The First of Many

The snow has stopped falling, leaving little Fort Collins in a wintry mess of goodness; except of course if you're driving your dear husband to work in the morning. In that case it is icy death, stress on ice. As of now, I'm curled up on our couch, warming my hands with a steaming cup of tea, and gazing at our lovely fake Walmart tree, filled with eclectic ornaments gathered over 25 years of living. We balanced a beer bottle on top in lieu of a star, at the excited suggestion of my mother on our last morning together over the Thanksgiving holiday week, and I must say it looks a sight! Somehow a Chanukah tune has accompanied my activities all morning, galloping wildly around my head, picking up speed near the song's end. Strange how those songs we were made to sing in 9th grade still pop up at unexpected moments.

"Shalom Aleichem, celebrate the new, peace the whole world through!" (insert boisterous accordion-type music throughout)

Of course my search for the song lyrics only brought me to the wonders of Wikipedia, where I was reminded of the complexity of the meaning of shalom; peace, restoration, unity between man and God, wellness, wholeness, and so on. Our choir teacher tried to impart the significance to us as teenagers, but I am only now beginning to understand the tip of it.

And I've successfully travelled down a vast rabbit hole, oh the wonders of my brain. My main point in updating today was to discuss my dance with word counts and noveling in the midst of National Novel Writing Month. On October 31st, Julian and I both signed up (and probably signed away my sanity and parts of my social life) to partake in the madness of scrawling away 50,000 words in one month's time. And when I say madness, I mean there are whole hours for which I cannot account, where Julian claims a significant amount of events occurred directly in front of me without my notice. Only when writing can I focus so intently, it still boggles my mind, being easily distracted in the everyday.

On day one, Julian and I sat together on the couch and opened our Think Pad and MacBook laptops, and let our fingers do the thinking, having no time to plan or outline. We ended with about 300 words apiece, me with a bumbling girl named Emmaline, and Julian, well, I'm still not sure what he wrote. Each day we were supposed to set 1667 words on the page, and yet after the first, we weren't even a quarter of the way there. Julian quickly lost interest, claiming to be a short story writer at best, and more of a poet at heart, and I sat for two days staring at a blank page for minutes at a time. On day four, I finally snapped back, realizing how far behind I'd fallen, and sat down in front of my food speckled computer with purpose. It didn't matter how ridiculous or silly my thoughts were, onto the page they went, and somewhere after about eight rambling pages I developed a slight bit of plot. And then, soon after, I catapulted into my least favorite part of writing: dialogue. That, too, became less and less difficult, perhaps not altogether fantastic, or even believable, but it was there.

When I reached 10,000 words, I realized quite suddenly that I had propelled myself, unknowingly, into the midst of my fears of writing, of lacking talent, of not rising to my perfectionist ideals. I have wanted to do this my whole life, ever since reading Harriet the Spy at age seven and sneaking around with my journal, cataloguing mysteriously inane events in and around the Eiche household. I also realized that I'm not as a great a speller as I once presumed, having to rely heavily on auto-correct and right-clicking on squiggly red lines. All in all it's been a lovely, if sordid affair, and I regret not one bit of it, even if finishing two days ago cost me several hours of reading and possible moments to spend time with husband and friends. This little endeavor forced me to be diligent, to sit and write every day, no matter how little brain capacity was left after spending days and evenings building language skills with children, or pretending to be a turkey (yes a gobbling, strutting, wing waving, neck thrusting spectacle) to get a few smiles and make the work not so begrudging.

Of course, now I will not be writing 2000 words daily, especially not after the long and eye-blurring days where I feel my forehead knocking into walls of frustration and lack of erudition. So today, I can sit with my now finished tea, Ranger beside me, and tap out a few more words, a new perspective on my novel devised on a refreshing afternoon walk the previous day. You see my mind is always working, always narrating and spinning webs of words sticky enough to trap me in its fibers and distract me from the present. This is a blessing and a curse, and I'm learning to be patient and work, or to live in the moment and put it away when the time calls for it. It is a process. As for my "novel", I haven't read it yet to see exactly what it is about, probably because I am not altogether finished with it. Last month was a draft of a draft, the first of many, as its file folder is so rightly named, and so away I will chip, until I get close to some idea of what exactly my mind was thinking when I first began to type. Maybe then I'll let you read it, but until that time, you must be patient, my dear ones. Unless of course, you have no interest, and rightly so, in which case this all means nothing to you and I seem like a pompous you-know-what. Either way, you had better watch out, or you might find a speck of yourselves lodged somewhere in my novel, unawares.

That last bit was a joke, or a half-joke, at least. If you do find yourself hiding away in there, it was entirely unintentional and I apologize profusely, hoping all the while that I did your character no injustice. Take heart, so far, most of them live to see the end.

Now enough blathering, I am determined to enjoy this wintery day, having had my afternoon of work recently canceled due to unforeseeable weather conditions as the evening progresses. And now I bid you all a fond farewell and leave you with this parting gift, a favorite Christmas movie: