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.”

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 34,367 as of 7am on Saturday, 20 April 2019

EMD word count: 75,543 [untouched]

My meeting went well yesterday. I will miss our meetings after this month.

The scaffolding is down from the front of the house, and Gary has done most of the clean-up. There are still nails everywhere, and I think we both look forward to working on the front garden.

I could not sleep so I wrote and rewrote. I did not work on the novel, even turning thoughts away from it. BF needs butchery and I am inclined to butcher the old in favor of the newer words—not always wise.

I am restless and looking forward to the long walk we promised ourselves. 

In the mean time, enough work already. I am supposed to be retired. Today must be the last I work on the apartment. I am not convinced I have done enough, or will have done enough, but I need to stop. I was awake half the night again, never a good thing. I tried reading a much-praised novel with historical errors all over the place and I think I must let it go. I tried reading a famous work of nonfiction, and found I cannot get past the white privilege—how can the author express sympathy for the bearers, their heavy burdens and pitiful pay, without acknowledging that it is he who pays them a dollar a day to carry that weight of 80 pounds or more on their backs? Rich white men going places because they can afford to go, often at the cost of others in more than money. 

Altogether testy and distressed. It is never enough. 

Tomorrow I want a day to work on the novel without worrying about painting or hanging blinds or scrubbing anything. 

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 25,876 as of 8:30am on Friday, 19 April 2019

EMD word count at 75,543

We have already gone for our walk. We were on the beach for over an hour on a still cool morning. A pleasant day. The fog concealed Castle Rock offshore while we scoured the high stony edge for trash—plenty of that. Then we walked down to the water’s edge, a hundred yards west and the Rock was still concealed, the shoreline misty with increasing fog. I love a foggy, cool day. 

Every day on our walk, I compose an essay in my head about what I find. The plastic, agates, shells that I collect and those I leave behind, the dogs we meet and the visitors we see also walking, local friends, including one who is almost always out an instant before us. Tomorrow we hope to walk far north to the headland.

Today I will meet with a writer friend, Ann. I was not sure what I wanted to take to share with her. There was nothing much new going on—I have not even completed Part 2 of EMD. I could have chosen to revise a story draft I have or to begin the new Louise DeFleur story. Then this morning I brought out the BF novella and decided I would print out the beginning to share. This is the story that began with imagining all the birds dying.

One of my friends does not read. Not news or magazines or books of any kind. Not a bit. And she doesn’t like films either. And she gets on these campaigns that look from the outside a little overblown and probably are. And then again, she is very kind face-to-face with people. 

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 24,698 as of 6:30am on Tuesday, 16 April 2019

EMD word count at 75,321—revised again through page 129.

I have already discovered a place where I’d pasted in a scene a second time—I was so sure I’d done that. I wrote new lines. I revealed no more than I must about the tragedy. It should, theoretically go in the center chapter 8, but something else happens then. A life transition works. 

The news reported the fire at the cathedral of Notre-Dame. I approached the story three times, each time shying away. I feel an investment in her engineered and necessary flying buttresses and elegant, irrational details. It’s okay with the reporter that the gorgeous spire has burned since it is “not original” but added later, but most everything was added later as they found benefactors to pay for her rose window and side windows, the detailing of wood and glass that the builders planned for but could only complete after the money came in. [Thank you, Darlene Sherrick.] 

The cable was out and the good news was that it was not our cable but everyone’s. 

Our education system works overtime to reinforce gender separation. According to The Atlantic:

“Friendship is a critical influence on what boys are learning about cultural norms and permission to be yourself. Because of the way children are separated by gender beginning in elementary school, boys’ first friendships are often with other boys. They learn to practice skills of sharing and intimacy and connection with other boys well before they do it with girls. And we know from research that boys’ friendships can be rich and deep and life-sustaining. Boys will say, ‘Without my friends I think I’d die.’ ” 

When my younger son started school, his best friend was a girl just up the road. That relationship was forced underground before they were seven. By high school they hadn’t spoken in years. By the time the girl was in high school, that girl had been deeply involved with two popular and famously brutal boys. Her parents didn’t want to hear my concerns and neither did she. She never forgave me for trying. 

And from Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent article about America’s troubling history with ridiculous conspiracy theories: 

“Donald Trump got his start in national politics as a ‘birther,’ promoting the idea that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Several news organizations have tried to keep track of the conspiracy theories Trump has floated since then. One list, posted by the Web site Business Insider, has nineteen entries. These include the claims that vaccines can cause autism and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered.

“ ‘They’re saying they found the pillow on his face,’ Trump said of Scalia, during the 2016 campaign, ‘which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.’ (The Business Insider list is limited to full-blown conspiracy theories, and excludes the President’s more casual lies and fabrications.) ‘No president—indeed, no national official—has resorted to accusations of conspiracy so instinctively, so frequently, and with such brio as Donald Trump,’ Muirhead and Rosenblum write.” 

It’s still my country. Right or wrong? Right. I would wish it were right more often.