I don't know if I am a writer anymore. Writing runs strong in my family, like the Force in the Skywalkers.
Today Lent begins and I am pensive. Sometimes moving my stuff around helps me think. Today I redid my bedside shelves.
I am also trying to figure out if I can add a pic with my phone posts. Aha! The top bar of options slides over!! I feel as if my life has been returned to me. It's the little things. ❤️
I think I want my complex Tea story to be a picture book. Even as an adult I love picture books. Somewhere more than a picture book and less than a comic book style. That's it. Back to my regularly scheduled life now.
18,000 words, most (all?) of them typed by thumb on my phone's notepad, during moments snatched here and there around the edges of my life. A long labor of love. Yet 18,000 seems so few compared to the yearly goal of 50,000.
I am such a different person now than when I started my first Nanowrimo seven years ago. Yet if I do ever publish a book, hopefully a successful one, it will be entirely thanks to Nanowrimo coming around each November and reminding me of what is possible.
My children are older now, 13 and almost 10. I have a new puppy. We are back living at the family home Grace Meadows. School is winding down for me but the last six months until I graduate may be the hardest yet. I always thought I would finish Tea's story first, and I did, in a way. I told it out loud in parts to my daughter as a bedtime story. There has been change in the telling, and I think that is perhaps why I no longer am interested in writing it, at least not as it was. I went back and read some childhood favorites by Louis L'amour, but I no longer enjoyed them as much because my adult eyes saw things that my ten year old self did not.
As a child, I loved Beauty and the Beast, but after the #MeToo Movement, and the general conversation about the treatment of women, I can't see the story the same way anymore. It is interesting to me how I react very differently to cartoon stories and what seems okay in that medium versus the live action ones. So I have been re-examining the stories that last and the ones that don't. My son and I had an interesting conversation in the car the other day about Columbus and how one's legacy can be redefined in the future. My conclusion is that kindness lasts and ages well even when other things do not. I myself prefer Indigenous Peoples Day to Columbus Day. What was acceptable, or perhaps just overlooked, in relationships in the past, now seems inherently unhealthy and even immoral or just plain wrong.
This ties in to my fear that parts of my Tea story will not age well. The central love story between Ama and Der, and the blurred line between Tea and Ama, did not set well with my daughter. I began to question the old (immortal-ish) guy/young girl trope too and so I took it out of the verbal story altogether. Ama reappeared, and I thought about the way older women are often written out of the story. My daughter loved the friendship group dynamic between Tea, Sol, Aze, and Why, especially Why's silliness and passionate commitment to his erroneous ideas of earth things, like the stabby stabs. Jeto and Der figured only lightly and it was not as dark overall. But I missed the time pretzel part of the story in the verbal retelling, and Der's journey. So now I hold the broken pieces of my story, not quite sure how they fit together, or what the story is about anymore.
Which is why I have been writing Sara's story instead this Nanowrimo, my sequel to A Little Princess, a childhood favorite. Which brings me back to the 18,000 words that are still a bit jumbled and not a cohesive story yet. It's mostly dialogue with a few setting snippets here and there. At the same time, I am immeasurably proud of those 18,000 words because they all came to be in 200-300 word chunks. Maybe once or twice I thumb typed out a scene with 1,000. I feel as if I have been catching raindrops for years, and finally have a small bucketful. My arm is cramping from thumb-typing this, so now I shall be done.
Until next year, my friends. Please excuse the typos since I am not going back to proof read this.
I am back, or still here, just working away behind the scenes. I have been using a new writing technique, called (by me) snippets-on-my-phone. Sitting down to write gives me huge anxiety, as it was becoming all-consuming and leading me astray in my stories and in my life. So now I just write little scenes or pieces of dialogue as they come to me throughout my day. Sometimes I just want to capture the feeling of a strong emotion, so I turn it into story form and put it into one of my two main novels, one a sci-fi with animals coming of age story, the other a sequel to one of my childhood favorites.
Why am I here today? I tend to get a bit lost in nostalgia whenever I open my blogs. For a time, they were such an important part of my day and they still bring me much joy. I am doing Camp Nanowrimo. I am also a fan of Hero Journals now, and they teamed up together for July, so I had to jump in. I set a low goal for myself, to sketch out a rough draft of a children's book I'm working on called Waiting. Or Hope. Or The girl and the bunny and the red balloon. I met my goal of 123 words, yay! I am only satisfied with this version maybe a 3 out of 10. I like the description that I wrote to a friend much better, so my next step is to rework it with a bit more structure of what elements each page will contain. I am hoping that said friend will also illustrate it for me and then maybe we could see about publishing it together, but we'll see.
You know me, I love a good badge. I popped in today to put the Camp Nanowrimo badge on my blog. I like knowing when I start things, since I count my participation very generously from the very first moment.
I guess I also just wanted to put it out there that I am still writing. I am still here. I am further along than I have ever been. My next writing step in general is to download a new writing program I saw that partners with Nanowrimo in order to get organized and see how much I have. Today I hit a milestone for my ALPA novel, no more words fit in my note. Time to move it on to somewhere else I guess. I could just start a new note but I like threading it all together. I am also quite a spender and have a gift for investing (that just means my money goes bye-bye almost as soon as it comes to me), so I need to gradually move some of my projects towards finished and hopefully an income stream someday. Soonish. I am currently into collecting backpacks and I want to dabble in Trapper Keepers again (technically my first purchase yesterday was a five star Meade portfolio/binder thing), which requires additional funds. So onward I go. It's the little things.
Nanowrimo. Its draw pulls me back here year after year.
1423. The number of words I wrote this morning. I told myself, just write for an hour. About two paragraphs in, I though, "These are all the words you've got," but then I paused and more words came and ideas. Now I'm on my way. My first Nanowrimo was in 2015 and perhaps this one, five years later, will be my best one yet.
Now time to get the kids up for school. Two more days until Thanksgiving break.
