Hoarded Ordinaries

If you’ve been watching my NaNoWriMo progress on my blog sidebar, you’ve already seen the good news: I finished and thus “won” my write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge, logging in late last night with a whopping 50,311 wretched but oh-so-gratifying (now that they’re oh-so-over) words. Can somebody please pinch me?

In my Zen school, there’s a famed phenomenon called the 90-day giggles. During the winter and summer months, monks, nuns, and motivated lay-people have the chance to sit a 90-day intensive retreat that involves a 4:00 am until 9:45 pm schedule of sitting, walking, and chanting meditation. During the entire 90 days, retreatants keep silence; consume no meat, sugar, or caffeine; and are encouraged to refrain from making even eye contact with other retreatants. This rigorous regime is designed to clear the mind of all mundane distractions so meditators can focus whole-heartedly on their practice for the duration of the retreat.

By the time the 90th day rolls around, something quite remarkable happens. After ridding the mind of distractions and slowing down to enjoy the minute details of life, retreatants are completely in-tune with the universe and themselves. And in response to this remarkable feat, people on the final day of 90 days of silence often, typically, get a massive case of the giggles…the so-called 90-day giggles. After sitting in silence staring at a hardwood floor for three months, nearly everything seems gut-wrenchingly, side-splittingly, fall-on-the-floor-laughingly funny.

Although I’ve never sat a full 90-day retreat, I’ve sat week-long chunks in the winter and three-week-long stints in the summer. After 21 days of silent retreating, you do get somewhat slap-happy, the simple phenomenon of eye-contact being enough, at times, to send you over the edge of silliness. First one person starts giggling, then another, and another…before you know it you have Zen Masters slapping their knees and monks rolling in the aisles. It’s simply natural, I think, to need some sort of physical, emotional catharsis after the intensity of doing nothing but concentrating for 7, 21, or 90 days, and a good senseless giggle fest is as good an emotional enema as anything.

So last night, after hitting the Wall of Despair around word 43,000, I experienced a nearly terminal case of the 50,000-word giggles around word 46,000.

Writing a novel in a month is very similar to sitting a long retreat. When you sign up for a Zen retreat, you have visions of how relaxed and enlightened you’ll become after spending a concentrated amount of time meditating without distraction. Once you’re actually sitting a Zen retreat, however, you inevitably reach an “oh shit” moment where you realize or remember that Zen retreats really, really suck. Your knees hurt, your thighs ache, and your back is screaming for mercy. Your mind is either wildly racing with distractions, neuroses, and obsessions or you find yourself literally bored to tears. You find yourself madly craving pizza, beer, and chocolate, and you have elaborate fantasies of seducing, slapping, or simultaneously doing both to whomever (man or woman) happens to be sitting next to you. In a word, your mind goes completely and entirely nuts when you spend massive amounts of time doing nothing, and the tricks it comes up with to entertain itself make you want to run out of the room screaming.

And in a word, that’s pretty much what the act of writing a novel in a month feels like. When I began NaNo’ing, it sounded like such a cool writing exercise: what better way to kick-start my writing and kill my Internal Editor by diving head first into a massively insane writing project? Partway through actually doing the damn thing, though, I experienced that aforementioned “oh shit” moment where I realized writing a novel in a month really, really sucks. I’d lost all sense of plot (not that I had any to begin with), I lost all sense of characters (not that I had any to begin with), and I lost all sense of sanity (not that I had…oh, never mind!) I ran out of words to say but continued writing anyway, taking the storyline in directions that were entirely unbelievable, adding sex scenes that were entirely unnecessary, and having characters do things that were entirely out of character. Around about word 46,000, I was tired, thoroughly sick of the horrid crap that was masquerading as “my so-called novel,” and completely slap-happy.

As Gary, who finished his NaNo novel yesterday afternoon, can testify, last night I could barely speak I was laughing so hard at the utterly awful sentences I was writing. In the end I killed off a handful of my characters in a shoot-’em-up blood bath; had one character speak from beyond the grave to talk about how she’d died; featured a rhapsodic sequence where rocks, trees, and Mother Earth herself derive a so-called moral from this tawdry sequence of events; wrote a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards in a cheap attempt to pad my word count; and transformed an otherwise innocent, idealistic female character into a lurid seducer who beds (in absurdly comic and astonishingly acrobatic fashion) nearly the entire male population of her college campus.

So, what did you do over your Thanksgiving weekend? Now that it’s over and my ribs are slowly recovering from the 50,000-word giggles, I’ll proabably be crazy enough to try the whole NaNo insanity again next year. But I won’t be able to say then that I didn’t warn myself now. No shit, Sherlock: writing a novel in a month really, really sucks, so maybe next time I’ll try to start off with a plot, a couple of characters, and an ounce of sanity in my head. Or then again, maybe not…and maybe that’s what’s the funniest of all.

Knowing full well how many of you visit Hoarded Ordinaries looking for the lastest word on fashion, let me be the first to tell you. The hottest look on the runways of Keene (hotbed, we all know, of high couture) is, yes, blaze orange.

Yesterday I walked the dog at the Dillant-Hopkins Airport in nearby Swanzey, NH. Keene’s municipal airport is one of my favorite places to walk during the winter months. Although the runways themselves are fenced and thus inaccessible to walkers, the mile and a half stretch of road leading from the terminal parking lot to the Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant offers a relaxing there-and-back stroll overlooking the airport runways as well as surrounding fields, marshes, and woods. Closed to vehicular traffic on weekends and holidays, Airport Road is a favored place for locals to jog, roller-blade, walk, and let dogs run off leash. So although I haven’t (recently) strutted my stuff on any high fashion runways, yesterday the dog and I walked near some runways.

It’s currently deer hunting season here in New Hampshire. Although you might think that a nature lovin’ Zen Mama like Yours Truly would be an adamant animal-rights touting, anti-hunting (and anti-gun) zealot, let me be the first to set you straight on all counts. Although many of my Zen-friends are vegetarian, I eat meat, and I have no illusions about where beef, chicken, and pork come from. Even when I was a vegetarian, I never condemned hunting per se: predation is a natural aspect of any balanced ecosystem, and it doesn’t make sense to condemn people for doing something that comes naturally to wolves, mountain lion, bobcats and the like. Mother Nature herself makes no qualms about killing, so neither do I. Responsible hunters and so-called “gun nuts” love nature just as much as tofu-eating Zen-heads: in fact, many of my citified, eco-sensitive Zen friends know substantially less about the actual wild than do even neophyte hunters.

So these days when I’m driving on the outskirts of Keene and see trucks and SUVs parked on the side of the road, I don’t rail against their drivers’ butchery. Instead, a part of me wishes I had the time, know-how, and wherewithal to pull over myself, striking out into woods and fields without heed for established trails and parking lots. (For the record, this is one time of year when I don’t believe in trespassing: when the signs say “Posted: No Hunting” or “Private Property: Keep Out,” that’s a signal to be heeded regardless of whether you’re toting a gun or not.) These days when I see a group of hunters hefting a deer into a pickup truck or field-dressing a deer strung up in a tree, I don’t shake my fist in anger or exclaim “Ewww! Gross!” Instead, I’m savvy enough to know that eating and, yes, killing are a part of survival, and for many Granite Staters, deer season is one way to cache an inexpensive stockpile of food for the winter.

Instead of condemning hunters and hunting, I try to be smart and prepared. Although the municipal airport itself is closed to hunters, the surrounding fields, marshes, and woods are fair-game. On Friday, Reggie and I took a quick jaunt up Pitcher Mountain, the first time we’ve been hiking anywhere remotely “wild” since the start of hunting season. Seeing other hikers in their blaze orange stocking hats, vests, and ball caps, I came home afterwards and dug out my orange hat and the dog’s orange vest. It’s easy to forget to be prepared…but it’s just as easy to keep season-appropriate togs in the car, close-at-hand for any impromptu walk.

None of the two other walkers, their black long-haired German shepherd, or the lone jogger I saw on Airport Road yesterday was wearing blaze orange…but the pair of walkers I talked to mentioned they’d seen hunters down the road, and they wished they’d thought to wear orange as well. As the saying goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry. On the trek back to the car, I heard a rapid-fire succession of gunshots coming from a distant field: here’s hoping someone bagged this winter’s stockpile. And after hunting (unsuccessfully) for the beavers responsible for this fierce bit of arboreal predation, I spotted an equally wild sight: two bow-hunters in full, head-to-toe camouflage gear returning to their parked trucks on bicycles. Dress for success is the law of the wild, it seems. If you know there are hunters afoot, wear blaze orange; if you know deer and turkey lurk in a place where you can’t drive your truck, break out your bicycle. It’s smart to be prepared no matter what color your cap.

Today’s Photo Friday challenge is Prosperity. In the belief that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, I took these photos at a local antique shop. Enjoy!

Sometimes one picture makes an entire day worthwhile.

That isn’t to say, of course, that Thanksgiving, 2004 wasn’t “worthwhile” in its own merits before I got dressed (finally) and walked the dog around the Square around lunchtime. After all, every day is intrinsically worthwhile, and some would argue that red-letter holidays are by nature more “worthy” than so-called Ordinary Time.

All I know is that it’s been rainy and overcast these past few days — yesterday I didn’t walk the dog (a rarity for me) and only left the house to do three loads of laundry at the laundromat down the street. So today when I took the dog on our usual jaunt into and around downtown Keene, I was somewhat desperate for blog-worthy photos. Would Happenstance happen: would the Remarkable spontaneously shine through?

Initially, things didn’t look good. Although I had thought yesterday’s perpetual rain had stopped, when the dog and I left the house this morning, it was drizzly and windy, exactly the type of weather that makes walking with an umbrella impossible. As soon as you put up your umbrella, the wind blows it inside out. As soon as you give into the wind and take your umbrella down, the drizzle turns to downpour. Needless to say, this makes for less-than-ideal photographic conditions: not only did I have to worry about my digicam getting wet, on today’s walk I fought a perpetual battle against a windblown umbrella on one hand and an antsy, tugging dog on the other.

So I wasn’t expecting Serendipity to show up as I turned the corner onto Church Street; in fact, the only thing I was looking for as the dog and I turned the corner was a trash can in which to deposit a fresh baggie of “business” that Reggie had done while I stood, again, playing tug-of-war with the wind and my umbrella.

New England in general and New Hamsphire in particular is known for its fickle weather, and today was not atypical. As I hurried the dog down Church Street toward the trash receptacle I knew was at the corner of Church and Main, I saw something unexpected. Sudden sunlight. It shone over the roof of Hannah Grimes Marketplace and onto the building across the street, bisecting that facade and the line of trees before it neatly in two, a perfect line between light and dark trailing off into the vanishing point. Geometrically, it was perfect, full of the lines and angles I love. Visually, it was stunning, a glimpse of light in an otherwise overcast scene. And temporally, it was fleeting: as fumbled with the umbrella, leash, doggie-doo bag and camera, I knew that in a snap second the clouds would shift and that sudden sunlight would be gone. Act now — supplies are limited.

I took two pictures of the sudden sunlight on Church Street: the first is the image you see at the top of this entry, and the other is one I deleted. In the span of time between my first and second shutter-snaps, the sun had vanished and a suddenly sunlit brick facade became ordinary again. Now you see it, now you don’t.

I firmly believe that grace is like serendipitous sunlight, sneaking in when you least suspect it to catch you unaware. Today for the first time in my life, I’m spending Thanksgiving alone, turning down a last minute dinner invitation to spend instead the day in stretch pants eating comfort food and lounging with the dog. I don’t think I’d want to spend every Thanksgiving alone, but this year, it feels just right: a chance to contemplate this past year with its monumental comings and goings — first a PhD earned, then a 13-year marriage ended — in a spot of intentional solitude. When I stop to consider what I have to be thankful for this year, I don’t know where to start or stop: although I have regrets about things I have done or left undone, I can’t think of a single thing in my life itself that I would change.

Last week on the drive home from meeting with Tim over tea in the afternoon and my friend “A” (not her real initial) over beer and burritos in the evening, I saw a shooting star drop toward the western horizon. Given the chance to wish upon a star, I didn’t know what to ask for since these days I feel I have everything I could want or need. Although it’s bad luck, they say, to speak your wishes before they’re granted, I’ll share with you my shooting-star wish: trusting the Universe knows exactly what I need, I asked for another year of serendipitous surprise.

The weather reports say it will be a brown Thanksgiving here in Keene: in fact, the forecast calls for high winds, rain, and scattered thunderstorms with temperatures well above freezing. Still, it’s good to know my neighborhood laundromat (of which you’ve seen photos before) is ready for winter with a handy stash of rock salt and sand right by the door. In northern New England, it’s always best to be prepared.

Safe passage to everyone who’s traveling for the holidays. Here at Hoarded Ordinaries, we’re hunkered down (and doing laundry) while the weather blows in and out. And I guess that’s something to be thankful for, too.

As Kathleen would say, “mad props” to everyone who got the musical allusion in this entry’s title. Nothing like ringing in the holiday with a little gospel optimism.

It should come as no surprise that the woman who has a rubber ducky shower curtain also has red flannel puppy pajamas. Here in New Hampshire, flannel pajamas (and flannel sheets if you’re a true sensualist) are a necessity. (If you don’t believe me, go ask Amy about her monkey pajamas.) I switched from regular to flannel sheets back in September, and today I bought a new pair of flannel pajamas: red glow in the dark puppy pajamas. Okay, I wasn’t exactly sold on the “glow in the dark” part: who knows what kind of radioactive element is responsible for that. But I needed new flannel pjs, and I couldn’t resist the cute doggies…

After teaching the last of today’s classes, I’m on break until next Tuesday, so I’ll be spending a lot of time in my pjs this week. I’m looking forward to my own private pajama party: I plan to spend my time writing in pjs, blogging in pjs, reading papers in pjs, cleaning the house in pjs… In fact, apart from walking the dog, I just might spend every moment from now until next Tuesday in my apartment in my pjs. So, don’t mind me and my glow-in-the-dark doggies: we’re nestled down, snug and comfy for the night, the week, and on through the weekend.

Today is Monday, November 22: a week and a day until my NaNoWriMo deadline. I was “supposed” to write 4,000 words on the novel today, and so far I’ve written none. Typically as I approach a big writing deadline, I kick into Emergency Writing Mode. Regular habits like sleep, eating, and showering become not exactly optional, but wildly irregular. I eat when I remember to, shower when I have to, and sleep when I can no longer hold my head up. When I was an undergraduate, I had a body-abusing ritual that fueled my late-night, day-before-the-paper’s-due writing sessions. I’d sit at my desk with my typewriter (yes, one of those ancient relics), a hand-scribbled first draft, a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and a giant bag of Doritos. Hours (and countless Meaningless Carbs) later, I’d have a finished product, the final paragraph of which always began with the word “Thus,” followed by whatever half-assed thesis statement I could crank out before the arrival of the due-date’s dawn.

It’s a bit too early in the race to pull a home-stretch all-nighter…and I do have Thanksgiving break to make up for lost words. But after having not worked on the novel since yesterday, I’m feeling my Muse (or is that caffeine?) moving within me. There is, after all, an all-night convenience store just down the street that sells Mountain Dew and Doritos, so it would be easy enough to grab the ingredients to inspire an impromptu appearance of the Midnight Muse. Thus, another writer discovers the Keys to Creativity, delivered via the agency of sugar and artificial colors, inspiration by the two-liter bottle or bagful. Watch where you tread, Gentle Reader, and beware: the Writer is at work!

After adopting Reggie from a non-profit animal rescue organization in 1998, I’ve kenneled him only once, at a clean, well-lighted place in Toledo, OH. I have nothing against kennels per se…but before I adopted him, Reg had been on “doggie death row” for a month and in a private, crowded kennel for two months after that. Given his history, I’ve always felt terrible taking him back to “the joint” even temporarily. I have a wonderful pet-sitter who pampers Reggie whenever I’m away while taking in my mail, turning on & off the lights, and otherwise making my apartment seem “lived in.” One of the benefits of being a childless pet-owner is you get to spoil your pets shamelessly; as one dog-owner once confided, “If we weren’t going to spoil them, why’d we get them in the first place?”

And yes, this is the first time a pile of dog poop has been immortalized here on Hoarded Ordinaries.

I have a long to-do list for the day, so I don’t have time to write a proper entry. And since Saturday is supposed to be my blog-sabbath, I shouldn’t be blogging at all. But I haven’t said much recently about my NaNoWriMo novel, so here’s a quick update on where things stand.

As of right now, I’m about 15,400 words behind where I “should” be. When I initially charted my target word-counts for the month, I’d envisioned having 29,400 words written by today, November 20; right now, I have just over 14,000 words. This means that I’ll be write, write, writing over Thanksgiving in a valiant attempt to catch-up and ultimately reach my 50,000 word goal by November 30.

That’s 36,000 words in ten days…3,600 words a day. Looking at the numbers makes my head spin: is it possible for me to crank out that many words in the next ten days on top of life’s other obligations?

Officially, I don’t know whether this is possible: actually, the thought of writing a novel in a month never sounded possible. But there’s something about impossibility that is wildly attractive to me: when someone tells me I can’t possibly do something, that makes me all the more motivated to prove them wrong. So is it possible to write 36,000 words in 10 days? Probably not…but I plan to do it anyway.

Word-counts notwithstanding, the good news on the NaNo writing front is my novel is starting to take on a life of its own. I’d sometimes heard authors talk about characters “appearing” in their fiction as if a ghost simply walked through the door and then materialized under their pen. And I’d also heard published novelists talk about how characters seem to move and act out of their own volition, doing things their authors never intended them to do.

I have a character who’s starting to behave in this way. She materialized out of the blue, a nameless, disheveled woman who walked into a drugstore while I was writing about someone else. I didn’t know what she was doing there, but I let my pen uncover the story: the nameless woman walked into the cosmetics aisle and started looking for makeup. When the store clerk, the character I had intended to write about, walked up to the woman to ask if she needed help, the woman took off her sunglasses to reveal a black eye she needed makeup to cover. In a scene that spontaneously materialized under my pen, the store clerk helped the nameless woman make-up her face so she could take her belongings, leave her abusive boyfriend, and move back with her parents, unashamed. When the nameless woman walked out of the drugstore, I truly hoped she was walking into a new life, a fresh start.

This morning I woke up and realized fiction isn’t that easy. Although I like this character and want the best for her, this morning I realized in a flash where her story is heading. Her abusive boyfriend isn’t the type who’s going to let her walk out of his life. This morning I wrote about this boyfriend and his motivations. Although I haven’t yet discovered why she would want to be with him, I realized his intentions for her: it’s all about power and control. He’s not going to let her leave. He’s a violent, angry man, and he’s going to insist on taking what he believes is his deserved due.

When I first started writing random stories about various characters who all live in a fictional town not unlike Keene, I didn’t intend for their lives to interweave. But somehow, the story has taken a life of its own. For some reason–my personal political leanings, perhaps, or the larger mood of the nation–several of the characters I’ve brainstormed are somehow connected to a women’s clinic like this one. For some reason, my character’s story is starting to fall in line with something I read yesterday, and that can mean only one thing. I’ve created this character only to kill her off. In the warped justice of fiction, at least one character has to die in the name of “realism.”

When I got my first glimmer of inspiration regarding this project, I envisioned writing a novel-length collection of stories like James Joyce’s Dubliners or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. In the meantime, I’m sensing that my novel is closer in kind to Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. The story of a group of women who live on run-down, dead-end street, Naylor’s novel features one wrenching chapter where one of the characters is gang-raped and left for dead in an alley. That isn’t the direction I wanted to take my novel: I didn’t intend for there to be a political much less feminist undertone to the story. And yet, the novel and its characters are taking on a life of their own, and I’m not sure this spontaneous growth is something I can claim or control.