Camp NaNoWriMo word count: over 45,000 as I type this before 7am, Tuesday, 30 April 2019

So. I complete my month of furious (not angry, just driven and desperate) writing, and I outstripped my original simpler goal of ten thousand words. I have journaled and written essays and book reviews and worked on stories and revised a novel and begun revising another, and not all those words found their way into my official word count. I completed reading and reviewed several books, for example, and only one review is included in my NaNo pages. I wrote emails, responses to news, and rants about politics and population and poverty. Most of what I wrote will never be read by anyone other than myself. Sometimes I merely thought about things. 

Expect nothing more from me for a while.

Saint Lucy, by Francesco del Cossa (c. 1430 – c. 1477)

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 43,032 by early Monday morning, 29 April 2019

The light was coming as I typed on Sunday, early-early.

Food52 is promoting a new cookbook that recommends buying small and often, using everything up as you go along, and yes! that is what I have been trying to do lately. Most of the Food52 article is common sense advice I already follow, but confirmation is always welcome. My crisper has only one lemon and some apples. I supposeI should make some sortofapple tart, preferably without sugar. Last night I thawed out the next-to-last last season’s pesto and made a pizza to use up the fresh mozzarella. Years ago when our fridge died I tried earnestly to get by with one of those tiny dorm-sized fridges, the ones about the size of a generous waste-paper basket. Milk and cheese and butter filled it. No room in the tiny freezer compartment for berries or peppers or anything beyond either an ice cube tray or frozen peas. One the other, not both. Condiments were a huge challenge, and my family thought I was mad. I argued that we really could not afford a new refrigerator at the time. That was not entirely true. Eventually I gave in and we bought a new fridge. There is this attitude that we must have twenty cubic feet or more of chilled storage, but many Europeans manage with tiny refrigerators or none at all by purchasing what they need for a meal and then using it up. Americans tend to gather stuff in the their fridges until they could condiment a regiment and the crisper goes sodden and has to be emptied directly into the trash. I have too many spices too. I dumped a jar of very-much out-dated dried Italian herbs the other day in order to have the jar for an herb I use frequently. I am wondering if my herbs, spices, and condiments should be marie-kondoed like my clothes closet—taking note of what flavors spark joy and discarding the rest? 

I have emptied both crispers now, used the sourdough start for the pizza dough, and consumed the recommended daily amounts of fruit and vegetables. The cheese drawer still contains seven cheeses. There is real bakery bread waiting to be toasted. (The stuff sold in plastic bags bears almost no resemblance to actual bread. Even the “whole wheat” slices smash into a lump the way we once turned Wonder Bread into a ball as if it were raw dough.) 

A TNYT story reveals the impact of our poor diet on mental health because “most Americans are overfed in calories yet starved of the vital array of micronutrients that our brains need, many of which are found in common plant foods. A survey published in 2017 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that only one in 10 adults meets the minimal daily federal recommendations for fruit and vegetables — at least one-and-a-half to two cups per day of fruit and two to three cups per day of vegetables. Nutritional psychiatrists like Dr. Ramsey prescribe antidepressants and other medications, where appropriate, and engage in talk therapy and other traditional forms of counseling. But they argue that fresh and nutritious food can be a potent addition to the mix of available therapies.”  We all need, as my mother would say, to take better care of ourselves. 

Inhale a bit of a horror story and found a market to submit it to. Tuesday is the final day for Camp NaNo. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will finish this task and move on to something else. 

Gary spotted a robin’s eggshell on Nye Beach pavement the day before yesterday, exactly like this one.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 39,039 by 6:30 Friday morning, 26 April 2019

On our way home from two nights away (“We’re on vacation!”), we stopped several times. Gary bought a double-scoop ice cream cone. I bought batik fabric. One of my favorite fabric stores in Wheeler had a sign in the door. After 35 years, the store had closed. Last October! Such a lovely store and such lovely people we will miss. Next door in the antique mall, twenty feet from the front door was the table we had decided we needed just a few days ago. Round, 42” in diameter, and paintable. Probably a hundred years old and ill-used, but exactly what we were looking for and inexpensive. It has already been painted many times over the oak, so no guilt when I add three more coats of dark green. 

This morning I will need to find something to share with my writing friend. Most of what I have accomplished in the last week is the novel and I cannot very well print of a couple of hundred pages to share. A chapter? The shortest chapter? Something else? Seriously, everything I have worked on is long. 

This morning I reversed order of the first two stories in my novel-in-stories, LISL. I had moved an afterword into chronological order at the beginning. (Yeah, I know—it is always hard for me to keep things in chronological order. My literarily seems to happen in chronological order. I connect the hereandnow with an event when I was six and with something I hope to do next year. All of my writing is written out of order. All my stories longer than a few pages skip around in time. That alone, should have been a warning.)

LISL, set in Arizona in th early 60s, now needs a read, start to finish. It need close attention and revision, though I have spent hundreds of hours on its individual parts and the stories as a whole. I could see, even in my swift review, that I may have done some things right, and there is an overall tension and some humor. (Humor—not Homer—seems to be coming back to me after all these years.) And doing that is just one more way of avoiding the tedious task of summarizing the other novel, EMD. As to the latter, I have just read a review of two memoirs about the deaths of mothers:

“ ‘Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them,’ writes Michelle Filgate in her essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.” But when a mother dies, leaving her child without the home of her love, that task of returning is supplanted by the task of grieving. Grief, then, becomes the new home.”

The review suggests another scene for the Arizona stories. And I have written a brief preface: 

He would say later that he did not know how he survived his last summer in Arizona. They were not free-range children but completely feral. They wandered out of the yard, off their block, and into the desert where none of them were killed by snakes or falls or as a result of getting lost. They were innocent and careless and their foolish adventures were wild with fun and full of fear. And through it all there was the chaos of his family, the loss of his mother, of what it all meant.

It is a short novel, but technically it is also a cycle of stories and not at all short for a collection of short stories, which is how it is disguised. 

I am sitting up in bed, the doves coo-cooing to one another. It is flirtation and I am in love with my home, with the skim of spruce-tops I can see from over the curtains in my bedroom, Gary bringing me coffee, the promise of labor. 

The view looking north from the bed of the Jane Austen Room of the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 38,287 by Thursday monring, 25 April 2019

EMD word count: 70,242, 240 pages, an imperfect but respectable length. 

TUESDAY. We were away in the morning and the point of being away is to be without the normal day-to-day distractions. Usually this means I do not bring my computer. No news. No television. I am offline for a day or most of a couple of days. Offline, what a concept! But I brought my computer and worked throughout the drive south. 

Before we left, however, I reread the flash nonfiction “Constellations” by Abby Mims on Brevity—nothing short of spectacular! A daughter recalling her mother and child, the hard loss of one, the welcoming of the other. It is the kind of story I am trying to tell in my novel. I wanted to reread it so I copied it into a file to avoid the temptation of internet.

The first blue heron was walking in Tillamook Bay, the second flew north to our south, thirty miles further along in our journey. Lunch at Ové’s Northwest was marvelous. We both had the three-cheese toasted cheese sandwich and then we checked into the Melville Room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, lay down in the king-sized bed and promptly fell asleep for an hour. As I type these words, I am sitting in one of the chairs in that room and admiring the beach far below. Most of the rooms here have an unobstructed view of the ocean. 

Gary is sleeping in the chair beside me, the tide is half in at Nye Beach. We are in what is called “the library” here at the Sylvia Beach. We are eating very well indeed, and I think the release of tension trying to deal with the duplex and spending a great deal of money on the duplex and the house pretty much wore us out. 

I have begun reading What I Didn’t See by Karen Joy Fowler and realize it is not a new book, not even new to me since I recognize at least four of these stories. They are very fine. 

WEDNESDAY. Yesterday, after we checked in, we were both so sleepy that we worried we might be ill or poisoned or drugged. I had two glasses of Prosseco, one with lunch and one with dinner, separated by several hours and that does not seem enough to explain our lethargy. I think we were merely exhausted and stressed and relieve to be away. I feel fine this morning. 

At breakfast this morning, the sun is shining and Dorothy Dunnett was recommended to me. I think I may have read one of her historical novels, and that I did not like it because I objected to the historical accuracy of the psychology? [My arrogance. My hubris.] I suppose I should, at the very least, try her again even if I have read her before. I am unnecessarily and painfully petty about some things.  

A crow brought his food to the deck railing just in front of me, ate and cawed, and when she was finished she walked north on the railing to the other corner and wiped her beak clean before flying off. 

THURSDAY. A street sweeper works it way slowly around the loop while Gary makes a pot of super-strong coffee and brings me a cup. We have brought our own grounds so that Gary can have coffee strong enough, and the crew had only set up the coffee-maker with a filter, no coffee or water when he got there. As we sipped our first cup he said, “If someone pours from the pot I made, they will get a surprise.” Gary’s coffee is as near espresso as it’s possible to be. 

Once he’d poured out our second and a half cups each, he put everything back the way it should be. He says this was a good idea of mine to bring our own ground coffee. 

Out for an hour onshore this morning we found limpets and ugly-clams, a few interesting rocks, almost no trash, and four pieces of seaglass. The wind had died almost completely and only began to come back up as we returned in time for breakfast after 8:30. 

We are feeling well rested, I finished reading Fowler’s marvelous collection of short stories this morning and reasoned more about the novella though I did not work on it. My novel is in better shape than it was (with the arc of action and emotional intensity shifted well toward the end) and Ada Limón has given me the sweeter epigraph I needed. I had thought the final chapter was secure, but I have revised slightly and I think it will be stronger still before I am done. For Camp NaNo, I think I will reach 40k words, or even 50k by the end of the month, depending on whether I continue work on the novel or shift over the novella, whether I write entirely new words to post here, or make only smaller edits not worth transferring. I have five days to the end of the month. We will head home a little later this morning.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 36,030 by 6:30am on Tuesday, 23 April 2019

EMD word count: 67,679. It had to be done. 

Gary wanted tart for breakfast yesterday, but no, we will finish it this morning. We will soon be on our way for a drive south. I am bringing my computer and the charger so that I will not be limited in writing. It would be good to get through a couple of chapters. I committed major acts of butchery, working throughout the day yesterday to cut and cut and cut. 

Our new tenant has moved in. A couple of helpers parked a massive moving van in the road for a few hours, we withdrew to avoid the confusion and chaos, but eventually all his furniture fit. He was so very tired and we hope he finds some rest and relief from the strain of caring for a very ill family member. I got the trim recoated with white paint mere hours before he arrived. There will always be work to do, I fear. It seems like everything needs works, but the plumber replaced the trap in the sink, everything has been scrubbed twice. We plan a new roof on that building . . . hopefully in the next month. 

We skipped our walk yesterday morning because I wanted to drive north first thing for the trim paint (I went through the stored paint cans and there was nothing close) and then to paint in time that nothing would be the least bit tacky when our new tenant arrived. I was done before 10, the blinds went back up by noon when I was already back to work on the novel. We took our walk late in the day on a mostly empty beach, and admired the new siding on the west face of our home.

Ten submissions in the last couple of days. This morning, John Randolph Bennett on the Brevity blog, urges an approach to defining terms derived from Aristotle by briefly defining its “origin, its form, its source, and its purpose.”