A month and three days since my fall and everything seems to be functioning. No coffee since mid-October. sigh I cut back on salt. Cut wine from 30 glasses/ month to 2. I did not stop running after the Bridge Crossing—ran yesterday on schedule. I am typing without pain on my new Mac. I am hoping to find an actual doctor in Portland. The crows are flocking in our eastern view from the condo. I have resisted ordering yarn on sale or fabric from Liberty of London. I have enough. And November was National Novel Writing Month.

Today is the last day of National Novel Writing Month and I am not done with the stories, though I have well over my fifty thousand words. I have gone through my computer and found raw short stories I never finished and others that need serious work. I still have a ways to go. And I expect I will continue working on them all day today.

There is my very first short story, written 23 years ago, and the one from a few weeks ago. Some older files I cannot even open, but the lost stories were not important to me then and still aren’t. Some stories that never quite worked before found a clear path this time. Problems seemed to find obvious solutions, POV shifted, paragraphs rewritten or moved or deleted. Maybe I have learned something over the past thirty years, or perhaps I am too stupid to realize these stories are worthless even after all this work.

The six novels—seriously? I have written six— are another matter.

I cannibalized the first one, Love Interest (and two others). It was a mess.

The second novel, Clean Away (working title was Bitch Trial because I thought my first novel was too “nice.”), went way over the head of my skills twenty years ago. Many voices and several generations. I hired an editor to help and she gave me some good advice (rewrite it as a short story—which I would now see as an invitation to write a synopsis). She also wanted me to reduce my characters and turn it into a YA novel, which was her advice to herself and entirely unhelpful to me. I simply didn’t know how to write it, make it stronger, and so I set it aside. I may have earned the skill to make it work by now but can’t open most drafts of that novel now, even though I probably kept them all.

Novel number three (A Single Fact) is expanded from the first story Calyx published. It was timely in the early oughts but the internet and cell phones changed all that. It’s the story of a high school senior scared to go forward and unable to back up. Terrified by the notion that high school was supposed to be the best time of her life. Kill me now.

My MFA thesis from 2007 (Living in Snakeland, number four—renamed from Blonde Indian, which I did not realize was the feminine and besides there is another novel of that name now) is reduced to a novella for this collection. The novella needs some work.

Number five, The Promised Hour from 2016, is an expanded novel-length versions of the story Calyx recently published. A book waiting for further work or official abandonment. It would be sad to think that I need to write an entire novel of ±75k words in order to complete a strong 5k short story, but there it is.

Number six, All the Daughters Sing, my best and my greatest hope written from 2018 to this year, hasn’t found a home yet; a rejection came yesterday. So there is some sadness here.

I will need December to complete revision of my 2023 NaNo collection of short fiction, I think. I will do that. Yesterday I began work on an incomplete story. It is still incomplete and threatens to take over the world. There are seven stories to revise after that, including the novel-cut-to-short-novella from my MFA program. My current NaNo count of revised/rewritten stories is 100,690. Twenty-four done, five to go.

Starting tomorrow, I will take ten days to work on the long incomplete story, “Entering the Green,” although I have no idea what happens next. I might give up on it. I might trust that it will find its ending. (Heaven help me if it insists on becoming a novella.) Either way, I will move on to the rest of the collection after ten days. Ten days, not counting a day to wrap gifts that need to go into the mail.

My plan is then to print off the entire document in single-space since with the unedited stories it already has over 151,708 words, 439 pages in Garamond. I will then sort the stories into realist and not, arrange each set in the best order I can, and begin revising once again on each collection. Then another edit or two or three (or fifty), rearranging the stories a few times, and then we’ll see. That’s the plan. The temptation is to forget about the whole thing

We’re still not sure how we can fit all the books we mean to keep (just looking at the shelves of BASS going back to the ’80s makes me cringe) and Gary’s CDs and my sewing machine and the loom into the condo—all that yarn and fabric. The Condo repipe will not be done before next summer, but we are clearing the beach house. Today, Gary is sorting clothing to take to Portland, and we are measuring bookcases. We are considering furniture we will shift (some of the bookcases), what we will store temporarily (the rest of the bookcases and some furniture in hope of finding another place to put them), and what we will just let go (frankly, most of what’s here). Both Gary and I have dealt with emptying houses of loved ones and hope this will be the last time we have to do it. We wouldn’t wish the chore on our sons.