Category Archives: Inspiration

November in Review

For the love of a dog, Inspiration, Month in Review, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2017, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

Can I start you off with the best thing?  I dare you not to smile.

You guys, I’m tired. I’m on doggy hospice duty these days, and the ol’ Fuzzball has been needing a lot of middle-of-the-night tending for weeks now. But it’s the greatest gift I can give him these final days. It does make me foggy the rest of the day, though. We push through, don’t we?

It’s also been a month of tremendous work output – I somehow finished NaNoWriMo in eleven days – and now I am retreating a little to take stock and refocus on next steps.

I rarely wait for New Year’s to start a new goal. Heck, I won’t even wait for a Monday. I’m finalizing some plans and will share here when ready. I also have some very exciting news to announce shortly.

I do know that I want to write one essay a week starting this week. I have no end point, no plans. There is no “1 Essay a Week for the Next 100 Weeks” type thing. But if NaNo taught me anything, it’s that I like being motivated by a goal that has a tight timeline.

I had a semi-momentous birthday in November, which may be contributing to this deep-seeded need to get grossly introspective. I feel sometimes like I’m Konmari-ing my own damned mind and life. All good. All good.

I’m not sure what it was about late October through November, but I sure pulled some great reads off my shelf.

Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling packs a lot of emotion in  a slim volume. Outrageous, hilarious, painful, and poignant.

Chelsey Clammer’s Circadian is a breathtaking and bold piece of art that merges and weaves together various forms and styles to try to arrive at understanding what may never be understood fully and to stumble upon truths that are often hard to accept.

Maggie Smith’s Good Bones. Breathtaking poetry about motherhood and middle years with strong, hearty through lines and themes.

I posted this review of Michael Ian Black’s Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom’s, which I know sounds weird):

Reading Navel Gazing was like discovering an up-and-coming band on a college radio station that you want to run around and tell everyone about and force them to listen. Not in a hispter way, really, but more in a "This guy gets it" way that made me go back through old yearbooks and double-check that we hadn't gone to school together back in Jersey.

Michael Ian Black packs a lot into this book -- health, aging, relationships, genetics, ancestry, mortality. It's surprisingly existential at times, rich, full, and just snarky enough to avoid being saccharine.

And funny. Did I mention funny? I literally was chasing people down to read them quotes from the book. And they don't hate me for it!

Highly recommended and truly appreciated.

Here are some fun things I ran across on the Internet this past month.

Here’s why you’re bored after you accomplish something.

Speaking of Konmari, can watching Groundhog Day make you a better artist?

Always time, always hope.

And now? I read, write, and figure things out. It’s a good end-of-year task. Something about low light and angles of things. Asking and truly answering “What do I want?” is an act of courage…and a lot of fun!

NaNo Scatter

Creative non-fiction, Fiction, Inspiration, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2017, Writing

I’ve had the privilege of two protracted, relatively uninterrupted writing days. I’m closing in on 10,000 words already. First drafts and word counts are rarely my problems — it’s the rewriting, the editing, and finding the art in the marble that causes me to sweat.

So far, I haven’t felt particularly funny and instead wrote stark, necessary essays. Now purged of some of the sulfur, I’m reconsidering the novel I put aside the other day in favor of writing essays.

Maybe a few thousand words will let me know if this is the right time for a novel. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel funny. Maybe in a week, I’ll have the courage to continue the serious pieces.

So I’ll permit myself this oscillate-writing. Back and forth, concurrent, parallel, and distinct. Perhaps an unsurprising constellation awaits at the end.

NaNoWriMo 2017

Creative non-fiction, Fiction, Inspiration, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2017, Writing

I am participating in my third-ever NaNoWriMo. It’s been a bit of a journey to get to the first lines of this challenge.

I wanted to write a book, fiction specifically. I’ve been feeling it’s high time for me to launch into the “next phase” — and that felt like doing something book-y.

I narrowed my initial three ideas down to one. I had a beginning, a mushy middle, and an end. The basics. I began plotting and getting to know my characters. I read books on the process. I studied my favorite novels.

I was starting to feel…stressed, actually. Completely unready to take this on. Not in an “I’m not good enough” way but in a “This doesn’t quite feel right” kind of way.

About a week ago, I got several emails and messages from friends and acquaintances about various humor pieces I’ve had published in the last few months. They all mentioned how my voice is distinct, and their words were complimentary and so very appreciated.

I said to my husband that I needed to find a way to make my book humorous like my essays, that that feels most me right now. And in his infinite wisdom, he said, “Why don’t you just do a book of essays?”

It stopped me in my tracks, as did my response. “Because I think for that to be successful, I’d need a much larger internet following than I have.”

Which…is not a good reason not to write the book I want to write and the book that I think will be good. I can’t control the market, I can’t worry about the selling points. I just need to worry about writing.

So I started from scratch, planning essays, figuring out a tentative through-line which I am more than happy to toss aside at any point. I’m keeping the novel ideas because I’m learning (the hard way) to never say never.

Today I started writing.

See you in 50,000 words!