This morning I passed 50,000 words on NaNo. I’ve given up on the plan to stitch ornaments to go in the holiday cards. We stayed home last weekend and I was supposed to be stuffing squashes and making applesauce this afternoon. Instead I spent four hours recreating the emergency manual for our condo because I only had the pdf and could not figure out how to revise it. So the document got another complete edit, which is a good thing, and I sent a brand new pdf off to the man who did most all the original work. And I looked up photos of my classes.

Fifty thousand words of a novel is the official National Novel Writing Month goal. Today I have over fifty thousand words in my NaNo23 file, which is not enough for a real novel and anyway I’m not writing a novel. I am playing “Rebel” this year to an extent I never have in the past. All 50k so far are revisions of short stories. I hope for fifteen stories, maybe seventeen at this rate.

In the past, I’ve started off a NaNo month with a short story and then only counted the new words. This year I pulled out old stories and revised. Several have been published, one was so old I could not open the file until I took a hammer to it (metaphorically—I had the title but ClarisWorks is a defunct software program that I had to import software to access). Most of the eleven stories I’ve worked on so far needed careful editing. I changed names and rearranged paragraphs and honestly did write a lot of new words, sentences and whole paragraphs. One very long story is getting a hatchet job right at the end of the month from about 12k to something more like 6k. I expect to work on another 20k, but more new than salvaged words.

So. Holiday cards. I have handmade most of our holiday cards for most of the last fifty years (and our wedding invitations and birth announcement etc.). I’ve done pen and ink drawings, lino cuts, and last year fabric leaves. I had a plan for this year too, but then I had that fall. My right hand took the worst of it, probably not broken because it healed in a month. It took three weeks to be comfortable typing (carefully). No weaving, though I had yarn sorted and wound off, read to go. I couldn’t lift anything with that right hand, not even a full coffee cup. Writing by hand and knitting were not wise. Better now.

I don’t like cancelling plans. It’s like breaking a promise, but sometimes plan take time I don’t have. A few days ago, I ordered cards. We sorted gifts on the dining table. The holidays are coming.

Fred Meyer’s has had live Alberta spruce for sale since early this month. When we went shopping for acorn squash on Monday, a week before Thanksgiving—and Thanksgiving is about as early as it can be—they already had Christmas trees for sale. So did the nursery at the junction.

Maybe we’re all a little desperate for a holiday?

So much hardship in the world, and I barely want to think about it. I need to do something for someone. Something kind. I want a fir wreath on the condo door, to take a loaf of my cranberry bread to share with family, and once the cards arrive, to address the envelopes and sign each one.

I mean to get more serious about selling my work. When I was weaving in the Cannon Beach gallery, people kept asking me where I was selling. And I never have sold the weaving until now. I will be looking for a gallery, I think. I should open an Etsy shop, but I want people to touch the soft wool, to look at the colors up close. So that’s a plan for the new year. We have talked about where I might fit my loom in the condo. Space is tight, but somehow odd things seem possible. Good things even now.

I ran into a former student at the Bridge run and another at AWP—beautiful women now all grown up and doing their lives. It made me so happy to see them. I heard from a fellow NaNo writer from the Middle East. We’ve been “buddies” on NaNo for a couple of years and she actually found my “Daughters” short story and wrote that she liked it. She has a brother living in Korea who might find me someone to read my Korean chapters. I have a friend born in China I might ask to read that chapter, but she is a writer and busy. I still don’t know who sent me the red heart puzzle, but my friend Toni had two little handmade critters sent to me which I peeked at and then rewrapped to save for Christmas. The Christmas cactus is in full bloom, the little vermillion gerber daisies are still beautiful after two weeks, and my acorn squashes are halved and roasted with a bit of orange juice. Tomorrow I will stuff them with wild rice, shallots, cranberries, and sage. And I will make “that chocolate thing” (chocolate pots de creme) in little glass cups that I used to make for my students before the Winter Break. It’s been a while since I did that, a ritual I treasured.