Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 10,266 as of 7am on Sunday, mostly journaling here. I wrote a brief dialogue yesterday afternoon that may have moved me along in toward figuring out a story I began last year. This morning I watched my counter hit exactly 10k and then kept typing.

Revised novel EMD word count: 74,883 This draft is still just sitting. I have not even peeked.

We went out yesterday morning and did not get home again for almost three hours. As the crow flies we probably covered three miles of ground, but since we were seriously beach combing (11 pieces of sea glass) we walked a considered distance, up and down up and down the rocky part of the shore. Everything had moved around.

Gary says we have been intensively combing the shore and gathering trash since our last dog died. We lost Yeti in June of 2017. Our last dog. Last year we picked up a thousand pounds of plastic. We go out nearly every morning with a bag to gather trash and I usually return with pockets full of agates and perhaps a few bits of glass in one hand.

Yesterday morning was the first time we met another couple gathering trash. Gary talked to them but did not ask where they were from. “They must have been local” he concluded because the woman talked about bringing her kitty litter scooper out to sift bits from the sand without bending over so far.

I had to reread the passage in Shawl/Ward that defines “the unmarked state”—the taken-for-granted aspects of a story: that it is set on Earth, here-and-now, that the characters are human and white and English-speaking, and male. “A character in the unmarked state has a certain transparency”—of “someone” rather than a particular person who brings a broad range of expectations.

This resonated.

Usually on the first day of my Junior English classes I taught either Suniti Namjoshi’s “The Blue Donkey” or Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” and I always taught the latter in the first week. Always. I chose these stories not only because they are very good and also short, but because they offered a certain degree of misdirection that allowed me to teach lessons about the unmarked state, though I did not call it that at the time. The author begins with the unmarked state and certain assumptions she or he might make about the reader and the reader’s expectations. Generally, the author can be relied upon to tell a story that in setting occurs where and when the author him- or herself is writing from. Le Guin turns that on its head. She apparently told an interviewer that the story was about betrayal (and later told me she did not recall saying that, but never mind) and so, once we understood who the characters were in the story, we talked about betrayal, notably of the reader. Le Guin breaks that fundamental rule about where-and-when-and-who and she gets away with it because rule-breaking is pretty much the point in that story. The stories we read in class were all “good” stories. I assured students that authors worked and reworked a story. If they found a line of poetic rhyme in a narrative (such as in “Yellow Woman”) it did not happen by accident. What is the author asking us to pay attention to? Look again. If we hear the story as well as seeing it, what does it sound like, what do those sounds reveal? In Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman” the rhyme indicates the point in her story where the narrator tips into her story, accepts the reality of her participation in a myth. The goal of all of this was to make students pay closer attention, to help them gain awareness of craft, and to encourage them to value the process of writing.

Some of this I learned, or was reinforced, in a workshop with Bret Lott, who liked to stay he knew nothing about how to tell a story and then proceeded to detail what should happen in the center chapter of a novel (something critical). This I-know-nothing claim followed by something enormously helpful is not unique to Lott. At my first MFA residency, Bill Kittredge was pretty much bullied into giving a craft talk about writing nonfiction. He stood behind the podium, cross about this expectation and insisting he had no idea how to write an essay. And then proceeded to explain precisely how it might be written: set up a problem by composing an anecdote that defines it in the first paragraph; then write a paragraph with a false solution to the problem, also defined by an anecdote . . . Although I had already been teaching the “Real Life Problem” for years, that is exactly how that framed essay assignment was set up for students.

The sky is lightening and I think a short walk is in order today. We refilled the bedroom where I had painted the floor. We went over our taxes and I redid one page where I made an error, and then corrected two issues Gary found. The forms are collated, stapled, and ready to be stuffed into envelopes. Gary keeps wondering how our friend in Seattle is managing since he also does his own taxes but has no computer. It is increasingly difficult to complete taxes without using the online system or a paid preparer. I had planned to send a check, but found that would require yet another form, so I paid what I owed online.

The rain and windstorm caused some problems, but everything looks okay today. Our contractor is coming today to begin shingling the west side of the house. Wind has blown sand and that has ground the shingles on that one side of our house right down to the felt. The new door will be installed this week. I still have walls to paint, probably not today. Yesterday was supposed to be a day of rest and it was insanely busy. I can hear robins in the garden.