"How was it important for people to be writing novels?" ......
11/15/13 9:55a Fri.

The Wrimoer supposed she was not getting too late a start on the day's writing session. This was about the same time she'd started in on her last two sessions. It was so hard not to think in terms of how long it would mean she would have to sit there writing. When she did her regular journal writing, it could take just as long as the Nanowrimo writing, but there was no intention to concern herself with any end result. She simply wrote because she wanted to. She had gotten into the habit so long ago because what started out to be an experimental 'practice' soon showed itself to be very practical and useful to her. This provided further momentum and motivation to continue the practice of journal writing not just for the sake of itself, but because it was very important to her.

The Nanowrimo project had not reached that level yet. She was still questioning it. She tried to keep her intention on the idea that this daily exertion gave practice in fluidity of generating writing and ideas while typing, (rather than longhand). It also convoked a different state of mind the way she was going about it. This was an ongoing experience that she was exploring and playing with. She was not yet convinced that being able to think and type fluently was that necessary or useful. But if it also allowed her to have something that she could share in the digital realm of cyberspace, she thought that might be reason enough.

It was very hard to force oneself to just type without self-correcting when working digitally. It was just too easy to self-correct. But that interrupted the flow. One was always stumbling and back tracking to correct a misspelling or other error. There was not enough rhythm in this way of working. One would never want to listen to a speaker or reader who always stopped one's speech to correct what one had just said.

Her mother had taught her early on that when practicing music it was most importan first to keep a rhythm. If that meant going slowly, then that was what you had to do. So here she f - Here the wrimoer found she was trying to type very slowly so that she could think while writng. But she was still making typing errors,. They were driving her crazy and the sloness of this typing wrate was putting her to sleep,. She would never be able to continue like this. It made her cross eyed.

Well she had to revert to the fast typing with errors and correcting as she went along. The just mentioned experiment had already set enough tone of putting a glaze over her eyes, and had gotten her wondering how she would complete writing the required amount of words for the day.

It did not matter that she was now a bit over her target. Those extra words would certainly be needed on another day. And the sooner she was finished with this effort she felt, the better. Right now it was just something to get through.

The Wrimoer had still been following the local social media Nanowrimo group and putting her two cents in. She had not made postings announcing have made it to the half-way mark or whatever other word goals people had set for themselves. Supposedly it was helpful and incentivizing to be able to share such accomplishments with others. She wondered about it though. She was finding it unpleasant to read about. It sounded too much like bragging. She did not mind bragging that much if it was done openly - where the bragger was aware of the boast and disclosed that along with the boast. When it was down without the disclosure it felt too much as if the bragger was asking for agreement without being able to say that directly. No, not asking for agreement, but expecting a reaction of agreement. She hated when she felt as if someone was saying something and then waiting for the other person to return an expected reaction. It was an emotional pressure one person was placing on another. That put one person in a position of either giving a false response rather than a spontaneous response, or withholding a response out of resistance. It was not lea

10:25a alarm

...leaving people free to share and communicate from within. It meant one person held the reins. This was not a collaborative venture but an engagement controlled by one person. What then was the point of the other person? Would a doll, puppet, or machine do just as well?

Here in the local Nano group, people would post their accomplishments, and others would chime in with their cheers. Was it truly a sharing of one's pleasure with one's accomplishment? Did the sharing spur others to keep on? The Wrimoer felt it could act as a deterrent. If one was too far from the target one could too easily give up. There was the other side of it too. If one was too far off the target, it seemed to almost start off a pity fest. No, that was not true. The Wrimoer had seen where people had jumped in to buoy up the person who wrote of falling too far behind. They gave advice on ways to catch up and encouraged that it was very possible to do it. This seemed to have worked in at least one instance.

The Wrimoer wanted to see people realizing that one had all the tools one needed within oneself to do this challenge. So what then was the purpose of doing it at this particular time of year. Why had she felt she should be doing it? She had very little illusions that she was actually writing a novel. She was writing certainly, but she felt she could hardly call it a novel.

The other Wrimoers were very caught up in having to concern themselves with the other aspects of novel writing - form, structure, characters, plot development, details of reality, setting, dialogue, etc. This got her wondering just why did they want to write a novel? Did everyone want to write one so that they could publish and sell it?Or did they just want to write so that others could read it? Or was it to give others something that would be a pleasure for them to read? How did one write a novel for oneself? What would one write of fiction that one would want to read oneself in the future?

If it was just the experience of writing a novel, of getting lost in that world, then it would hardly seem to matter whether one did it according to the Nanowrimo goal. It would seem the primary purpose of that was to prove to oneself that one could do it. One would gain confidence in oneself by acting on a desire and carrying the desire out to fruition. By doing it with others doing it at the same time, one did not feel alone. One had a companionship in one's mission. Man was after all a social creature.

10:45 a

She was stalling in her writing, wanting to think, wanting to rest more than think. She could not wait til she would be free to work in her natural rhythms. Outer imposed constraints served some purposes she knew. They were much like the exercises she gave her students in the art classes. They were like puzzles or challenges that got you looking at a thing in a differnt way. The got you to try a thing in a different way. They were exercise. They strengthened the muscles while also creating flexibility. The mental muscles in this case.

Why did one think one had to make an effort to strengthen one's muscles? Did one not believe that one came into this world with a natural proclivity to act and perform in the manner one was created to? In a way, putting oneself through exercises, rather than having regular life be the source of where and how one used one's abilities, was saying and strengthening the idea, the message to one's self, that one was weak and lacking. The Wrimoer wanted to reflect more on this idea.

It was one thing to do it all as a game, for the sheer fun of it. And to join with others in that way.

The other question

10:55a alarm

... was, why was it so important for so many people to write a novel? How was it important for people to be writing novels? What did they gain from it? Was it that they were creating? Was it that they were entering that world of make believe when they wrote? She felt that that was the most important reason to be doing it, but that did not require any follow-up work of preparing a manuscript for a publisher, for printing, for distribution etc.

That made her wonder just how had this whole movement gotten started. When she had searched on the question of why Nanowirmo was a bad idea, she had come across one article that included a point that what was really needed was readers, not writers. With all the writers out there now, there were supposedly very few people who actually did much reading, according to that author. The ranks of the world's Nanowrimoers could hardly be a big enough pool of people who taken out of commission as potential readers!

This was a bit like the question of the current Health Care quagmire the government was struggling with. The Wrimoer remembered how on the one hand it had been so important that healthy (young) people get signed up for the new Health Care options. It was their payment into the funds that would provide the surplus money from which payouts would be made. Exactly the people who did not need Health Care. On the other hand the argument had been made by all the lawmakers that indeed everyone had to sign up because Everyone would need healthcare. The question never seemed to be asked - so which one is true? If everyone will need to use the healthcare, than why is it so important to get the money from the people who are not costing the system anything?

The Wrimoer wondered from her cynical self, was there a hidden ulterior motive in the Nanowrimo movement? As she had also read in that article on why one should not participate in the Nano challenge, that there was a great market now for 'How to  write' books, methods, coaches, websites. Involving people in such challenges as Nanowrimo was also a way to keep people engaged in this activity. It was by now a good sized business. But that was all from her cynical side. Perhaps she would look into this some more at another time, or perhaps she would just forget about it for awhile.

Just now she was concerned over whether she would be able to make it through the next fifteen minutes or whatever was left of that time segment. Her nose was clogging up terribly, the back of her neck had been getting too numb. This was all from sitting still in one position while doing the writing. She had intended to get up after the first alarm and get herself ready for the day before returning to the rest of the writing. But she was in the middle of writing a thought when that alarm had rung, so she kept on. She reset the alarm and plowed through the next half hour. This day she had no intention of going further than one and one half hours. She would have to be so deeply involved with writing something that she desperately wanted to capture, for her to go beyond the decided time.

11:22 a

The Wrimoer had been finding that the administrative aspects of this writing challenge, that she had set up for herself, seemed to be taking up almost as much time as the actual writing. She spent time transferring the writing to another two documents. One to get the word count with. The other to keep the whole running document together in. And a third

11:25a alarm ( She reset the alarm but would stop whenever she had finished what she wanted to say.)

... was a spreadsheet in which she entered the statistics of every day's writing session. She was finding herself adding columns of things to keep track of - how many minutes a writing session had been, the words per minute rate. What was this fascination with numbers and counting that even she could not resist? This was looking not that different than dealing with monies. She had this issue on her list of things to write about. That was as far as she would go with it now.

And lastly there was the posting to the new blog of the day's writing. That always took some time. She was trying to get caught up in posting all those earlier sessions. She only allowed one such back posting a day. She did not want the blog machinery to think her posting was a spam action. She had heard that numerous postings at one time were sometimes interpreted by the blog machinery as being spam from a robot poster, something meant to game the digital system.

She hated having to write about these technical aspects. She suspected that such references would soon be outdated and meaningless. She did not like placing her writing in such a specific time and space. It was the vagueness of the time and space that let her feel it was a fictional place, that gave her the atmosphere of stepping outside her day-to-day reality. This was the experience that she found so exceptional about doing the challenge, though at the same time it gave her some creeps to do that, just because she got so involved and almost lost in it.

Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, she had not yet decided. She was managing to hold off checking into social media until she had finished the daily writing. But then, after she had had such an intense effort of concentration, was she spending even more time and involvement in the social media? Yesterday it had felt as if she had been quicker about it.

Later in the evening though there had been so much more activity from others though that she had wound up spending more time with it. Was this just because it was a time where everyone was nearing or rounding the corner of the halfway mark and therefore more were reporting in? She would try to keep this in mind as she attended.

She had also had ideas that perhaps she could use her writings that she put on the new blog, in which to insert some of her own images as a way for them to be found, as perhaps purchased through the various venues she had been so slowly setting them up in. The question was how willing was she to spend time setting this up? If it was just to make money, that never gave her enough motivation to follow through with the effort required. It would have to be something that was done for the pleasure of itself. For instance and experiment. Could this be useful? Would people  find it and make use of it? That sounded like a fun thing to test as a test. One item was not enough of a test though. One had to have several things going that way. Yes she wanted to try just for the fun of trying a thing.

11:47 a (It seemed there was only 10 minutes left in this session.)

The Wrimoer had been so sure she would not continue past the last alarm, and now she had done it. She had broken her word to herself. One needed to be careful of this. One had to be careful not to hurt one's future desire to do a thing. There was that question again of 'needing to be careful'. Why did one need to be careful? Was there no resilience built into one's life, into existence? Was there no inner desire that had an innate wisdom of its own rhythm's? She was at least becoming aware of when she was forcing herself instead of allowing things to flow naturally.

Now she was sitting there staring off into the sky not really wanting to get further involved in any writing because the alarm would then interrupt it. She had finished the writing for the day.

11:55 am alarm

And only by now had she wanted to see her word count. That was perhaps a first for her
11:56 am
2812 words 120 minutes = 23.4/wpm

11/14/13 9:48a

It was the next day. The Wrimoer had just finished breakfast, a breakfast without her usual cheese on bread in some form or another. This morning she had had to have a boiled egg, and an English muffin with butter and jam. She was out of the cheddar cheese she usually had on the bread. It might be several days yet before she could get back to the supermarket to stock up on cheese and other supplies. Her car had been for weeks and weeks sitting in the parking lot out back of the apartment house waiting for a verdict from the mechanic on whether it was ok to be driven as it was, and whether it could be repaired.

Her student had been able to find out from one of the mechanics, who it turned had had indeed come to check on the car, that the car was in such disrepair that it was probably not worth repairing. The Wrimoer had been reluctant to accept this verdict since it had not come directly from the head mechanic. It had come from the helper. The Wrimoer wanted to know if she could still limp along with the car just around town and take the risk of whether she would get caught driving the car illegally. She had been driving it illegally for 10 months already. That was when it had needed an updated inspection sticker. Now there were only two, (and by now one and a half), months left before the color of the sticker year should be completely off the road. By the first of the new year, there should be no more stickers of that color on the road.

She had been through this before. She had been amazed at how many stickers she saw still on the road. She herself had come face to face with police cars while her car still bore a sticker from over a year old. She could not remember how long she had driven that way.

One year she had finally been stopped with a long outdated sticker. The police car had accompanied her and her car to her home so that she could retrieve the insurance papers. It had been an unpleasant experience to pull into the driveway with a patrol car following behind and then waiting for her. Her insurance papers had been in order but he had questioned her social security card.

The card had the name she always went by, while her license had her official name. The card had been issued when she was in high school. She had never changed to her official name.

When she had gone to become a citizen finally, after having lived all her life since the age of one and a half years old, she had thought she would include the name she was always called in her legal name. She made it her middle name. She thought that would take care of the problem. It had not though. Any identifications always asked for the first name and the middle initial. The middle name was never used. That was how there was such a discrepancy between the social security card and the driver's license.

In the climate of identification verification that so permeated the land ever since the horrific terrorist event, card was not in order. She managed to tell the officer that the motor vehicle people had always accepted this as part of her identification. He had relented and had returned the card to her. For a moment she thought he was going to take it away from her. He warned her that she needed to get that updated. The he had written her the ticket for quite a sum.

She had been risking the same scenario occurring again for the last 10 months.

10:19a alarm

The car had been limping along around town with an unhealthy rear axle or cv joint. It had been repaired once but quickly reverted to the same bucking and skipping in the rear as it drove. She had taken it back to the mechanic once for them to have a look. The shop was 8 miles out of town, a distance she was not comfortable driving the car with those circumstances. The mechanic had driven the car to see for himself. It had not acted up. He thought the car was probably ok to drive if not too far anywhere, and they had left it that she should return when it acted up again.

It acted up soon enough but by then she no longer had funds to fix it. She continued driving it carefully just around town. She did not travel further than a few miles. It meant she missed out on the meetings of a planning committee she was part of. That had been a whole other experience for her, one that she did not like, and one that taught her a lot about what she needed and wanted. That was a story for another time though.

Not having a car meant she had to walk to the library lugging her gear in a little rolling hand cart. The library was not too far from her home. It had been a challenge to do this because she had not been feeling fit and healthy for over a year now. She was sure that was because she was so up in the air over what she wanted to do with her life. Though she obsessed over the possible physical causes of all the little symptoms, she always returned to the idea that it would all come back into balance and harmony once she found her inner balance and purpose again,

She had for years been questioning the path she was on. Her identity and role in life, life with others, was that of a visual artist.
****** this was another topic she wanted to set aside and come back to later*******
10:37am

Though she wanted to set this topic aside for now, she suddenly saw a connection between talking about her identity as an artist, and her legal identity documents, and made that further note in her writing.

There had been a flurry of postings by other wrimoers on the social media wrimo group, most of which were either about how far people had come in their writing, who wanted to meet in order to write together, questions over what strategies others used to solve their writing  and content problems, challenges to each other to meet certain word count goals, and questions over how others formatted their work. Mostly it was about meeting to write and meeting one's targets. She had indulged in reading these posts after she had gotten her own writing done the day before.

She had had a lot of writing to make up the day before just from having missed one day. The strategy with setting the timer had worked well. For the most part it had freed her from even looking at the clock. It often felt as if the timer, set to ring in 30 minutes, rang in ten minutes. Only once had she reached a point when she was balking and stalling and wanting to stop. She had noted the time then and continued

10:49a alarm

to write in hopes the alarm would ring soon. It had rung very shortly after. It almost seemed as if she knew deeper inside when it was about time for it to ring.

Though the writing and the time had sped along and she been able to keep up resetting the alarm to continue for another half hour segment until she had done the time she needed for her goal at the words per minute pace she assumed she was doing, it turned out that the pace had been much slower. She had surpassed her goal but the writing rate was a lot less. When you accounted for 5 fewer words a minute over 180 minutes that amounted to a whopping 900 words. That was quite a chunk of writing. She wondered if the time she had spent trying to make a list of things she wanted to remember to return to had cut that much into the writing time.

Or just that time spent thinking instead of writing. She probably had stopped frequently to stare into space just to remember something or think how to say it. She had let herself slip back into that mode of writing. She knew she was supposed to just keep writing, focus on keeping to words coming. That was so hard to do. Even now she pondered over whether that was important or why. Not just pondered but questioned. She could intellectually understand the concept of it, but she had her strong doubts over it.

That had been one of the questions a wrimoer on the social media group had posed. She asked whether she should go with the story she wanted to work on and really just work at doing it the way she wanted to or should she stay with the wrimo challenge. The fellow wrimoer had even considered starting the project over so that it could be something that could more easily fit the parameters of the challenge. Advice had ranged from reavaluate why you are doing the challenge, to going with the story you want to tell.

Here she was stopping to ponder again. Now she felt she had to remember to catch herself stopping to think and make her fingers fly. Yes it did seem so stupid to just continue talking/writing when one wanted so badly to just let one's self think and reflect - to look at a question, to consider it, to think of possibilities around a question, to come up with ideas for the question, to try to remember things for it.

11:05a

She was getting edgy. This would be a tough session to fulfill. She did not want to pick up any of the topics she had listed the previous day. She was so oversaturated from the previous days lengthy writing and consequent involvement with other aspects of the writing that she needed to step back from it. She had again thought the night before that she could barrel herself, force herself, through accomplishing the challenge just so she would be done with it and could move on to doing what she wanted to do. She was questioning how good it was to put one's self through these rigours. What did it really prove or accomplish?

For a while she thought it was giving her practice in fluency, in being able to write, to generate, without stopping. But of what value if it made one so resistant that one just tread water and refused to consider writing anything that required thinking?

Part of the pleasure of the writing was the thinking. All that really mattered was that one enjoyed one's work and continued it from an inner desire. To keep forcing one's self to do it, to drive one's self to do it was like saying, " Here, play damn you, have fun damn you or else!". That was crazy.

The original purpose of the Nanowrimo event was that people try the challenge as a way to prove to themselves they could indeed get through a first draft. Taking the challenge along with others meant one had others who were trying to accomplish the same thing. It gave a sense of comraderie, a shared goal. One could feel as if one was playing with others in working towards one's goal. But that did not mean one had to do it.

The Nanowrimo website was set up not just to validate one's own wordcount but to also participate nationwide in state races for which states'  were moving faster than others in reaching their collective targets. She supposed this was all to help give incentive to motivate oneself

11:19 a alarm

From this she had learned that her state had a little more than 800 people participating. The website had sent them all reminders that they should register their locations so that they would be contributing to the overall goals of the state. This message and idea had almost revolted her. She had no interest in anything like this. She would probably check to see if she had fulfilled this just so she would not hold her state back in any way, but this kind of group or tribal identity horrified and revolted her. She had been annoyed to receive the message.

She also felt it had been hard enough to figure out how and where she was to go on the Nanowrimo website just to get her word count validated. Whenever she encountered such lack of clarity coming from those involved with communication, she questioned their purpose. But that was her cynical, distrusting, side showing its face, as it so often did. Too often she was seeing things that way, or reading that question into what she saw. That was her own bias. What part of her family history, her growing up, had led her to see things from that point of view? She tried to counteract that point of view as best she could, to at least not lock that perspective into being the only possible way that someone's behavior might be.

She had just lost the other thought that had flitted through her mind as she was considering the previous. One could not catch them fast enough. They would flow as they wished. One could just capture whatever one could capture. Little fragments here and there or big chunks and sections, or both. One had to trust that if they were important enough they would return in another flow. Was it like a stream or a river that kept flowing or was it like the ocean's tide that ebbed and flowed in and out of the shore? These were both qualities of water. Were these also qualities of certain physics particles (the names of which she did not remember). They had certain patterns of movements/activities and the patterns they could be measured by physicists for, were dictated by the nature of the experiments or measuring devices physicists used for measuring. Thereby the particle nature could not be separated from the experiment, perhaps for that matter, (no pun intended), from the physicist. The wrimoer did not know how correct her description of this was. She might have gotten this all wrong.

11:39a

She felt as if she was really at the end of her rope for writing. When would this be over? She had not checked with the last alarm reset whether she was resetting for the third time or even the 4th time. At least if it was the 4th time, she should be way ahead in the word count.

Hah! The Wrimoer's flash of inspiration was that she should disguise all the word count talk as some other kind of game. Then perhaps she could feel ok about using up writing time in endlessly discussing word count.

What could word count be a metaphor for? On a certain level it was a bit like everyone's obsession with the accumulation of stuff, of money, of status symbols, of winning. What was the real meaning of all that? What was at the heart of that? One was doing it to measure one's value against each other, against and ideal commonly held by oneself and others. But were these ideas and values that then prevented one from reaching a truer potential? Man had such a tough time believing in that ephemeral potential and inner value.

She remembered what she had wanted to mention. Some advice about  writing addressed to would be writers by Ernest Hemingway. A friend had posted the article this appeared in to the social media.

11:49 a alarm 
... and the wrimoer had seen it on her newsfeed. There were two basic premises of the advice. One was 'don't judge'. The other was to observe observe observe. Go into any situation and really watch what is going on. What is making each being/character involved in the situation act in the way they are acting. Watch yourself. What is evoking in you what feelings, reactions, and behaviours. It did not seem as if Hemingway was even saying to write on these things. It seemed he was saying to see  - to practice seeing. That meant holding back one's judgement of what was good or bad, or of what one wanted to happen. She had felt when she read this that it was powerful advice not just for writing but for living. It brought such new meaning to the experiencing of everything in one's life, whether pleasant or unpleasant. It all became a subject  to know more about.

And this reminded her of a piece she had hear on the public radio and had yet to find again. This was an interview or a story about a professor who achieved outrageous amounts of work while also being almost completely accessible to his students for guidance. She could only remember the gist of  his story. He operated by trying to treat every problem presented to him, whether by student or in his life, as a data collection project. It became something to observe and set up to gather data around. He had found in the process that this was also how he kept the hounds of anxiety at bay. He had enormous problems with anxiety over almost anything apparently, and this was the only effective method for keeping himself distracted from obsessing over a problem or feeling paralyzing  anxiety.

The Wrimoer knew she was not remembering the story accurately. She had search for it over and over again in vain. She had wanted to read more about this professor's ideas. She was at least glad she had seen a parallel between the professor's methods and what Hemingway advised. But what had made Hemingway so dark that he had had to commit suicide? That much she did not know.

Ugh - it looked like there were quite a few writers/authors who had committed suicide. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolff, Hemingway. That was a shorter list than she had thought. Had there been writers before the turn of the century who had done so? There were probably not that many writers then. She wondered if it had to do with the beliefs in Modern Times of the futility of it all.

She believed this was a huge issue that people were now holding onto as deeply as they had previously held onto their Gods and religions, This belief came without a sense of purpose and meaning though. She thought that was a very unnourishing mental and emotional environment for humans to thrive in,

12:15p
and that it was detrimental to one's health and welfare. The Times had come down to either that view or the opposite view of very rigid beliefs in tightly held identities of specific Gods and religions.

12:19 p alarm at last. She had gone way over.
3185 words
3185/151 min = c. 21 wpm

11/13/13 9:21a Wed.

The wrimoer had had too full a day on the previous day and therefore did not get to do any writing. She would have to double  the quota this day. She hoped she could do it all in one sitting. The quick alarm was set to ring in one half hour. That had been a very useful strategy for her the other day. She just kept writing until the alarm rang after the half hour she had set it for. She kept on resetting the alarm and writing without interruption. When she had done one and a half hours of writing she was free to check the word count. She was quite sure she had written more than the daily target of 1667 words. It turned out she had written perhaps 500 more than the target. Because there had been no interruptions of aching to see what the word count was and being unable to resist and then having to go through the whole process of copying the writing over to the other software that would give her the word count, she had been able to write more in that amount of time than before.

The act of writing would perhaps be more pleasurable using this strategy. She was not yet at the point where it was just second nature to write fluently with little pausing. Would she ever reach that point? Why should one reach that point she wondered. Writing was not like giving a speech. Or rather, if writing was like giving a speech or a talk in public, one would never go on as the sole voice for such an extended period. No one liked hearing one voice go on and on. Not unless that voice was so varied that it was like many voices. If one were conversing with others, one would never be the sole speaker. One would take turns, or at least be so in tune and responsive to the subtle changes in the others, that there was in effect a mutual conversation and communication going on.

There were other benefits or effects that came out of writing /full stop(?)/madly. Such intensity of writing ..... well she was not sure. She still wavered back and forth on how reasonable or even enjoyable this whole venture was. She felt her only hope was to do it at times that ultimately did not prevent her from doing the other things she needed to do.

She was growing tired of reading about the other wrimoers who were so gung-ho into their projects that they were completing huge amounts of writing way beyond the target pace. She could not help but see this as bragadoccio. She found it quite unpleasant. But she had her own form of bragging. A quiet bragging just in the fact of having been able to at least once complete the challenge, though in her own manner of what she had called a 'novel'. She hoped that how she was doing it now was a bit of an improvement, though not that different than the last time, and that it could be categorized as 'literary fiction'.

The previous day was one of her main teaching days. She had two teaching days. It was a holiday on the day that was usually her first teaching day of the week, so no public adult class. Both of the two students that came to the tiny private class in her kitchen had been able to come this time. She had been very involved with her own painting this time. Had it been the subject matter or the manner in which she was working, or both? They had started in with practice painting on thin

9:52a

paper, working from a few reference photos of the creature they had chosen as the day's subject - raccoons. She had initially selected two animals to choose from the general theme of woodland animals - foxes and/or raccons. She had gotten both of the file folders of reference pictures out from their slots in the storage boxes. To this selection in the last minute she added the option of squirrels. Then she wrote the names of the choices onto little bits of cards stock and set it out for the two students to blindly choose one. This would be the subject of the day. One student selected. It came up squirrels. That student had been having a hard time with squirrels at her house. They were making a bad nuisance of themselves. She was not at all keen on doing squirrels. The wrimoer had originally left squirrels out of the options because she had worked with that subject several years in a row, and much as she was ok with it, she also wanted to have a go at the foxes or raccoons again. Whether they had made a deliberate choice to do raccoons or it was another lottery, she could not remember. She thought it had been by consensus. The squirrel picker had said something that sounded like she preferred to do raccoons, the other student sounded like she was fine with that. And so they had proceeded.

It had been several years since the wrimoer had done this subject and had not laid out plans for how to do it. She thought they had done quite a bit of practice direct painting before just moving on to making a composition and watercolor painting. The one student who had been coming to class for several years remembered having done raccoons and thought they had done sumi-e style practice with them. As the wrimoer wrote, the ideas for ways to approach a raccoon art lesson came to mind. What was the difference between sumi-e style painting and what she called 'direct painting"? Sumi-e used a combination of essential lines and brush strokes to express the essence of a subjects's being, form, and movement. In 'direct painting' she did not use a large brush stroke to capture a gesture or movement. She used the paint to capture the shapes she saw in the reference image but in a manner of expressing the beauty of ta shape, finding the decorative quality of that shape. These shapes should simultaneously be expressive of form in space. Lines and edges were to be smooth and clean, whether they formed intricate patterns or sweeping curves.

Students had a hard time letting go of the importance of the concept/symbol/meaning of a subject. This was indeed of great priority in creating an image. But the students had a hard time grasping that above all it was most important to be almost a conduit between one's imagination and what came out on the paper.

10:22a - that one came so quickly - had it been possible?

As part of that expression one had to love the actual motion of one's body doing the expressing, the wielding of one's tools, the flow of the medium as it came out of the end of one's hands/fingers/ brushes. She felt the experience should be as if one watched actors on a stage or the dolls and toy cars one moved around the little play area world. One made them talk but they came alive as one did so. One had to pretend. If one got too caught up in how to make it look a certain logical way, it lost its magic. It had to have life of its own.

This was why some performers were so much better than others. Someone who read a speech in such a way that it just droned on and on was delivering words that could be of interest, but in such a manner that they would be very hard to listen to. The wrimoer had been so surprised to hear someone read poetry in almost such a manner. The sound did not actually drone, but the rise and fall of the pitches were so regularly and predictably placed as to have a droning effect. She always considered this a near mechanical or robotic form of reading. One would do just as well hearing it from the new 'voices' that the computers could talk to users with. When the wrimoer had heard that coming from someone she had expected to know better, she had been very disappointed. Especially since this had been at a time when she had wanted a deeper meaning and experience to express the reverence of that moment.

It had been an occasion she could say nothing about. She could affect no real change upon the occasion. She had had no idea going into it what it would be like or what it could be like. She had not wanted to participate in it at all but had felt an obligation to do so. Once she was involved in it, she had seen what could be done, but it was too late by then. She had asked for a little change in direction. Others had been open to that. Later someone criticized her for having wanted to change it when she had not even wanted to participate in it.

Here she was thinking about the event without  being able to say directly what the event had been, because it would reveal too much even in this wrimo project context. The wrimoer had started putting  her writing efforts out where they could be found and read, not that they would be found and read. For that she would have to let at least a few people know where the writing was to be found. They could at least be stumbled upon, She knew how that so far it was unlikely for people in her own circles to come across the writings. People just did not do that unless they were highly motivated,. There was just too much in everyone's lives for people to follow up on every bit of information that came their way. Still, it was possible. In that it was possible, she was unwilling to reveal more than she had.

And that was one of the problems with writing publicly. There was just so much one could not write it seemed, or that she felt free to write. On the other hand to write fiction, a whole long continuing story of fiction, seemed like one would have to know so much of how people actually fit together. She knew

10:52 a the alarm seemed to have rung even sooner this time..

people as they actually fit together in specific circumstances that she was witness to, but to rearrange them into invented circumstance - this was like trying to make up a lie and knowing deep down inside that there was no way to completely hide a lie or to not be found out. Best not to lie. She was always astounded at how many people thought it was ok to falsify a circumstance in order to get something they wanted or to do something they wanted. They assumed they would not be found out. She felt it was one thing to not reveal something and another thing to misrepresent something. Now she wondered whether she did indeed misrepresent lots of things about herself, or did she just keep them close to herself. She wondered whether there was a line between the two.

Her writing had really wandered from one point and question to another. She could not remember where she had wandered from. She had thought that morning that this time she would really start off by scribbling or typing a little list of things she could write about. In her longhand journal she just started with a morning warm up of relating some morning details. What time she had gotten up. Now  those details were including how it had been to go get the cat, who still had no name.

She usually continued with the journal writing of the day until time and schedule dictated she had to stop, or until she'd made an account of everything that had been of relevance to her from the previous day and even night. Sometimes she'd said all she had to say, but still wanted to keep writing. With the Wrimo project though it was not yet a matter of wanting to continue writing and having nothing else to say. It was a matter of a purposeful intention of continuing to write even though one had nothing to say. And then, she would remember some little thing she had heard and thought about, and that would give her something to write about.

What had just come to mind was the interview she had heard the night before with a humorist/writer who also suffered from depression. The writer and interviewer had talked quite a bit about the depression experience the author had gone through. The author even got upset on the air as she described certain aspects of the experience. The wrimoer had not sorted out all the author was saying. As the wrimoer understood it, it seemed that was most insufferable to the author was the inability to feel anything. Initially she had been feeling a lot of sadness. And that had then turned to numbness and deadness. And that was worse to her than the sadness. She was firm in her belief that this was something physically wrong, something gone haywire. The wrimoer was not convinced.

The general view of the nature of things, of the world, of existence, in the day, was that all one's ills were causal rather than calamities of the soul or spirit that had to express themselves in one way or another. Depression was something gone wrong in the brain chemistry and could be righted with the proper medicine. One need not have any responsibility within one's identity. That presupposed that having a responsibility was equal to being 'to blame'. Why did people assume that one presupposed the other?

*****
(This was getting
11:22a !!!
into a topic she wanted to delve into but also wanted to hold off on because it could be a long one. This 4th writing segment had flown even faster. The half hour alarms were doing their trick. Was she going to continue? If she were to get caught up with the missed writing, she needed at least another hour of writing she believed.)

....Why should one be to blame for one's ills? Why wasn't one allowed to experience the range of what it meant to be human? All experiences, good, bad and indifferent, were part of the human experience. The wrimoer did not believe that one

***message coming thru on the message machine?

... needed to do things 'correctly', that one needed to follow certain expected rules and roles. So often those expected rules and roles were so limiting in what they allowed people. Where and how had they come about? How did people keep adhering to them and not questioning them? They just kept following along in prescribed fashions instead of honoring their own visions. They lacked faith that their own visions had any worth. How had this come about that so many people were like that? They held tight to their small beliefs as if everything depended upon this.

The wrimoer thought this came down to believing that the outside of something, that which one could see and touch was all that was real. If one went as far as still believing all the visible things came from a greater or deeper source, then for some reason they usually also still believed that it was not one source but two sources - good and evil. The wrimoer believed that could not be either. If the visible came from the invisible, then why did it also supposedly follow that the invisible was divided? How could an invisible be divided? She believed it could only be one. There could be no good and evil. They were not the source but two necessary forces that worked together to create the visible. All of it was an unfathomable unity, and as many religions through the ages had said, unnameable, undefinable, and perhaps even unmentionable because it was so enormously awesome and sacred that it should not even be mentioned. Nothing could be separated from it. Everything had its source in it. Everything was a constant manifestation of it.

11:47a she wanted to rest. She wanted to write more on these thoughts but she needed to step back a bit. Now she was wishing the alarm would ring. Her previous line of thinking still had much more to go, but she needed to take a break from it.

She wished she could remember the term the Nanowrimo write-in group leader had for that strategy of reverting to certain standard scenes such as dinner table talk whenever one hit an impasse in one's writing. She would look it up later. It was a useful technique the wrimoer believed. She did not remember having used it before. She had passed on the advice to others when they spoke of reaching their own story impasses.

What would be
11:52a Hah! she had not been too far off schedule when she wanted to step back.

.... a comparable strategy to use for image making? Image making was so different. There one had to solve visual problems to keep the unity of the image while still being faithful to the so called reality of what the image represented. The visual problems happened through parts of a scene not lining up in harmonious ways, or details standing out too strongly. Did one reach a point in creating an image where one could not think of what else to say? That usually meant the image was completed, as long as it was whole and conveyed ones' meaning or intent. Often, one was not making image so much as using image making to deepen the experience of seeing, understanding, and absorbing a subject. This was another aspect that students did not want to believe. This to them often seemed like idiocy. It seemed like they just did not want to believe that. They could not see how or why such a thing was important. And because they mostly believed in the importance of judging something good or bad as soon as possible, they believed that everyone else had to hold the same beliefs (or disbeliefs) and would thereby never accept their attempts at such crazy new views as being valid or allowable.

There was the fear of being responsible for one's own authority, for trusting one's own authority. Where and how had people so lost sight of their own authority? This had been going on for centuries and centuries she believed. She supposed this was all part of the human experience. She often believed to that Man was here to learn to be a Human creature - to be a God as a Man. Man's struggle was that he believed either in only the Visible, or that he was separate from the source. That the  Visible was from outside of the source rather than always emanating from the Source.

***** She wanted to
        continue with
            the beliefs
            painting practice ideas
            telling of the day
            guidelines for kids classes
            author's depression story, wrimoers views on
            cat and winter nights worry about
            cooking story - borscht to potato cabbage dinners
            arrival of marzipan from overseas cousins
            ideas for similar art image making sessions

She was getting edgy for the time to be over. She thought certainly she had reached her limit for what she could handle. At least she had written a list of what she wanted to get back to.

She had been considering dropping in on the Write-In at the library, just to check in with the leader. She could perhaps borrow a library laptop. At this point there was no guarantee one would be available. One could call ahead. But she could not imagine writing with others in such close quarters in a windowless room on a sunny day. It had been one thing to write at the library on their laptop in the evening hour and to do it so that one was in the midst of activity, the comings and goings of others. But a secluded room in close quarters with others? She did not think she would be able to concentrate like that. She would be too interested in what was going on with others, or of posing questions that came to her. That room felt like a dungeon to her. One sat around a large table that filled the whole small room...

12:22p wow! she had made it.
3436 words - wow wow wow - even more than the target
but back to 19/wpm! 


           
        

How does one add a title to Blogger posts? - test title - so far it seems to be the first line?
11/11/13 11:29 am Monday, Veteran's Day

The wrimoer was balking at having to sit down to write so soon again. She had worked at the writing for 80 minutes the previous day, but then had done so much else involved with the writing afterwards, that it felt as if she had been immersed in the project for a very long time. Much as she would feel at the end of any kind of immersive session like that that she was eager to get back to it the next day, the next day invariably brought a need to distance herself from it.

After the previous day's writing she had spent time setting up a new blog for it so that she could immediately publish the writing. This was as her experiment to see whether one's writing improved if one knew it might get read. Then she collated all she had written up to that day into one file and submitted it for word count to the Nanowrimo web site. And, she posted an excerpt of the writing to the website. She used the day's writing has her excerpt.

The compromise this day to get herself to write was to just agree to do a half an hour. She had set a timer for it. If she wanted to do more fine, but at least she would get that much done. She was still filled with misgivings over the whole thing though. Misgivings that she was wasting her efforts and her time. As she wrote this idea, the question came - why was it ok to spend several hours browsing in social media or reading anything of interest to her, but not ok to spend several hours writing like this? Was it that doing the writing, the more she did it, implied she would be stuck having to do it through the rest of the month at times that it would be extremely difficult to do it because it would so conflict with other things in her schedule. If she invested heavily now, she would feel too tied. One never felt truly invested in strictly for pleasure activities. There was a difference. There one could stop doing them and not feel guilty about stopping. With the writing, once one had gone that far, one would just not feel free to stop.

Ironically that was also the problem once it was all over. It stopped. It left a hole in the fabric of one's days. In the purposefulness of one's days. There was something so beneficial about feeling one had to do a thing on a daily basis. She had to find a good routine around this though, or she would end up not doing anything with it.

She thought that she needed to put an aspect of play into the project. She needed to find a better way to reward herself for her efforts so that she really enjoyed having done it. The way she had made her walking in the house into a kind of game. That was also usually done in small manageable chunks. It was probably better to get a good rhythm going over a longer walking period but for now she just sought to do as much as she could, even if it only meant small amounts at a time.

The walking routine had really been interrupted by her having to go on foot to the library and anywhere else in walking distance since her car was now apparently completely out of commission. She had not gotten the official word directly from the mechanic, but she had heard indirectly. Any day that she walked to the library, meant she did not do any walking in the apartment routine. That was enough to break the routine. Perhaps she should keep just a bit of that habit going just to stay in the habit of doing it in the house. It could not hurt.

Was she ready to play with the story of Hansel and Gretel's brother Tansel? Not now. She was just balking in general, being stubborn.

She had been pondering again in search of a comparable activity in image making that matched this activity of writing. What was like it? Letters to people with sketches in them as Van Gogh had done? Could one sit there drawing scenes for an hour? She had love
half hour alarm rings - 12:01 pm reset for another half hour.
She had loved being able to go to the sheep farm and sketch the sheep with their lambs at the end of winter. She would sit in the car alongside the fields of one particular farm. The sheep were there because at that hour their food was still there. That was quite a few years ago though. The farmer and his sheep had long ago moved to a larger property up North. There was no more such sketching to be had.

There was the cow farm up in a nearby town. She used to go drawing there. It was very picturesque. They had an unusual breed of cattle. Tourists were always stopping to take a quick photo of the herd grazing. It was so unpredictable where the herd might be though that she had long ago given up trying to go sketch them. It was a long way to drive with the small hopes of being able to see them out there. They were also often too far out in the pasture to see properly. It was just all too unpredictable.

She loved being able to draw figures and animals in action. Some actions were just too rapid to draw. Sports would seem to be great for such quick figure sketching. She had tried to draw hockey skaters on a local 'pick-up' flooded rink. She had had fun with it though it turned out as a bunch of squiggles or scribbles.

She should really be starting on the commissioned work that she had to do every year around this time. This job had gotten so offtrack when she had done the Nanowrimo to completion two years ago.It had set everything else back and she had ended up feeling so bad about everything. That was another reason she had such doubts about doing this this time. She hoped she would find it in herself to do more writing at night where it did not cost her the daytime. In the daytime was when any efforts towards anything seemed to have such heavy time prices because of the way the daylight fled.

The other day she had sat down to what felt like a reasonable starting time. The sun was full on her. It was a lovely setting and atmosphere. By the time she had finished her stint though, the sun had that look of having turned its path to not just its descent, but the part of its descent that signalled it would disappear shortly. She always hated that look. Why did it have such associations for her? How could she give this hour better associations so that they did not make her feel so bad. The whole landscape reeked with this look just from the angle of the lighting on everything.

What were all the associations this meant for her? How much did others see or feel it this way? She could not remember this being that bad when she had lived further south in New York. Did they just have less light up north here. It would soon grow dark so soon here. It was bad enough already, but they had not yet reached the shortest time. There were several weeks to go for that.

Coming into this winter, or the changing of the clocks, had not been quite as bad as in previous years, because of how she felt about her adult art class. She had started seeing how coming together with them on  winter days had really made the winter better. This year she had found herself relishing the idea of it.

Perhaps the winter and daylight problem was more an association with a big reduction in being around other people. It still would mean that somewhat if she had no car.

12:31p next alarm! She set it for one more half hour. This last alarm had rung so soon it seemed.

... but she did not intend to rule out having a car. One never knew where, when, or how what one needed or wanted came to one. The walking to the library was cold and hard, but also had great benefits and fulfillments. With the new wheelie for her art supply bag that a student had given her, she was equipped to get to the library on foot whenever the weather allowed. She was feeling healthier already because of this walking and because of the enthusiasm she was experiencing  for the adult class.

She longed to be able to hop into a car and go where she wanted, but there were also not that many places she wanted to go. That had been a problem for her the past several years. She had felt so stifled living in this area. She did not like needing a car to get to places. But neither did she really want to live in a big city anymore.

Was she hearing more thumping around downstairs that did not sound right? It could be a child visiting and jumping around. Every once in a while it seemed like she was hearing that kind of noises, often accompanied by the sound of short quick running footsteps that little kids made. In her building it was hard to judge where sounds came from.

The cat had slept all day in the chair.  By evening he wanted some food and then wanted to go out. That meant he would probably spend the night out in the cold and/or wet. She hated having to let him out in the evenings. That was what he liked though. If she started keeping him in overnight, he would not get to acclimate to the cold. It would be too much of a shock for him if he did end up out on a very cold night. This way he would at least be used to it. She only hoped he would choose on his own to stay in at night during the very cold times. It would drive her crazy to have to run downstairs to try to call him in and worry herself  over whether he might have showed up too late after she had called for him. She never knew how long she should wait for him. He just did not respond consistently. It would be a reassurance to know there were many places for him to take shelter in. How did all the other animals manage it?

The squirrels had the leaf nests up in the trees. The crows huddled together and their feathers were good insulation. Some animals hibernated. This cat had a thick long coat. He had to be no different than a fox or mountain lion. It just dawned on her - bear hibernated not because they were cold, but because there was no food out for them in winter. Hibernating was a way for nature to handle the available food sources. The cat might well stay in once it realized there was not much going on with jumping flying insects or mice rustling in the leaves.

She was reaching the end of her rope for having things to think and write about. Had she written the previous day about subjects she had read up on? She had written a bit on what she had learned about Dickens, and about the new old production of a Shakespeare play. What else had she heard on the radio that intrigued her? Now she could not remember. It was not popping into her mind.

A bit of mundanity was the local Wrimo group on FB. There was a person writing sporadically about not being able to participate because this year they had no home. The person seemed to be taking such a victim stance. It was hard to watch. She had given advice, though she knew she should not be doing so. It seemed like the person was stymied in every direction. The whole world really did sympathize with such people. These situations were actually considered by almost everyone as being beyond a person's control. But could it really be true that there was so little one could do for oneself?

1:01 pm She made it to the last alarm - 90 minutes!

Even if one just did a tiny bit for oneself on a daily basis, that would help one's emotional state and just might open the door to finding a solution to one's situation. One could not even envision that from where one stood if one held one's self to be a victim of one's circumstances, instead of the creator of one's life.

1:04 pm. She would stop and do her word count and other 'administration'.
2176 words - Wow! - a good surplus to boot. 24 wpm!!

11/10/13 1:35p Sun.
The would be wrimoer settled in to her daily writing stint. She had gotten a glimpse of an idea of how she might continue this ritual after November if she thought it might be worthwhile to continue. She could carry on in the same way but use a smaller daily target. The other idea was that perhaps this should be published on a daily basis online in a web blog, not so much so that others could or would read it, but more that the act of making it public meant it was even more of an act of communication. She suspected that that alone, the fact that it was now communication with others besides herself, would improve her writing skills. Practice alone did not mean that much, but practice in the context of real function and use made one get better at a thing. Children did not learn to speak by 'practicing' - they learned to speak by wanting to speak, wanting to exchange and engage with others.

She wanted to be able to write off the top of her head, make up a story off the top of her head. Perhaps she would never be able to do that. Perhaps it would turn out that she did not really want to do that, but loved the idea of it. She could do it with music, dance, painting, drawing, cooking, fairly easily whether it was at a high or low skill level. Making up stories could not be that different, or maybe it could. Perhaps there was another significance to making up stories that kept her from allowing herself to do that. If a story was about something occurring in the 'real world', the world as she knew it around her, there could be the danger, (had she thought 'danger'?), of having to keep straight what was real and what was not real.

Actors had to contend with that all the time. They had to dance a fine line between getting so deeply into being the character they were playing that they could get lost in the role, lose themselves in the role. For that time of playing the role, one became that character.

She had always been very concerned with keeping the 'facts' or memory of any events as straight as possible. It irked her no end to hear how others remembered things or did not. She knew that even her own memory was fallible. She had a reputation for being able to remember things. She knew that very few people really remembered things the way they actually happened. One tended to remember more by associations and by what one was emotionally drawn to.

Another thing she  thought she could try in the regular November writing sessions was to start off a session by listing as part of the writing any of the ideas, thought, and events she had been experiencing. Then they would be there for her to refer to and pick up on or not. That would mean some pausing for reflection and contemplation at the start of the writing session.

She could also set a timer so that she could write uninterruptedly for a given amount of time. That way she could not get distracted by wondering how far along she was in the word count. The best of course would be to have such confidence that one naturally had enough thoughts, ideas, and events at a sitting that one need not attend to time or word count.

Another idea was to make a word association list and then start making up little stories around some of those word groups. That was too much intellectual exercise for her though. Unless such things evoked or invoked affairs of the soul, they just seemed like dry practice.

2:03pm

She had had a chance to read up a bit on Charles Dickens. She wanted to know what his writing approach was. She knew he wrote for serial publication. There apparently were no clues left behind as to how he kept his story lines straight, she had heard. She read that he had burned his journals and letters not long before he died. She assumed that was why there were no records of his writing methods. It seemed he had a near photographic memory. That was very helpful in his writing.

Dickens engaged in many speaking/reading tours as a way to earn money not only for himself, if even that, but as a philanthropic activity. She loved the idea that one could write something and then use that to give performances with. That intrigued her as a possible direction to move in for herself.

That morning on the radio they had done a little piece in the news about a 'new' Shakespeare production that was actually being done just the way it would have been done in Shakespeare's time. All the roles were played by men. There was little in the way of scenery and props. Everything was in the performing. The producer explained that this meant greater audience participation because they had to imagine the details. As they heard the story recited by the actors, it was in the audience members' own imaginations that the story took place.

The wrimoer rememberd how her mother read to her from the thick volume of Grimms fairy tales. There were no pictures except for the head capital of each story.  That capital was very ornately decorated with perhaps a hint of illustration relating to the story. It was small. The text of the story was in 'fractur' German print. She was too young to be able to read then. She could just curl up in the safety of her mother with the book spread between them as her mother made the story come alive with her reading. There were usually ghastly endings to the stories. She already knew this was a different version of the story then other children knew. Perhaps she remembered this as being from a time before she could read because she could not read fractur, and therefor just associated it with not being able to read. How did she know of the regular versions of the stories? She was not going to nursery school yet. She did not have a tv. Where had she come across the regular versions?

Disney's movies. Snow White had been created when? She had had a little musical carpet sweeper that played "Whistle while you work" as she ran around with it as a three year old busily cleaning the floor. Over and over again. There was a Golden Book of the Disney version.

When had the movie Cinderella been made? She had a wonderful carousel cut-out book of the Cinderella story.
2:30pm

She had even searched for this book online. The book was such a magical creation. One opened the book and tied the covers back to back. Each double spread formed a different scene. There were papercut layers that stretched between the double spread pages like layers of scenery and actors in a stage set. Little tableaus.   She did not think the illustrations were part of a Disney movie. She had been able to find it online and had filed away the information. She wanted to see that again. She wanted to make a book like that. She had made a few simplistic cards like that but never anything as elaborate as this book.
2:36 pm

Now she was getting restless about her writing. The time was nearing that she ached to find out how much she had done. Unless she had written at a much faster pace though, she would not have reached her quota yet. Her writing rate meant she had to write straight for 72 minutes in order to make the quota.

She fished around in her mind for something else to consider  telling about or musing about. The cat that was not quite her cat yet, was at least comfortably at her side, having taken over the chair she usually sat in. He had answered her whistle readily that morning, appearing very wet from the rain they had been having. She had worried the night before because she'd seen reports there was to be snow. Apparently the reports were not  meant to be for the area she lived in. There was only rain out there and the quite wet cat.

Once upstairs he had not wanted the food left over from the previous day. Usually she turned that over to the crows and bluejays outside. He was not interested in dry food. He had been so spoiled by whatever other food he was getting elsewhere outside, that he was never interested in her dry food. She had to add water and wait for it to soak into the kibble. That took a few minutes. The cat lay waiting patiently on the kitchen floor for a little bit, and then went off to the chair to groom himself and go to sleep. He had been there ever since, for almost six hours.

2:47pm
She had read that some of the other wrimoers worked at their word targets and writing session by setting themselves to completing to certain targets within the story lines that they had plotted out. She envied their knowing what they would write about.

That morning she had even started telling herself a story in her imagination of a possible someone connected to Hansel and Gretel. It was simply a matter of this young sibling of theirs, (whether they had such a sibling she did not remember), going for a walk in the woods and of course getting lost. She had thought she might play with that in her writing that day, but she never got to trying that. Perhaps another day. Just now it seemed as if she had probably finished the time needed to complete her daily quota. And now there was just a bit of sun on the clouds that were separating to show bits of blue in the western sky. At last she could stop and check her word count.

2:55pm 1691 words 80 min = 21wpm

"The leaves on that tree were very yellow this year, especially against the blue and because so many had blown off that it was a beautiful interplay of yellow and blue."

11/09/13 11:20 am.This would be another experiment with writing thought the wrimoer. She would try doing some writing on her prepaid mobil device using her web email. It would mean that each section would be limited in word count because of the device's limitations. She did not remember what the limits were. The device would let her know by refusing to take any more typing. Then, if she had not finished her thought, she would have to go back through to find chaff so that she could squeeze in the end of her thought. Just now she was falling asleep again. She would be lucky if she got to finish one little section or email. That morning she had again decided not to go thru with the project, even though she had at last gotten caught up the night before. So she had been looking up articles on why doing the Nano project was a bad idea. Of all the reasons not to do it, all of which she agreed with, there had only been one reason for it, and that had almost
 convinced her - it was fun. She'd felt that way the 1st year.
11:34 am

11/09/13 1:20p

The wrimoer had tried another method to get started on the day's writing quota. She had used her prepaid mobile device and written a small section of writing in her web email. She had thought perhaps doing it in little sections like that which could be done from anywhere, could make the whole process seem less daunting. This was a good theory.

It turned out that it was physically too hard to write on that small device for the amount of time one needed to complete the quota. But at least she had primed the pump by just doing that little bit. It had not required any set-up. She could feel a bit of accomplishment towards the quota, thus leaving that much less still needing to be done. And that had given her an emotional boost that helped her in getting ready for the day all so that she could get back to the writing.

She still did not know what to write about. For now it was only about spitting out words - in digital format. What was the meaning of that? The implication of writing in digital format was that it was a format to be shared at some level or at least available for others to read. It meant that she intended to put it somewhere that it could be found for others to read. Or at least that was part of the implications of it.

One could also be writing digitally because it was faster, because it took up less storage space. Another reason one wrote digitally was that one could edit supposedly easily. Why would one want to edit unless one was preparing a writing for reading by another?

She thought she preferred writing in longhand. Because of the difference in voice for the Nano project, she felt an aversion to writing in that voice in her longhand journals. She wanted to keep the two separate. It was already odd enough to hear herself thinking in the 3rd person, observing her thoughts and whatever was coming up in the mundane minute to minute affairs of the day running a continuing commentary in the 3rd person.
1:36p

This early afternoon she looked up through the brightly sunfilled southern bay window where she had settled herself to do the writing and noticed how much blue sky was showing through the tree across the way. The leaves on that tree were very yellow this year, especially against the blue and because so many had blown off that it was a beautiful interplay of yellow and blue.

And then she looked out of the left hand panel of the window and startled. From that vantage, only one main trunk branch showed. It was quite vertical with a curve at the bottom where it connected to the main trunk, which was not visible. In this position for a moment it looked like a huge hose, pipe, or snake that was suddenly fallen or reaching down from nowhere. It just had not made sense as part of the tree. It had shocked her momentarily, until she realized what it was.

But she had just been playing that exercise or game of looking at patterns and seeing what one could see in them. She was looking at a cloth of French Country floral patterns that covered a heap of stuff in her bedroom. She was seeing all sorts of animal faces in the flowers. The centers of the flowers were so much like eyes. Almost every flower in the pattern had an animal head around it.

This was why humans had to learn to see a object or being as its own identity in whatever position it was in. Ir was why the students had a hard time drawing. In drawing one had to be able to see shapes, to see additional meanings in things. And that was mind boggling.

1:53P.

She had thought she might try writing some of the points she remembered from her morning's reading of all the reasons why one should not do the Nanowrimo challenge.  That could refuel her argument against doing it. She had been trying to remember why it had been so important to do the last time around. She wanted to get at the essence of what had been so important for her about it. She wanted to be able to transfer that process to art making. Maybe it could not be transferred. Maybe it was unique to writing.

She had been so relieved when the challenge was fulfilled that first time around. She had barely been able to wait till it was over. But then when it was over she had nothing to take its place. She only felt as if she had written something that she would not go back in to edit or read, or so she thought. She had been to exhausted from the effort to be willing to look at it again. She did not really want to put it where anyone could find it. It could be found but one had to know where to look. The reason for that was not because she thought it was no good, but more because she had said things in there that others might be able to find themselves in. Though names were not mentioned, the stories were.
2:05p

She was losing steam again. She did not want to have to remember the points of why Nanowrimo was not a good idea in the view of these other writers.
It could be something to write about. Perhaps just remember four points you read there, she thought.
   
But stopping to try to remember would stop the flow of words. and the point of this challenge was to write without stopping, at least, as much as possible. If one were telling a story to an audience, even an audience of one, one had to keep telling it, to keep making it up. One could not stop to think. That was one reason she did not feel she was a good story teller. She liked to stop to think.

She was reaching the end of her ability to go on. She had gone round and round with this now several times over. She did not want to do this anymore.

She had thought she might be able to get to the library that day. It was so cold and windy though and she was on foot. Her car was out of commission. She had heard third hand that the car was irrepairable. This was going to be quite a challenge. She did not like wearing the trench coat she wore in winter over her heavy sweaters to break the wind. She did not like cloth outer wear. It did not move with one the way knitwear did. But knit wear always let in the wind. Cloth wear felt like a sausage casing though. She hated it. Today was a day she would have to relent and put on that coat if she intended to get to the library.

She did not need to go to the library for her writing, since it was looking as if she would be done with that. It was a way to get out and be around other people for a little while. She also wanted to check with one of the librarians on a matter, that had seemed to be unresolved for almost a week now.

2:19p

Could she check her word count yet? No, she had to write for 72 minutes she had decided. That seemed to be the amount of time it took her to do the writing quota. She did have that little extra cushion of the writing she had done by web mail. She had also been including any of her social media comments that she thought were of any consequence.

A friend whom she had just been thinking of, thinking that they had not visited in quite awhile, had left a phone message earlier. It seemed their family would be back to celebrating Thanksgiving as they used to in years past. Did she want to join them again? She thought she would. Her last two Thanksgivings she had found herself very glad to stay at home by herself. The first one alone, she had spent almost the whole day in that peaceful atmosphere so unique to a holiday that everyone is celebrating writing for her Nano challenge. The second year alone she had bought a small turkey and roasted it. It had not thawed in time for a normal roasting time though. It was not until 11:30 at night that it had finished cooking. But what a turkey. It had been perhaps 15 years since she had roasted a turkey or perhaps any bird. She had not forgotten how. This was the best turkey she had had in that many years.
2:28p

What other way around this writing could she find? She wanted aspects of it but not this huge chunk of time that so cut into her day at the cost of so much else. It kept her from so much, even though it was satisfying in other ways.
2:30p 1539 words

She should have known better. She had not written the full 72 minutes required to meet the daily quota. Any little interruptions like stopping to set up the writing as a document in the other software, interfered with the time. She needed an alarm perhaps so that she chould write uninterruptedly. It seemed like such an inorganic way to go about creating though.

She would have to consider how to get out of this endeavor what she wanted. It was so hard to give up participating with others in it. It was hard to give up being able to say one had done it, or one was doing it, or I can do that, or I've already proven that.

One had so many choices in everything. She always found it hard to decide things. She found it hard knowing what she wanted to do, because it was so ingrained in her to consider what was the 'best choice'. This pervaded the whole culture of the day. One could hardly help falling for it. One did it without realizing one was doing it. She believed that kind of view spoiled a lot for herself and for everyone.

2:41p 1791 words 81 minutes, c. 22 wpm

1999 words after adding the yahoo mail section - so that st phone can only handle about 200 words or ? characters. and the wpm rate is c.14!

"Instead she had made a soup of a potato and a wedge of sliced cabbage."
11/08/13 6:39 pm Nano
The uncommitted wrimoer had thought she'd go to the library in the afternoon so that she could do another writing session the way she had done the previous day. Though she had not liked everything about the work the previous day, there had been a satisfaction in being able to sit in a somewhat public space, where she could watch people come and go as she wrote. The machine had been somewhat uncomfortable to work on, but then once she had finished working, she felt good about it. She had not spent an inordinate amount of time on it. She had come close to her quota, though she had not made up the back quantity she needed for being on target.

At home she had found out how to find all the comments she had made on the social media. She gathered those together  - just the ones that seemed interesting - and added them to her writing. Was it cheating? Since her writing project was of such an oddball nature, (or perhaps not), she figured the social media writing was fair game. At one point she had considered somehow converting the writing she did by hand in her journals. That would mean much to much transcription for her though.

There had been a discussion thread with other wrimoers over whether they wrote by hand or by computer. One person said they wrote by hand, but then revealed she just wrote her initial plans by hand. Any writing that was not Nano she did first by hand. With Nano, there just was not enough time to have to transcribe.

Every time the wrimoer sat down to write she would realise she had again forgotten to jot down notes on things she might write about. There she would be left again having to remember off the top of her head anything to write about or just hope an idea would come up.

She was again listening to the radio as she tried to write. Her attention was split between the writing and listening to any stories on the radio. She hoped that she might get ideas from the radio - anything that might trigger her opinions on issues.
Was that cheating?

She had wanted to say for ages how annoying she found the voices on the radio in recent years. The reporters seemed to be younger with what seemed to be false cheerful sounding voices which always rose and fell in predictable tonal patterns. It was getting so that she had to turn off the radio more often because these reporters and announcers were so hard to listen to.

6:59 pm

No, she was not going to try to take a word count yet.

The weather had been too cold and windy to go out to the library. Instead she had made a soup of a potato and a wedge of sliced cabbage. It was cooked in the leftover pickled beets juice from the home canned jar of  pickled beets that her student had brought her. The pickled beets had been delicious and beautiful. Her mouth watered as she wrote and imagined those pickled beets. For the potato cabbage soup she had added some water and a salted seasoning. When this was cooked to tenderness she had put a spicy dijon mustard and several slices of cheddar cheese in her little bowlful of the soup. That too was delicious. The soup was wonderful even without the mustard and cheese. She could barely get it put it away in the fridge because she wanted to keep eating it. There was not much left.

7:07pm

She wondered what else she could write about. Had she said that she had already done her handwritten journal? Just for something to write.

She did not want to write literally about the stories that flowed through the radio. Nothing had provoked her.

She had been sleepy quite a bit that day. Not sleepy for the whole day, but periods when she found herself falling asleep and wishing she could just go lie down to nap. She was rarely willing to do that because she usually had visions that she would sleep too long, perhaps sleep away the day, and find herself waking at dusk. The day would have disappeared.

She was hitting that point of wanting to tally the words to see where she stood with the writing. Had she now decided that this was how she would continue the writing? To just sit down and continue writing about nothing much. But again this evening she had switched to intending not to write. That had meant she would probably give up the writing. She would not want to have to get behind and then decide to try to catch up. There was that part of her that simply wanted to play the game. It was a game as she saw it. If she was not ready to decide, then she had to do it so that she would not be behind if she did decide to continue. There was that silly logic again.

She also thought she was experiencing that weird dizzying effect of looking at the screen too much. At least this screen was smaller and did not have the huge expanse of space that the text had to cross as it was written.

Perhaps she could guess how many words she had done. That might justify having a peak at a word count. If she guestimated by the time she had spent, it was only 920 words.

7:28pm 930 words - wow what a guestimate!

She had looked and now she wondered how she could write anymore for the evening. There seemed to be just too much she had to make up.. What were those ideas and insights she had wanted to write about?

If she gave up now, at least she had gotten some kind of amount written towards the target. She was again falling asleep. She would have to stop. Perhaps she could pick up later in the evening or in the middle of the night.
7:38pm 1021 words

9:16 resume
She had spent quite a bit of time browsing on the social media even though she was still falling asleep, though not as badly when she'd been doing her writing. The Nano thread was now talking about dealing with 'he said, she said' - did one get tired of hearing all that, and what could one do instead. She had chimed in that she thought Agatha Christie hardly used any 'he said, she said'. That had been what struck her most pleasing about Christie's writing, that she had bypassed that kind of quoting almost completely. She let the dialogue run together. It made for a faster pace of dialogue.

And now she was remembering that she had wanted to write about the interview she heard the previous evening - an interview with the writer Stephen King. She was glad to know that he did not plot out his books. The fun for him was in finding out what the story was. That was why he wrote them, to find out what the end was. She always liked hearing that about writers - that they did not know where they were going with their writing.

Now she was hearing someone pounding on a door somewhere, downstairs she thought and very loudly so. It had sounded like a door had been slammed and possibly raised voices. She heard footsteps pounding too, but the footsteps of the woman downstairs always pounded. Yes, she was hearing raised voices. Was this the boyfriend or the son?

The day before the handyman had had to change or fix something in the lock downstairs. She wondered if it was because the neighbor had had the lock changed.
She did not want to have to call the police. But it was sounding like she might have to.

She called the police. In this case there had been nothing she could see because she was in bed, but she could not see anything on the porch anyway - the porch roof covered any view of the porch, with the exception of one corner towards the front.
9:30p - 10:20pm

It had been another one of those almost frantic nerve wracking calls to the police as the dispatcher spent all that time taking down her name and getting a call back number for her, while she tried frantically to describe what might be going, Frantic because she wanted them to get here while something was going on instead of after. After the call, she had heard, now she was quite sure it was indeed the downstairs neighbor, come out the door and call out "J". Later the wrimoer realized the neighbor was saying her boyfriend's name which sounded similar but was not the same as the name she' d thought she heard.

The cops had come. The wrimoer opened the kitchen window to let them know it was she who'd called and that it was the apartment downstairs that the problem was in. But the policeman almost demanded that she come downstairs to talk to them. She did not like his tone. "Can you come downstairs" "I'm not dressed, I'm in bed." "Can I come upstairs to find out what happened. I don't want to talk to you through the window." Same difference - she would have to get dressed and come downstairs to unlock the door. There was something not right about this situation. She had never had to speak with the police when she called them She always stayed out of the picture. She did not want to be involved in the fracas. Did this mean she would not be calling in the future? She was upset.

She pulled on some clothes and went down to talk to the cop. But she was so angry with the situation and so busy telling him this - I don't understand why I have to be involved with this. He said he needed to find out what happened because it was a possible domestic situation. The son showed his face, looked at her and said it was not him. Later she wondered if they had thought he was the culprit and hauled him off, but she had not seen what happened after she went back up. She told the police she did not know what happened. She had heard these tremendous noises and madly tried to call the police. She could not see anything from upstairs. She said again that she did not understand why all of a sudden of all the times she had had to call police about situations with neighbors she had never had to tell the story. The policeman spoke of possibly wanting a statement from her because he needed to find out what happened. She caught sight of his partner.

That was scary too. That fellow looked very unintelligent, lethargic, what she called pluchey. A dead withdrawn face, lacking human connection. She felt almost sorry for the cop who spoke to her that he had this fellow for a partner. The dead beat cop, pulled the storm door open. It was quite cold out. She told him bluntly and coldly to close it. The cop who'd been standing inside had decided he had given up on his argument with her and said to his partner that they were done here.

She did not know what happened after that. She went back up steaming and was still steaming almost an hour later. At least she had managed to get some of the story down. She tried to call one of the other neighbors just to tell that one that she had called the cops. One of the phone numbers was on call forwarding. When she tried the other number, the dispatcher was calling her back to confirm if there was still anything going on.

It had been such a strange experience. Almost most frightening was to see this other person as a policeman. That was of concern. He had struck her as someone who would love to believe he could exert the power of his uniform. She also wondered how he could possibly have graduated from the Police Academy.
10:44pm

She had been just about to tell that she had had to come back to the writing because when she went to enter the evening's entry into her spreadsheet and worked with it more so that she could see at a glance where she was with her quota, she had realized she was now quite far behind in the quota. She had better at least try to make the daily quota for that day. Thus she had just started doing more writing when this incident had occurred. It had at least given her something to write about. She was not sure she had even told it properly. She thought perhaps she should be telling more about arguing with the cop. She had been so stubborn about it. So upset with him. Not at all interested in helping him with his policing problem. But she just had not understood why she needed to be involved in it. She felt it would certainly give her pause before calling again. She had told the cop that. She had asked him - Do you not want me to call when something happens? He said, No they wanted her to call.

10:50 pm 2243 words
Her FB comments
so, i write up to 2k words a day longhand in my personal journal. Love writing by hand. The Nano is madly typed on laptop, a plotless mess of unknown direction, but not a transcription of the journal. Dont know why im doing the nano or whether to continue. One day at a time w it. - it has no real 'novel' vision or concept. The experience of madly typing like that is interesting and enriching for itself, so far...
 at 8:28am

They each make for different kinds of writing don't they? A typewriter gives another tone entirely. I think one's thinking processes may be different in each medium/method. Some writers will only dictate because they feel it needs to be oral - as close to actually speaking to people as possible.

2380 words
Resume 11:16pm
At last she had only 110 words to catch up to where she needed to be. That was such a small amount surely she could do that little bit.

The house was quiet now. The heater had just turned off. It was either hot with the heater on or cold almost as soon as it was off. That was what she hated most about the cold weather. There did not seem to be a way to keep a consistent temperature. She had to wear socks or her feet would freeze in the kitchen, though not necessarily elsewhere. Now she was finding she had to put on the big sweater when the heater went off. When the heater came back on she had to tear off the sweater or risk getting very overheated. It woud be a long winter ahead.
11:21pm 2526 words

At last she was ahead on her word count - by just a few words.