking in everything. Yes, I can correct my first page, but what about the remaining pages? There are lots of pages beyond the first, and if each one has to be gone over with the thoroughness that my group raked my first page over the coals with, what’s to become of me???
This writing thing is a harsh and cruel business. How come there to be so many books in print if authors have to crawl out from under a bus every time they present their work?
Oy vey ist mir, as they say in the old country.
However, I will be going to Crime Bake 2016 with two good buddies. They will support me through thick and thin.
Right, ladies? Because I promise to be there, whenever, for you.
View from the courtyard
Nothing but blue skies and sunshine
It’s 90 degrees and 100% sunshine where I am in Arizona–and yet I’m sequestered inside, lounging on my bed as I try to conjure up a topic to blog about that simultaneously edifies and entertains our loyal readers.
In the Valley of the Sun there are no changing leaves to wax on about–no doubt you have had your fill of the foliage, whether as a leaf-peeper yourself or via all of the pictures posted on Facebook. There is no question that this was a stellar year for colorful foliage in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Green-thumbed residents in Arizona are planting their gardens, though the sun continues to blister the tender arugula and basil plants. Back home it is time to weed-whack the perennials or continue to cover them at night with sheets as we try to eek out a few more weeks of blossoms.
We have seen numerous vees of ducks and geese, presumably ones that have followed us here from brrrr chilly New Hampshire. Unfortunately, my husband (if I can drag him onto the plane) and I, unlike those real snowbirds, must return this week to furnaces and wood stoves, sweaters and gloves, delaying our true winter migration until after Christmas. In Arizona it is still shorts and sandals, air conditioning and ceiling fan weather.
Our grandchildren are out scorpion hunting–and killing–at night with black lights. The good news is after six days here we no longer check our bed at night for scorpions and we aren’t afraid to walk around indoors without our shoes on. Outdoors–that’s another story.
Our mode of transportation is an open air Jeep Wrangler. The other day I was caught without my sunscreen as the sun beat in through the open roof. (Luckily, I never leave home without my zippered, hooded sweatshirt in tow, just in case we venture into a store or restaurant with the a/c thermostat set at sixty or lower. I plan to launch a campaign to “encourage” businesses to raise their a/c thermostats. Sorry, I digress….) With what I considered a clever defensive move, I whipped on my sweatshirt backward with the hood covering my face. Instant protection. And immediate embarrassment to my husband as we stopped at a ubiquitous stoplight and the women in the car to our left and the man to our right gawked and laughed. At me. (This appears to be a case where ” you really had to be there” to appreciate the humor of the situation.)
With any luck I’ve entertained you. Or made you envious. The edification will have to wait. I’m still on vacation.
Columbus Day: It’s All in the Point of View
Columbus in his glory
Another Columbus Day, another round of arguments at the intellectual level of 1066 and All That. Was Christopher Columbus a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
It all depends on your POV. The meaning of the Columbus story, like any story, can be whatever you like. It’s more interesting if you let it tell itself to you from all possible points of view, and then thread your way through them. The greater the number of threads, the subtler the story.
A single POV might yield a genre pot-boiler. Conquering hero braves disaster, nearly dies, wins new continent, bestows Civilization on benighted heathen.
Conquistadors in action
Alternatively, noble savages (variant: sophisticated though low-tech culture) welcome strangers; strangers turn out to be pox-ridden thugs; lovely hemisphere and its people ravaged; reparations now due.
Suppose we mix in a little more back story. Christopher knows the world is round. Educated Europeans did know that. Facing east, you go overland to India. Facing west, you cross the sea to India. Then it turns out that there is a whole New World in the way.
“New World” wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t a new planet, but it was so huge, so different, so strange and hence so dangerous that it might as well have been. Monsters and marvels that had floated in medieval minds for centuries instantly crystallized into stories about the New World.
Christopher’s new American neighbors
There be blemmyes, headless men with their faces in their chests! There be monopods, single-legged men who lie on the ground in the shade of their enormous, single feet!
A writer could do better than sci-fi with that. Imagine exploring a place full of actual dangers – venomous snakes and fanged beasts whose habits you don’t know, a population rapidly learning that they might be better off without you – while behind every bush you know that an unhuman human might lurk. Imagine a stream of consciousness that holds both kinds of knowledge with absolutely equal certainty.
Or take the sci-fi angle from the other side. The Spanish chroniclers thought the welcome they received meant that the native population thought the conquistadors were gods. Maybe, maybe not. But what if they, or some of them, did think Quetzalcoatl had returned?
Quetzalcoatl, Codex Telleriano
Seriously. If you are or have been religious, what would you do if you met your god, embodied, right here and now? How would you imagine the likely future? How would you imagine it if your god were Quetzalcoatl?
Two points of view. You could have a collision of disillusionments. You could have a folie á deux. You could have one disillusionment confronting a persistent monomania. (No, please, do not make one side a languorous beauty and the other Bruce Willis. I don’t care how big the royalties would be.)
And why confine yourself to the humans? What stirred in the mind of the Spanish horse who first saw the Argentine pampas? Europeans introduced the domestic cat to the New World. What delicious new prey for the jaguar! What an Armageddon for the voles!
It must have been like two galaxies colliding. Slowly, over the centuries, they interpenetrate. Columbus Day focuses on the explosions. A better story might explore all the gravitational pulls. Then – if you tell it all carefully enough and honestly enough – like any story, its meaning can be whatever you have learned.
A BED OF STONES
A BED OF STONES
I regarded the weather from two different angles: from the aspect of being, as they say, under-the-weather, and from the window of our car as we drove around the north country yesterday enjoying the clear cloudless day, warm temperature and glorious foliage.
At a picnic area by one of the Connecticut Lakes, which are almost as far north as you can get in New Hampshire, I saw near naked people sun bathing in their lawn chairs, so unseasonably warm was the weather. I, trying to recuperate from some strange ailment, went down to the shingle beach and lay there fully clothed in the sun, listening to the lap, slap, lapping of the water on the shore only inches from my feet. It was very relaxing, to say the least, and I didn’t have to worry about the tide coming in. My husband opted to nap in the car; he was doing the driving, and it is quite a distance to the Connecticut Lakes from our comparatively urban home in Haverhill, NH. He suggested nap time.
I did look up shingle beaches in the encyclopedia to see if I would be correct in using that term for those delightful, flattened shale stones that covered the shore to a possible depth of glacial scouring, and I think I am. The term usually refers to pebbly beaches, such as are found on the Riviera. Those shingle beaches are bumpy and impossible to walk on with bare feet, much less to lie on comfortably. The stones I lay upon lay so flat, being only a fraction of an inch thick, and each about the size of a quarter or half-dollar though not all round, some were oblong. They overlapped and underlapped each other in such a way that by only a minimum of vigorous and judicious squirming one could create a cozy nest for oneself.
I looked around to make sure no one was observing me, and did just that. In a few seconds I was firmly and comfortably supported by a smooth bed of millions of thin flat stones. I used my jacket for a pillow and hoped no one would wander by, especially with dogs, which are, as you know, prone to slobber on pronate and easy to reach victims. But I rested there, unmolested, for a good half hour. It was wonderful. Only the sun on its westward downward slope made me rise.
(It’s possible that these stones could be marketed as a sleep-aid and mattressed up for sale by some doughty entrepreneur, but think of the shipping cost.)
Leaving my bed of stones (those lucky Neanderthals), we then proceeded to Colebrook and to a boulangerie called Le Rendezvous. That was a delicious find. We bought fresh baked bread and a whole grain baguette. Some chocolate of course, it was French, after all. The owners of this boulangerie have an interesting story. Let’s see if I can remember to recount it for you in my next installment.
October whispers in my ear
October is here and we in northern New Hampshire know what the forecast is. Changing seasons: shorter, cooler days. Turning leaves: tour buses, leaf peepers. Flipping the family photo calendar: grandchildren clad in Halloween costumes, my mother’s birthday. Swapping out my wardrobe: fleece, socks and sneakers. Fall cleaning: screens down, deck furniture in.
October whispers in my ear: I know you’re busy but don’t forget that NaNoWriMo is on its way. November first is less than thirty days away now. Don’t you always say you are going to start preparing for NaNoWriMo in October? Get your outline and character sketches done so that you can just start typing away on November 1 with your outline for reference? I bet you can exceed 50,000 words if you do that.
This year I have a response. Listen, October, stop bugging me. I am working on an outline for NaNoWriMo. I already have my characters’ names with personalities formed, allowing for more novels to follow. I’ve drawn a rough map of the town where the murder takes place. I’m reading Louise Penny’s “Inspector Gamache” novels to make sure that I don’t end up copying her quaint, idyllic, deadly town.
It’s a real temptation, especially as this area of New Hampshire abounds with similar towns: a town common or green surrounded by old churches, old stately homes, old maples, old, white fence, old pines adorned with Christmas lights. Possibly a gazebo decked with red ribbons and sparkly snow. You get the drift….
My fictional town of Woodbury wears a blue-collar attitude. A diner instead of a bistro. An auto repair shop in place of a bookstore. A run-down motel instead of a B & B. The hub of the town? A Village Store where the locals go to catch up on all the gossip they missed at the diner. And let’s not forget the farms on the dirt roads spiking out of Woodbury. Beyond town lies another world, a lake populated with out-of-state visitors, some who visit for the summer, most just a week or two.
And there’s plenty more. I think I am in better shape than I have ever been for NaNoWriMo.
So take that, October.
Eleanor Ingbretson
Karen Whalen
llandrigan
Heidi Wilson
Mike M
Thursday Night Writes 