NaNoWriMo and Baseball's "Off" Season

Just a quick program note, boys and girls:  Yours truly is going to attempt National Novel Writing Month (commonly known as NaNoWriMo to the inside crowd) this year.

However, I have no intention of getting a novel done with this exercise.  Instead, the focus is to learn the long-term habit of working on a novel daily.  Some things, of course, will have to be compromised.  Beginning Tuesday, November 1st, I will be in a more limited or non-extistant capacity in one or more of the following while I devote myself to my "baby":

• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Twitter
• Meetup
• Blogger
• Rotten Tomatoes
• GoodReads
• Email
• Texting

I'm kidding on the last two...of COURSE I'll check those just as faithfully.  (#Maybe #JustKidding)

Think of it as my maternity leave while I hatch this evil plan to win readers.  Have a great Thanksgiving, all, and I'll catch you again in December.

If you missed this post, you can catch it again in its entirety here.

Write on.

The Knot, End of the Discussion (For Now)

Whenever I experience a change in my own habits, I tend to panic.  My subconscious says, "Nope, don't think so," and then I'm scrambling to figure out what the flip I really want, when what I really want I just established.

Since the advent of the novel, I have a problem:  I don't really want to read.  I can't wait to find out what happens next in my own story, so anything on-line, off-line, longer than a poem, smaller than a breadbox tends to be an obstacle.  (Hell, blogging tends to be an obstacle.  But I am here to record the truth of the matter, dear writer.)  Shut up, world, and let me see what the protagonist does now.

I know why I want to shut off the outside and just write:

• I'm afraid I'm going to lose this great story if I read someone else's; 
• I still have a whole bookcase of books not yet read.

Lack of work/life balance, that's all.  I still need to read; if I wrapped myself up in my own work I would be operating with a sense of hubris that is relative to that of a Yankee player or Top Gun pilot.  But by feeling this way about reading, I can come to a compromise; I no longer need to finish a book because I was dumb enough to buy it (even though it's bringing me down), and I no longer need to clean off a bookshelf in a month.  I've read down the stack to the point that all of the books from the floor are gone, everything's properly shelved, and if I stop myself in the bookstore with "hey Jo, you have enough books and your own book at home" then I can curl up with a book and stop clocking in at one hundred pages a sitting.

Unless, I'm writing, that is.

I'm grateful to finally be picky, and grateful to have a novel, strangely enough.  In the advent of no husband, no children, no pool and no pets, I'm grateful to have my version of a progeny, and one that I adore so freely, without having to learn about the subject matter from the ground up.

Write on.

Encrypted

I've been carrying a Moleskine journal with me more and more lately, a soft companion with no rules.  I clip a gel-writing pen to the cover, usually with some outlandishly-colored blood in its veins, and I sit in bars, coffee shops, bookstores (not for the faint of heart, that; staff may think you are writing in a book of theirs) and park benches, spilling the beans.  I sometimes get out my BlackBerry and take pictures of the evidence, and put it on Foursquare for geographic reference or on Facebook with a fat cookie or cake piece to get comments...and I do get comments.  For the sweets.

Rarely do I get compliments on Facebook for my writing.  I'm starting to wonder if it's because I write in cursive, and if the friends who follow me on Facebook can read something that isn't a downloadable font.

I'm a minority in the pictures of this subject.  I'm also a minority in my writing groups.  Often in a group of three to fifteen people I am the only one going analog.  I adore analog.  I'm truly myself with analog, free to stumble, run, swim or fly over the pages.

Sometimes, though, the pages represent time wasted eternal to an outsider.  "You go to so many writing group meetings," say non-writing friends, and even some fellow members.  "Is your bedroom overflowing with filled journals?"  No, but more because I am a slow writer, a careful writer, even in private.  I got my very deliberate cursive from a strict teacher in the sixth grade, who told me my handwriting was awful (it was legible), and that if I made a concentrated effort to improve it, then I would be accepted into her special class for something called Calligraphy, where I could dip a pen in ink and create fancy letters like the ancients.  Few kids bit at this bribe, but I was lonely enough then to bite at anything...sort of like I am lonely enough now to bite at any social networking site or technology just to find companionship.  With the calligraphy class I learned to change my handwriting (my fifth-grade handwriting and my seventh-grade handwriting look like two different people--I'm lucky I didn't have to sign things at that age), and grip the pen with such worry that two things happen when I write:

• You can't take my pen from me--the hand will come along for the ride;
• I cramp up about a page in and can no longer feel my middle finger at the tip.

I have been told to loosen up by other teachers, physiological medical professionals, even psychiatrists.  I've tried, but then the distinctive art is lost.  I would rather be in pain and combative when it comes to my writing than relax and lose the picture.

Occasionally, someone will shock me and be on my side.  I'm used to my handwriting, so the shock comes from seeing the beauty again from the outside.  There's a cafe in North Beach in San Francisco that has fallen in love, collectively, with my pages--I have been known to get free drinks with my letters.  I've written for charity without a laptop, contributing by the page, for the penmanship.  And occasionally someone in the writing group will see me prepare for the session and their jaw will drop on the table.  "That paper is unlined," they'll say, and point, as though I just hurled a submarine pitch and the ump called it fair.  "How come you can do that and the paper is UNLINED?"  Because I'm a freak, I think, but just smile to the inquisitor.  My control issues work FOR me in this department.

This afternoon I was skimming my news feed through Twitter and found this, tucked in amongst the baseball stats, Kindle Fire announcements, and publication pointers.  My favorite journal manufacturer is sponsoring a project to collect something that may be a lost art in just a few generations, and that art is HANDWRITING?  You mean at some point someone is going to need a comparable Rosetta Stone to decipher me?  You mean that I, the least hip person and probably not one of the smartest people on the face of the planet, is using something akin to Navajo spy messages or passing down an oral tradition in recipe?  

Or code?

And all of the apathy toward my life from outsiders, all of the things I'm not smart enough to see and all of the things I have to keep up with to be published and "liked," were washed away.  I have a gift.  I have the writing equivalent of the knuckleball, long lost to pitchers because they can't maintain control of it.  I can maintain control of it, in the knot between my fingernail and my hand.  I have the ball at the seams, and I send the curves flying, so slowly that the page thinks it can be hit out of the park, still swinging at something lost in the tomorrows.  Suddenly, I feel relevant, and...surprisingly precious to an unsuspecting world.

Write on...a lost art.

When To Let Go

The baseball season is over.

Well, at least for me and the other die-hard Giants' fans.

The bandwagon fans will be completely gone again in a few more weeks.  For those of us who will always wear the orange and black, this is a relief--with any luck, ticket prices next year will be reasonable.  We have our reasons for heroes.  The only thing left to endure is "Not so hot now, are you?"

Beating my head against a wall, I keep the common sense to myself, only to write it here...

People.  The Giants were never hot.  They were scrappy.  And they weren't scrappy enough this year.

I'm good with that.  But I'm also content that at this point, Bochy is pulling a Ohio State University coaching trick, only in reverse.  Ohio State University coaches, two of them now, tend to put in their greener, second string if they are light years ahead of the opposition in the second half.  It makes them look like good sports, their second string becomes deep, and they have a better team.

Bochy is operating on the same principle, in the reverse.  He's losing, and losing so badly that he is using this time for "development."  I won't see a lot of the same faces next year because Bochy needs a new hitting team.  (He needs a new hitting coach, too--but I digress.)  He's so far behind he can put in his second string and give them time to learn to be his hitting heroes.  He's creating a deeper team than he has right now.

Which isn't hard, since these guys have nowhere to go but up.

*****

About a month ago I was in the shower, and I was happy when a story idea bloomed in my brain.  What I wasn't happy about was that it was a story for a novel.

I guess it's a good development that I recognized it as a novel instead of trying to write it first.  But I ground my teeth anyway...I'm just now getting the hang of writing short stories.

And a damn novel shows up.  I haven't even published a short story, or even submitted one.

So I wrote around the novel for a few weeks, daydreamed it, free-writing.  Tried to talk myself out of it by writing around it.  What actually dampened it was reading the book "Moneyball," by Michael Lewis.

You guessed it.  The novel was about baseball.  And reading "Moneyball" made the novel unbelievable.  That, and the Giants had a homeless fan who has been missing since July, which was a part of my novel before I knew they had a homeless fan that they were looking for.

Let me reiterate--the novel has dampened.  But it hasn't gone away.  It just makes me think of how to write it better, or how to re-shape the idea.

I can't help it...I so love baseball.  It seems stupid not to write about it.  It seems stupid not to do it, better.

And, since I'm not such a hot writer, but scrappy instead, I have nothing to lose.

Thanks, Jim Tressel.  Thanks, Bruce Bochy.

Write on.

Coming Clean

Today is another Shut Up and Write Marathon...I haven't attended one of these in a while, and I can tell that my body feels strange to be back. My mind doesn't know what to do with all that paper, for starters--"what? You want to focus on yourself for a bit? How the hell does that work?"--and then there is the need to write the first draft long-hand, which means that the hand gets tired. The sun is out but it's freezing cold out there--my mother's voice is at the back of my head demanding to know why I don't go outside and play anyway, because if you want cold Lord knows there are days in the Midwest where you spit and it sounds like you dropped your car keys.

So get out there.

F, no.

I'm too old for a lecture, Mom.

And yet I'm not. Over the last year I have made three monumental mistakes because I thought I deserved to make them in order to "feel good," which is sort of roughly on par with justifying smoking by saying you're stressed out by your mother's cancer. It doesn't make sense and makes perfect sense. The other night I came clean to a friend, ready, braced, for the lecture. Her response, "You aren't evil." YES, I AM. "Nope." As though what I had done was, well, human. (And I would repeat it here, but I'm still not sold on the part that I'm not evil. So saying it makes me a bit nauseous. I am my own crazy aunt at the family gathering.)

The lecture I got wasn't to stop, by the way--telling me to stop any kind of behavior is probably the least effective mode of getting me to stop. The lecture I got was to start worshipping myself, which is completely opposite from my normal behavior. About a month ago my boss gave me the assignment to complete a self-evaluation and then warned me not to get my feelings hurt when he got a hold of it and gave it back to me for not being harsh enough. I gave him an even, steady look and said, "Believe me, I'll make your idea of harsh look like a tea party." He shrank back a little in his chair. "You wouldn't stun me by sending it back," I continued. "What would stun me is if you kept it, liked it, or was kind to it. THAT would throw me off my game." And with that head's up he followed my advice and accepted it, which meant that I was back off balance.

Kindness usually puts me off. I don't know what to do with it, or how to thank those who bestow it. Sadly, since moving here, my thought process is that if you grant me kindness you must be ready to ask for something--and if you're a man the motives that cross my mind are twice as sinister. So the lecture of kindness that my friend gave me was on par with putting me in a blindfold and spinning me about 40 times and then telling me to find the door. She put the extra confusion in the mix by adding this to the lecture:

You have to be nice to yourself too. Kind to yourself. Worship yourself. Or you'll keep making this decision.

Oh shit. How the hell do I do that? Be nice? Worship? To THIS?

YEAH, TO THIS, JO. But how...

I'm about to find out. Be nice, dear reader.