mystic_savage

It's always Life 101, isn't it? It never seems to get to be Life 220 or Life 457. I have this feeling of being perpetually at the beginning and unschooled/unaccomplished -- a feeling that is uncomfortable juxtaposed against my age and my expectations for where I should be at this point.

I feel generally uncomfortable right now. Not "anxious" or "sad" or "hurt". More like "squirmy" or "restless". Settling into my new room with Karen and James and my new job at UWMC--it seems to be happening by degrees, and the sediment rises again with each social opportunity or break in schedule or turn of events. I have a list of those things that are bestirring themselves in my life and debate with myself about whether I really want to go into them here (resulting in a long post about all the things I can't control right now) or not (resulting in me looking back at this post in six months and going "hunh...wonder what that was all about"). Opting for the latter.

NaNoWriMo rises up again at the end of this coming week. I don't know what I'm going to write. I don't want a detailed outline this year (in previous years, those have resulted in miserable failure), but I don't want to start with nothing (that has yielded two lousy first drafts with big plot holes in them). I think ideally I'd have a protagonist, an antagonist, a conflict, a climax, and a setting. As of yet I have: lots of ideas and none of those things. The only thing I'm clear about is that I want to avoid anything even remotely related to my life. No characters working at the UW in thinly-disguised jobs; no overblown assaults; no very cute word-for-word conversations with small children; no coffee-shop acquaintances. I guess to me that says "fantasy" because I'm not sure I have the discipline to write in any other genre and not reference myself. The detective or spy would be in her 40's, for example, and it would be a slippery slope from there to her life as divorced, starting over, with kids, etc.

So. Fantasy. That's more than I knew at the beginning of the last paragraph. Thanks LJ!

This weekend I'm in Vancouver with Andrew. We went to Parade of Lost Souls last night, which was as robustly artistic as any festival I've ever been to, and a lot less drunken. Amazing to see all those people in costume and all that wonderful art, and to have everyone still being well-behaved. Canadians, man. *shakes head*. They will never cease to amaze me.

So there is a thread in the NaNoWriMo forums about the Big Fun Scary Adventure Challenge.  You put up a list of things you want to do in 2008, and if you accomplish one of them by the end of the year...dude.  you've won.  you get a certificate.

ALSO:  If anyone wants to go out hiking or dancing w/ me, drop me a line or a comment.


And, as of 1/3, I'd like to add these:

I'd like to try to write one long poem a week.  I don't know much about longer poetry, so it would be a good chance to explore the form.
I'd like to read the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun  The Tyee at least twice a week.
And I'd like to read more in general.  Last year I aimed for 50 books and ended up reading 27 cover-to-cover.  This year I think I'll just aim for reading 25 challenging books.  By "challenging" I mean:  nonfiction, poetry, classic or literary fiction...something that takes more concentration than I usually read with.

I passed the 25,000 word mark today.

I just wrote 3600 words and got caught up and even a little ahead on my wordcount for nanowrimo.
I had a wonderful day with breklor yesterday, and nine hours of sleep between the two kids.  Which I needed.  To recover from the wonderful day.  Discovered the world's best coffee-flavored cookies at the M Street Grocery on 8th & Madison. 
I found a good cheesecake recipe that I'm going to adapt to make sugarfree oreo cheesecake for thanksgiving weekend with wandawonka and iguanahey.
I'm mostly caught up on work stuff and I don't have a cold anymore.
I get three more writing nights and a writing weekend this week. 

Most of the stuff in the novel is fiction, but this really happened. I wanted to post it to LJ last Monday, but had a little mini-crisis and forgot about it. Then it came out anyway in the novel, so I'm lifting it to put it here:

There are a lot of sad things in the world, and I think it’s important to notice them. But there is also this: the way the guy at Starbuck’s has a new word for the day every day. Every day it’s an alliteration: Have a Mystical Monday! He’ll say, or: have a Terrific Tuesday. He doesn’t use the same words over—or at least he hasn’t in the last two months. Last Friday he was glum, and it’s the first time I’d seen him that way. I asked him what the matter was, and he said “it’s a long story”. He, behind one side of the counter. Me, on the other. A line forming behind me. And so I let the moment go. But on the way to the bus stop, I went into Walgreen’s on impulse. I knew it would make me late, but I thought it was more important to reach across the counter in some way, to let this man know that I cared about him. And so I bought him a card, something about how he always cheers everyone up and how much I appreciate what he brings to our days. I wrote: I hope all your Fridays are fantastic. And I took it back to the shop and gave it to one of his coworkers to give to him.
I went on to the bus tunnel not knowing if I’d done the right thing. Would he be offended. Would he read the card as a mandate that he be cheerful all the time (and was it, in fact, some kind of mandate?) or would he understand that I wanted to make him feel better, or let him know that I liked how he interacted with me.
Monday, I went back in and there was a line, but he reached across the counter and gave me a Starbuck’s pin to put in the lapel of my coat. That is what is right in the world. And why there might be hope.

And in other news, I'm going to do NaNoWriMo this year. Comment if you're doing it too.  I'm super busy in November, but I've carved out 5 evenings just for writing, and I think I can do 1700 words a day if I can get an hour or so after the kids go to bed.  (I may have to give up chomping people on Facebook and playing online Scrabble for the month).   I've attempted NaNoWriMo 3 times in the past and "won" once.  ("Winning" is finishing a 50,000 word novel by November 30th).  The time I "won" I started writing on November 1st without a plot or a character or a conflict or anything, and I just started with the first image I could imagine and followed it to the next image and so on until I had a book.  I think I'm going to do something similar this year, although I'm going to free myself up to write erotica if that's what...uh...comes up for me.