I woke too early this morning. That happens a lot these days. Sometimes I can get back to sleep. Sometimes I go to work. Lately I am knitting and revising my novel. Doesn’t that sound wonderful to myself: revising my novel!

I listened to Dorianne Laux read her poem “I Dare You” on the Academy of American Poets website. Click the link and find it. It is wonderful, and wonderful to hear Dorianne’s voice reading her work. She was teaching in the Pacific University program when I was doing my MFA, but I was doing fiction in 2005 to 2007. I sat in on a workshop with her husband Joseph Millar, who is also brilliant. I had already taken a workshop with Dorianne. My poem “Eyebrow Wings” came out of working with Dorianne.

But this new poem about letting go of possessions, letting go of youth, letting go of that risk-taking fearlessness that has become funny and foolish now that we are aging. She was born the same year I was, but in January, so she is not a water dragon. That makes me a little sad. I like to think of Dorianne as a dragon. In a good way, ferocious and flying.

Yesterday, every time we looked out the window and one of us said, “How about we go out?” it would begin hailing. I draw the line at hail. I need a run, or at least a couple of hours outdoors. I swear it rained and hailed a hundred times with brief interludes of blue and white puffy brightness al day long. No run. No walk. Today I mean to go out regardless.

I worked on my novel for hours yesterday, which is what I should be doing now. It is early (4:15 on my computer clock) but about the time I began writing yesterday morning. I passed my daily goal and had to make myself stop. Too easy to roll right through paragraphs without accomplishing the careful line-by-line work I need to do. I have found one of the earliest draft of All the Daughters Sing, from January of 2018. I had begun something earlier, I remember, but I haven’t found it. What I have found is more than I remembered.

This is one of the National Novel Writing Months (NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo). The original write-50,000-words-in-30-days event is November. Thousands or at least hundreds commit. You can promise to write those words on the website and track your daily progress to that goal. Posting my progress is useful motivation. I wish I had “buddies” but the charts and graphs and little awards are encouraging. In April NaNo, the goal can be whatever you like. You set your goal—a short story, a collection of poems—and then mark your progress. I am revising 80,000 words. I have committed myself to at least 2,500 words each day. I work in mornings. It’s what I will go do now before reporting my progress below.

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I am back on the blog post.

So far I am making good progress, fewer words today than yesterday because I rushed through five thousand yesterday and also wrote a bit of an outline in the gas mileage book in our car when we drove for mail and banking. That rush and structural rethink meant I spent some of my work time correcting errors I missed and moving paragraphs to later in the book. I have more than 15k words revised on the page as of day 4. I may go back and work through more even though today, thus far, I have worked 3,341 words. I cut several paragraph and more sentences, removed them to add back later. I carved back and it still became longer.

Though I am technically ahead of schedule, these are the early pages in Gena’s story that have already been revised and edited many times. So far this is the easy stuff, the scary stuff is ahead—more recent pages and the completed novel I wrote during NaNo not in November of 2021, as I had thought, but in November of 2018! That’s a big fail, losing track of that. Not to mention I never could bring myself to read most of it. It’s been lying like a fallow field for more than four years! I’ve located a graph of characters with names, birthplaces, ages, travels, how many children, how long the children live (yes, I know why), and I have also found a few long passages saved on my laptop that may fit someplace. (So many drafts of everything! It’s a mess to find what I want and not repeat myself!) The reckless goal I set on the NaNo website is to revise eighty thousand words. I might, just might manage that.

I thought I would check in weekly, but Dorianne’s poem set me off early.

Think of a break in the weather. I need a walk.