End of the Nanowrimo quest journey

Friday, 11/28/14 10:51 am

End of the Nanowrimo quest journey 

The Wrimoer finished breakfast and turned right to her laptop to begin working on what was probably her last day of working on her Nanowrimo project. She did not expect to finish in one sitting. She had a bit too much left of the 50000 words that had to be completed in order to finish the so called novel for National Novel Writing Month, the yearly November challenge that had been cooked up quite a few years ago to get people proving to themselves that they could write a novel in that amount of time, instead of leaving their desire to do so waiting forever on the back shelf of a closet. 

She had still cheated through her fourth attempt at the project, in that she felt she could hardly call it fiction. Everything she wrote was true, and happening around her, to her, or as she remembered. She did not identify herself specifically in the writing. She had no real name in the writing. That was how she felt perhaps she could call the writing fiction. It certainly felt like fiction in that sense. That was also what gave the experience of writing such a fascinating appeal to her, though it was also a queer experience. She was deliberately taking on the role of observer from a much more distant standpoint. It felt odd to step outside oneself in that way. One was so used to identifying with one’s experiences as one went through the day. Writing in this manner always made her go through the whole day with that point of view as if she was continuing to write the story all day.

The journey, or the quest, she supposed she could call it either, was coming to a close. What had she learned from it? Had she remembered to write anything she could think of that she was learning? Sometimes during her writing she did not want to write anything that would require her to stop and think. She kept her focus on trying to write without stopping – simply to plow through to get the required word amount done. It was hard to squash that impulse to be able to think and write, think and write. One would not sit talking with someone in this manner – just talking, talking, talking. Storytelling was another matter. There one did have to be able to spin a story non-stop, but in a way that kept the audience or the listener listening, spellbound. She doubted she had been able to do that. She was sure that most of her written blather was quite boring. That thought had made her want to give up the challenge so often. She had not been able to see what one really could learn from doing this project if one had completed it once before. Once one had proven to oneself that one could do it, why did one need to prove it again? If one had a real plan for a story, or one knew how to make up a long story, then it was perhaps a good idea. But if one had already proven to oneself that one could write that quantity of words, then why could one not just write the rest of the year round at a slower pace and get one’s novel writing done that way? Her real challenge was that she could still hardly conceive of how to go about making up a story big enough for a novel. That had to be too big a project to begin with. It would seem one would have to learn by starting off small. One should practice at coming up with short stories to begin with. She wondered of authors of long ago had started off by writing short stories. Had they practiced that way or had they plunged right in to write a long work?

The night before when she had updated the spreadsheet in which she kept track of her writing, and she could see the results of where she stood with the writing progress, it had finally looked so easy just to get 50K words written. That was still hardly the challenge. How did one learn to make up a story? One idea that came to her for learning how to write a novel was to take perhaps a mystery she had read, and use it as a template. Rewrite it perhaps. Take its basic structure and substitute different characters, settings, and events. She did want to try that. Another idea was to take a set of what she was calling ‘story cards’, shuffle them up and write the outline or story from that arrange them. ‘Story cards’ was an idea she had been toying with for quite awhile for her art classes but had yet to really use. For the art classes they were not ‘story’ cards but ‘art’ cards. Make a deck of about 50 cards on which one had written as many art elements as one could think of. One could then pull from the deck randomly for a set of parameters to make one’s artistic choices in creating a piece of art or an art exercise. ‘Story cards’ were similar to this. Instead of art elements, they would be made up of certain kinds of characters or roles, places, settings, actions, emotions, problems. As soon as she had thought of this, she had realized this was basically what Tarot cards were. It had struck her long ago that this was what the Bible was for – a huge collection of stories from which one could pull stories that fed the soul or kept a group of people bound together in the act of listening to the stories. A leader did not have to come up with new stories but had only to work from the stories collected in the bible. In popular music there was such a book called a ‘Fake Book’. It contained a huge selection of popular music that a musician could entertain a small audience with, or that a piano player could use for a group of people gathered around a piano singing.

11:38 am 1027 words 47 minutes 21.85 wpm 

Break

Resume 2:58 pm

The sun was about to drop. The Wrimoer had not yet reconnected with her sister as they had intended. The Wrimoer had realized she did not at all want to be on the phone during any part of the daylight hours. She was even reluctant to take up that last bit of time with the writing. But wt least with the writing she could do it while looking out the window. She supposed she could do that while she spoke on the phone too. It was not the same though because in a conversation one needed to be listening. In the writing one did not need to be listening other than to ones own thoughts. 

During her break she had gotten herself ready for the day at last, and also written at length in her journal, always by hand. She was getting confused between what was written where and when. Sometimes she wrote her thoughts and stories in both places. 

While writing the journal, she had thought she heard the sound of the cat padding across the porch a few times. It was a sound she was not that sure of. It seemed too quiet to be a person. Looking out at the snowy front yard, she saw the cat’s tracks heading out across the street. The prints came from the driveway area crossed the front of the building then headed to the street. There were no return prints. She was conflicted. It seemed too early to call him home. But if it had been him passing along the porch a few times, then had he wanted to come in? The traffic also seemed a bit heavy to try to call him in. She preferred to let him stay out as long as possible before getting him in for the night. That meant quite a wait too until traffic was slower. She had to remind herself that when he really wanted to come in, he came to the house in wait of when he could come in. He might also wait up by the neighbor’s house. She often saw him jump down from a spot over there and come racing home.

She had gone down anyway to check on him. She only gave a couple whistles. The rival cat showed up. She gave that cat some food. After he had finished, (she was still there waiting in case her cat showed up), the rival cat looked up at her behind the storm door. She ached to be able to let him in from the cold. This cat did not have the long thick fur that her cat had. She prayed that the rival cat’s fur would get thick soon. This cat had come from some experience being inside and often acted as if it wanted to come in.  

She was pausing to think too much instead of writing. It was the last stretch of scraping the barrel for something to say. This was like a filibuster. Anything to fill the space and keep up the words.

Just as she wrote she hear a sound that sounded like cat cry. She looked up in time to see two creatures race across the wooded area across the way. It was a cat in hot pursuit of a squirrel. It was her cat. The squirrel was safe. She would go down for the cat

3:21 pm break 1600 words

3:26 pm resume

It had been a dog’s high bark she had heard. She heard more of that dog’s barks as she shut down the laptop before going down for the cat. 

Downstairs she saw the cat was now back in the yard on the other side of the house and heading up to that spot she often saw him jump down from. She whistled and waved to him. Opened and closed the door thinking he might not know where her whistling came from and this might catch his attention. She called out to him several times, “Come on!” He paid her no mind. He had jumped up to the spot and seemed engrossed in eating or drinking something. At least he was back on this side of the road, for now.

Had she not started to tell what, if anything, she had learned from this writing project, or had she already told that? There was nothing in this writing she could properly keep track of. It was not like a stack of papers or a notebook one could leaf back through to see what one had written already. One might repeat oneself several times. She supposed that was ok. One did that in one’s conversations.

She had never been able to understand the people she spoke with who tended to repeat things immediately, sometimes several times over. This was not just drunk people who did it. Now that she thought of it, it had been a while since she had come across that. 

She saw the mailman coming down the sidewalk with the mail. She would listen for the sound of any mail delivery he might bring. He had delivered the shopping flyers the day before Thanksgiving already. She had not yet taken a good look at them, except to know there was no Friday special on roast chickens. It seemed quite a while since that store had offered that. The big box store had it as a regular item. She had not tried theirs and would put off doing so. It was enough to have it just when it came up by surprise at the grocery store. Between the two grocery stores, this store had the better. The big box store’s was an unknown. She so disliked the new big box store that she bought as little as possible there.

3:47 pm 1994 words

There had been no sound of the mailman’s dropping mail through her slot. Usually she could hear that if he had put anything through.

She would have to do some fast thinking to have other projects to replace this writing project. It would be interesting to see what the effects would be of finishing this. She hoped she would not feel obliged to try this challenge again.

She wanted to brainstorm lists of possible projects to work on and that she could jump back and forth between. Perhaps it was as simple as committing one’s self to doing 1 – 1 ½ hours on an almost daily basis of some creative activity of any kind. She had been finding that it was very good to do this before getting involved with any social media browsing or participating in a day. To be involved with one’s own creative ventures first was like the dictum to ‘pay oneself first’. It made her feel very good to operate this way.

She also wanted to brainstorm a list of things to do while deciding what to do. She had made such a list a long time ago, and had kept it attached to the side of her fridge. Once she wrote it, she never referred to it, or even followed its advice. She needed such a reminder again, at least to use until it was second nature to follow such a reminder. She had packed away the old list when she moved. 

It did not look like there were going to be any revelations or resolutions to the last parts of this writing. Life would go on as before. That endless cycle and repetition did scare her. The artists and authors who lived to old ages while adding to the world’s stores of creative ventures and explorations, which were private at the same time that they were public, gave her so much hope.

4:04 pm had she been hearing a message come through on her message machine? 2331 words. 

She would go check again and try to get the cat in again.

Break

4:21 pm resume

The cat had come racing in this time as soon as the Wrimoer whistled for him. He came from somewhere by the little boardwalk leading up to her porch. This walkway had a line of juniper trees running along side it at the bottom of the little embankment. The cat also often waited in the leaves and brush down there. 

He came in purring for his dinner, ate a bit of it, then settled himself on her mattress on the floor where she slept. He was in for the night, or so she hoped. She would go down later to put out more food for the rival cat.

Back to the question of what she had learned this time around. She wanted to make sure that she got something of her own creative venture done, a completed whole of anything, the day after her week’s classes. 

It did not really matter if it was done on that day, but she was not yet trusting herself to get it done sometime during the days off between classes. If she could find other ways to make sure she would, that would be good. Why might she have a problem getting this done if she did not have a way to make sure she did? Why could she not trust herself? 

Because she turned it into something that HAD to be done? Or because she had too many strictures on just how or what it was she needed to do? This was why she wanted a list of things to choose from – so that she could keep it playful rather than as something that had to be. Her main reason for feeling like it had to be was that she got upset with the feeling that time was passing so and that she was treading water. When she took care of her own creative desires, the passage of time was not a problem. Then it became more of a miracle.

She knew too that, if she were taking care of her own creative venture needs and desires, she was ready and eager to have her classes, eager to get ready for them in the mornings. When she was eager to get ready for them, it was easier to get ready for them. 

She could continue to play and experiment with ways to sell her productions online. It need never be carried out all the way if she thought it would create too much headache. Such things could always be taken off the table and not offered further. 

The lights in the back parking lot were off again for some reason – at 4:40 pm. It was pitch dark out there. She would try to remember to keep watch to see if they came on at a certain time. With the iciness out there that was a dangerous condition. 

She looked to see if the streetlight was on. There had been quite a build up of ice on one of the power lines strung between the streetlight and the side of her building close to the back. That line had looked like it was hanging very low. Standing up she could see that the backyard was lit, just not as well as she thought it usually was. There were times when the tree trunks were lit up. Now it seemed as if only the ground was lit. Perhaps it was because she did not usually have the light on in the bay window as she did now while writing. Usually she looked out this window from a darkened living room. She was not usually sitting in this spot during the evening. 

What final words could she say as she finished up the writing? What other big thing had she learned from this? She did finally have the experience of seeing it was possible to write a novel in not too long a time. She had two ideas of things to try should she decide to try it. She also saw how good it was to have specific goals to work towards bit by bit, but at the same time the importance of making small completions on a consistent basis.

4:56 pm 3048 words

Sounded like the heater just went out. She needed to check whether it was one light or both lights

4:58 pm the green light was still on.

  

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 11/27/14 11:36 am

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 11/27/14 11:36 am

The Wrimoer was torn over what she should choose to do that day. She wanted to get back to the Nano writing project just so she could get if finished. She had just over 6000 words left to writ4e to complete the project. But she had also been thinking of going down to the orphan’s thanksgiving that one of her students had offered her. It was held in a local Grange not that far from her. She had thought for weeks now that she would probably want to stay home just because she loved feeling the atmosphere of this kind of holiday. There was a stillness in the air, a peace in the air, that only seemed to exist on these holidays. Much as she liked being in the company of a large group of people who had such strong community bonds, or at least could come together in community. The window for it was very small though. These gatherings took place midday. She just was not prepared to leave the house at such a time. Especially if it meant she would not get to do the things she wanted to do at the moment.

She had cleared away her breakfast tray almost as soon as she was finished. That was a very positive step for her. She had done that the previous day as well but then run about the house doing a few quick tasks before actually sitting down to work. This time she was sitting herself right down to write. She could still decide to run off to the gathering. 

She had also written herself a little list of possible ideas to write about. And this time she did have the list at her side. That did not mean she could refer to it, as that would be too much interruption to the writing. She would have to rely on her memory.

The evening before, she had been pleased over her overall writing progress. She had updated the spreadsheet where she kept track of her writing progress. She had gotten to post a couple of the recent writing sessions to her Nanowrimo blog that she was keeping. But then there had been a strong feeling of letdown. It suddenly felt as if she was not doing anything towards the art or the creations that meant the most to her. She did not feel that this Nano writing was part of that, not yet at least. She had thought she was keeping up with her idea of trying to get done some small piece of soul and beauty based art or creativity right after her teaching days. She had realized that she would have to start doing that to ensure she did it, or risk feeling very letdown or depressed about the whole nature of things.

Perhaps the feeling had returned not because she was doing the writing instead of the other, but because the writing would be coming to an end very soon. She had heard that authors often felt blue after finishing the writing of a book. It was a very different time involvement than the ongoing completion of smaller pieces. She would contemplate more on what might be the root of her blueness. It had been a blueness that almost made her nauseous. 

The nor’easter snowstorm had made the area white again overnight. It was a wet heavy snow that started around midday the previous day. By afternoon there were reports of weather related road accidents. There had been plenty of power outages again. Thanksgiving day had turned into a sunny day for the morning at least. 

The cat had had to stay in overnight because the Wrimoer would not let him out into the storm. He was anxious to get out of the house when she let him out. His rival had apparently eaten all the food she had left for him in a bowl. It was a china bowl instead of the usual lightweight plastic container – so it would not blow away in the storm.

It had not appeared as if it had been as much snow as forecast. It was to be around 8 “. It looked more like 3-4”. The plow guy had already come and gone. That meant she would have to clear away the plow leavings behind her car. She had shoveled away more than that probably was. As long as she could get out there while it was still sunny out, she thought she could manage it.

The heater seemed to be running fine now. At one point during the night she had wondered if it was off. She could not hear the usual sound and it felt a bit cool where she was. But when she finally got up for the day, the light on the heater was still green. At one point she heard the heater come on – both the red flame light and the green power lights were on. The heat was running. And it had stayed running properly. This hardly answered the mystery though. She had her theory of what it might be.

As she sat writing just then, the radio had started airing a story, an interview with a mother of one of the Middle Eastern terrorist kidnapping victims. She got caught up in listening to the mother tell her story instead of writing. She should stop her writing so she could listen properly.

12:06 pm 910 words  30 minutes

12:41 pm resume

That morning she had heard a story about the poet Robert Burns. He had written and self published a small book of Scottish poems in hopes of selling enough of these little books to finance a trip to the Caribbean where he was to take a job, since he needed to earn money to feed his new family, or his newly arrived children. He never made it to the job. He had gone, perhaps even walked, to Scotland for something and by the time he arrived there he was famous because his book was such a success and he was famous as if by magic. The Wrimoer was taken with the story of Burns writing a book of poetry in hopes of financing a trip to a job. In one way it had been done to make money, but would it have been so popular if it had not also been a meaningful venture, a meaningful creative act? It could be argued that it was the apparent need to make money that prompted the artistic creation. She was a firm believer that it just did not work to do a thing ‘for the money’. One might be believing that was why one was doing it, but perhaps that was simply the justification one gave oneself to do the thing.

She did enjoy doing some things ‘for the money’, but only also for the game of it, or that it was a common ground between something one wanted to do for itself and because it was ‘for the money’.  She felt one needed to do a thing for the desire of doing it. Or because the thing was wanted by someone. There were lots of reasons.

Perhaps it had been a year ago when she had received a cyber order with a payment for a single set of cards. It had been a lovely surprise to find this payment announcement, but she was so perplexed because she did not understand where the order had come from, or how the customer had figured out how to pay her. The Wrimoer had to dig around quite a bit until she by chance came across a web page she had made a few years ago that was set up as an online shopping cart with clear products offerings and descriptions. The memory of making this had returned to her, but the mystery was that she thought she had never connected it with anything else, as she had not felt ready to handle any possible sales from it. She had perhaps also been unsure over whether it was secure enough to publish. It was published, but she had assumed that if it had nothing connecting to it, it would not be found. It was from this page though that the order had come. The customer had found it somehow. That led to the Wrimoer’s wanting to find a proper place that she could properly connect to it, or that she could insert the page into. It was another task that she still wanted to do, that connecting. To make another page like that shopping cart page was something she also very much wanted to do. That was also the kind of thing that she thought filled her soul need in a way. Why would such a mercenary venture feed a soul need? She felt there was a very soulful aspect to business, or that it could be done in a soulful way. One put out there one’s gifts where others could find what they liked, and one gave customers, by its being an act of business, the opportunity to make the action a whole or complete exchange, instead of the user walking away feeling an obligatory debt. 

In the art classes she did for free, a part of her liked that it gave her a kind of power to be doing it for free. She did not like when it seemed as if people took the class fore granted, and did not treat it as if it was just like any other class that was sponsored. Practically speaking it should be considered as having the same value as the class that received funding. Somehow at the library, it seemed as if her offering was seen as no different a value than a volunteer coming to shelve books. Believing that that was how the class was seen by the administration was a problem for the Wrimoer. She did not know how to address this.

1:14pm 1664 words 33 minutes

What were the things she wanted to do to counteract the effect of the sinking sun over the next few weeks? It had about 3 ½ weeks left before it started climbing back to more cheerful position. She had been determined she would not let it have that gripping effect on her this winter.

She thought she might have figured out why the winter seemed so much longer than summer. It could be that it simply was much longer than summer in this part of the country. In winter though there were so many occasions where the winter upset everything in one’s routine. It also made such a drastic change in the appearance of everything – it was such a contrast after a snowstorm. The upheavals in winter were more memorable; they stayed in one’s mind differently than the relative sameness of summer. Summer passed almost as one day or one week. Winter was a series of strong events. She had to keep reminding herself of these philosophical, if one could call it that, viewpoints of the seasons. She thought that such views could help her take the ups and downs of winter better in stride. There was nothing like the communal feeling in the world when everyone came out after a storm to clean up and deal with the aftermath. In the big city where she had lived before, it just did not happen often enough to be a regular part of life. She really liked that it was a regular part of life in this part of the country. If the winter was any shorter, everything else would be different, there would not be the same after a storm feeling, and the summers would be cloyingly hot. It had to all be taken as a whole. The only way to have one without the other was to go away for the part one did not like.

She had written about only a few of the things on her list. After her blue feelings the evening before, she had played digitally with her calligraphy turkey demonstration drawings by adding a Happy Thanksgiving greeting to it. This she had sent as a message to her family and had posted to the social media. All morning she had been aching to see if there were responses to it. Whenever she posted an image to her personal social media, it got a good response. She usually posted images to her artist business social media page. Very few people saw it and that could be very discouraging. Mostly she was posting the photos of the students’ work. If she had a photo of her own work she would post it there on another day, so it would not conflict. That she would then also post to her personal page.

What else could she write about for the last few moments of her writing session?

The afternoon before, when she had gone out to set out food for the rival cat, the son of the downstairs neighbor was coming home. They had greeted each other. He was a young man just out of his teens. He had spent the summer working on the waterfront of an isolated offshore island fishing community. He had told her last winter that he lived for winter and snowboarding. Anytime he could get work that allowed him to do that it was very good for him. Last summer he had been in between his winter jobs and the new one on the island. It was 4^th of July weekend that he had been hanging out around home. The Wrimoer had just gotten t her new old car. The kid had acted shocked when he learned that this car in their parking lot was hers. He had remarked about that, and then made very odd observations about another neighbor’s car having out of state plates and its sticker being out of date. He had gone into his car, actually his mother’s, to get his smokes. His hands were shaking as he lit up. He and the other neighbor teased her, because they were also hanging around the building having beers, did she want to go get them some more beer. She was on her way to the supermarket.

At the supermarket she had parked next to a very large pickup truck that was in its spot at a bit of an angle. When she returned from her shopping, she happened to come around the passenger side of her car, and noticed there was a dent in the fender. She did not think that had been there before. Would she not have noticed it when she bought the car? She knew she had not made the dent. The truck could have made it. But she thought it was the kid from her building who had done it because she had found his behavior so odd. There was nothing to be proven about anything. She had never addressed the question. Her student had noticed the dent immediately when she came for class two days later.

Every time she saw the kid they greeted each other amiably and sometimes chatted a bit. This time she decided to at least mention the question. She did not necessarily expect to get a straight answer, but at least she was making it known that she thought this. She asked him, ‘did you….?’ He was flummoxed in how he answered. He could not understand what she was asking and kept saying he had been on the island all this time. She tried to clarify that this was way back when, and to describe how he had acted and that that had made her think it could have been him. She still found his reaction strange – he garbled up anything she said. Perhaps she should not have asked but simply told him she believed he had done it. She had let him off the hook, if he had done it. She was glad she had at least put it out in the open that she believed that. But by accepting his answer, if he had done it, he would believe he had fooled her. That was too bad. He seemed to be a kid who got away with denying things because he was so pretty or handsome. One never knew with him.

2:00 pm 2726 words break 46 minutes

8:02 pm resume

The Wrimoer had gone out to take care of shoveling her car out from the snow. It had not been as bad as she had expected. She wanted to take care of it while it was still light enough outside. 

There had been no concessions to Thanksgiving. She had not prepared any special food for the holiday, had not eaten any turkey, stuffing, or sweet potato. Had not visited anyone. She did have the commercial pumpkin pie she had bought at the supermarket, but that was something she did every year during this season. That was not something just to be eaten on the holiday. Because she had quite a bit of it during the season, she rarely ate it on the holiday if she was out somewhere for the holiday meal. She much prefer to try any tempting dessert she could not normally have access to. It had been a lovely day for her, other than the pressure to take care of the shoveling during a certain time frame. She always found it hard to cope with time strictures – when there was more than one thing asking to be done at the same time. She had had to let go of the idea she might be able to go out to one of the Thanksgiving gatherings. Later she had found out that a community meal quite close to her went on for a much longer time than she had thought. She could have gone to that one. It was not to be. Perhaps she would remember about that for the next year. 

She was ready to prepare her evening ritual and do some reading. Mystery writers were on her mind. A well known one had just died at the age of 95. The Wrimoer had never read that author’s mysteries, but had seen them on TV and enjoyed them greatly. She had heard or seen at least one interview with the author as well. It was a mystery to the Wrimoer how these writers came up with their stories. How did they figure out the solutions to them? How did they even come up with the ideas for them? What magic it was to write a story that a reader could get lost in. 

8:20 pm 3107 words 18 minutes

30+33+46+18= 127        24.46 wpm

Wednesday, 11/26/14 1:30 pm.

Advice of making a whole, goals, turkeys, & lentils

The Wrimoer was finally settling down to the day’s writing. She had been very gung ho to get going right after breakfast. Clearing away the breakfast dishes had led to its own track of activities. She had actually gotten herself ready for the day. In that process she had also done her journal writing. 

The night before she had updated the spreadsheet where she kept track of her Nano writing project’s progress. There were only 8000+ words left to go and five days in which to do them. Since she was now usually writing more than 2000 words a day, usually at a sitting, she should easily complete the challenge. Part of her just wanted to get done with it and see if she could knock through it in two days. That would be very special circumstances though.

She thought she might have finally figured out just what was so compelling about doing this challenge. How did it manage to keep her so engaged and focused, even though she was so often wanting to give up on it? First it was that it was clear obvious steps one had to do to accomplish it. For her she took it at the simplest level – just worry about writing the words. Don’t worry about how good they are. Just worry about getting that quantity done. There was, she had found out, a lot to be said for just working on the quantity, albeit for a while. The work almost had to be done on a daily basis  - it had to be kept up with. If one got too far behind one would either be overwhelmed with what one had to make up, or one might not be physically able to make it up. One’s wrists or any other ergonomics could easily get in the way of doing more in a day. One could not count on being able to make up a lot in one session. If one had to make upp a deficit, it would have to be spread out over several or many days. That made one’s daily target quota that much more than the big amount it already was.

These were not the main things she got out of it. She had found that it was also very important to be able to see this creation growing. The word collection! It was no different than seeing a piece of knitting or needlework develp. Perhaps she had already written this. She thought she might be getting a better picture of how she could apply this to other creative ventures or practices. It did matter that she had a tangible creation each day. In this case, because she had finally made use of the spell check and grammar check in the word processing software, she was now able to have somewhat finished day by day drafts. She had been posting the earlier drafts, though they had not gone through these little checks. Yet. She hoped she would at least be able to get to that in the not too far future. Knowing how easily the checkers worked, allowed her to try more typing without looking at the screen and without trying to correct too much as she went along. The problem was that if she typed too slowly and evenly, she tended to forget what letter of a word she had just typed. It almost needed to be typed fast while she still knew what word she was on, and what letter had just been written.

The heater mystery was not solved yet. It had come on just before the Wrimoer sat down to the writing, or actually quite a bit before. But she had had to set the thermostat higher than usual in order for it to be able to come on and stay on more than an initial moment. It had gotten too hot in the room. She did not even have a sweater on. And still the heater ran. 

She was getting her nights mixed up. It was the previous night, she thought, that the heater had run continuously for many hours. She had worried that something could catch fire if it kept running at such a temperature.

The wind had finally shifted. The nor’easter had started not too long ago. It was coming down thick and heavy, a fat wet snow. The kind the crows seemed to cluster with. A small flock had just flown overhead and were sitting high in a tree across the street. She had not seen many crows this season or even this summer. Where had they been?

Where she used to live, when the weather was like this, they would show up in the yard on the south side of her building, usually a group of three, and spend a lot of time sitting in the trees there. It was the backyard. Where they sat now up in that tree, was not a protected tree out of the winds. The winds did not blow yet. The roads were still wet. She could hear by the traffic sounds. She guessed the temperature was hovering around freezing if the snow was sticking this way.

Her best guess about the heater’s behavior was that the winds immediately blew out the pilot light, or there was some kind of discrepancy between the called for temperature and what the sensor of the heater said. But what situations would cause the reset button to turn itself off? A failure to ignite, or a pilot getting blown out. A backdraft perhaps? How did vents that faced the more common winter winds stay lit? 

She had tried to eat an apple for dessert the night before. It had been macintosh apples she was cooking up with cranberries for that wonderful dessert. Those apples were very sweet and tart and crisp. This kind of apple that she had tried last night, a kind she usually liked very well, empires, was getting mealy. She would have to cook it up with the cranberries. But two bites into it, she had had a pain in her chest as she had never had before. It scared her. She realized quickly that it was part of whatever gave her that swallowing problem, the only solution to which was to drink some plain water. It happened when one at a bit too much in one or two mouthfuls of a kind of food that would fill one’s esophagus. If one had swallowed any air before hand, as one was prone to do if one was with company and talking, or one was excited about the meal one was about to eat, that air in the stomach wanted to come up as a burp. If food was on its way down and there was no place for the air, one had a plumbing situation just like ‘air in the pipes’. Only drinking a few swallows of water would force that food down so that one could then burp. Before one did that though, the chest pain could be very intense and frightening. It was not a choking, as it was not happening in the airways. It was happening in the foodway.

She had had an incident like that at a friend’s dinner once. It had lasted a half an hour before she either accidentally decided to drink some water, or remembered the advice of another friend – ‘drink water’. From then on she never dared be without water at a meal. It seemed it needed to be plain water, though why she was not sure, or even if that was actually true. Perhaps someday she would put that to the test too. 

The Wrimoer had been imagining all sorts of shelters she could possibly make for that rival cat. The recent ideas were to make some kind of tent out of old wire coat hangers or small branches. Her eye caught sight of the big lampshade to a long ago broken lamp she hoped someday could be fixed and used again. That shade was formed around a wire armature and was much like something she had been wondering about. 

2:24 pm 1357 words

She had come across a piece of advice the other day, which she found very inspiring. It talked about the onerousness of doing chores and how dissatisfying they could be because everything just got messed up and dirty again and so quickly. The advice was to make sure to do something with one’s chores that one would be able to look at for a week. It should be something decorative and/or creative. Perhaps something like a flower arrangement, but it could be any kind of arrangement done artfully. It could be a pile of junk arranged in a design. This spoke to the need she had to get some kind of creation completed at the start of her day’s off. She had finally realized that – that she needed to get that done on her first day off instead of leaving it till the end. Her Nano writing was not yet satisfying that need. It needed to be a smaller but more whole complete effort than such a thing as the Nano writing. It was great that she was working on this, but it was her days of the previous winter when she had done those quick illustrations and papercuts along with the little sometimes stories, that had been so satisfying for her.

Doing her calligraphic turkeys over the past two days had been good. They were certainly quick enough to do. She did get to share them though. The sharing them was what also spurred her on. It was not that she had to, just that she did so enjoy that part too.

She was eyeing her word count instead of writing as she tried to think what else she could say at that moment. This writing session she had done again without a list of ideas. She had not written a list of ideas for this day. She had done that for the other day – but had she had it in hand when she went to do her writing? 

2:37 pm 1691 words (67 minutes)

Dinner the night before had been another delicious surprise. It was partly a very odd leftover that she had not liked when she first prepared it. Two nights before, she had tried to cook up some lentils. She had let them burn, but not yet too badly. She had melted some cheddar cheese over the lentils still on top of their burned bottom layer. When the cheese melted, she scooped off the good lentils into a container. In a smaller saucepan she heated some crushed tomatoes with a bit of sugar and a dash of lemon juice. This then went over the serving of lentils in her bowl and got some grated Parmesan. It had been ok but not that great. She had only eaten half of that. 

What she did with the other half was the surprising discovery for her. She made up a serving of fettuccini with more crushed tomatoes, dash of lemon juice, spoon of sugar, and beef ramen seasoning. When this was cooked, the leftover lentils went on top in the pot, with more cheddar cheese to melt over it with the cover on. When the cheese was melted, she put that all into her bowl. The lentil tomato sauce tasted so much like meat sauce. What a surprise for her.

Her turkey she had bought a couple weeks ago when they first came on sale in one of the supermarkets. Since it was frozen and she had bought it early, she had put it right in the freezer. She had not taken it out. It slowly grew in her mind that she did not want to have to cook anything at length. It would be nice to be able to decide on a whim whether she wanted to or not, but here she was not willing to commit herself to having to cook that bird. She might have to do it over Christmas.

The previous year the other store had been out of the sale price turkeys when she had wanted to get it. By the time they did have it, it was just a few days before Thanksgiving. There had been hardly any time to defrost it in. As it was she had spent quite awhile trying to speed up the defrosting. That was perhaps part of what kept her from tackling it this year. She had had two years of making the best turkeys she had tasted in over 15 years, since the last time she had cooked a roast of any kind. She was just so good at it. No one else’s compared to hers.

The Wrimoer was very glad that she had taken care of getting gas in the car while she was out the day before. She had wanted to put it off and just get home quickly after her class, but she managed to talk herself into getting that chore taken care of. If the weather were to be bad the next day, there would be no taking care of putting fuel in the car then. If she wanted to maybe go out to her Thanksgiving invitation, she certainly would need fuel for that. It would be a hindrance to have to worry about that extra chore if she happened to be trying to go any kind of distance by a certain time. If they got as much snow as the 8” predicted, one might not have to worry about whether one would go out or not for Thanksgiving. 

She had always wanted to try one of those big public Thanksgivings put on by a local church. It was mostly for very low-income people she thought. And that was what kept her away. Such a dinner, though open for anyone, was populated by a specific demographic. She assumed it was not a well-mixed crowd. The fast food places were very narrow in their demographics as well. That almost kept her away from those places too. People did not mix themselves up very well. They wanted to stick to their own types. She preferred diverse groups of people.

3:07 pm 2378 words 97 minutes= 24.5 wpm spell/grammar check – 3:18 pm

Monday, 11/24/14, 2:16 pm

Working with wireless keyboard at the library, and then, the heater.

This was a different setup for the Wrimoer. She had done this at least once before - to work at the library. Whether she had worked on the wireless keyboard then she could not remember. It felt odd to her to write in public on the keyboard, as she could not do it by looking at the screen. In this case she was using the tablet. She had seen the other day how woozy that made her if she looked at it too long.

There was again the problem of what to write. She had no list on hand. She was also doing it with her eyes closed instead of looking out the window. That made her feel funny to be in a room with people and to have her eyes closed in front of them. In shutting out her view of them, she was letting expressions run over her face that she could feel self conscious over.  But it would seem to feel odder to be looking out the window while typing

away. Her position was not at all close enough to the tablet to be able to check anything she had written. She gave looking out the window a try. It did feel odd. Looking up that way gave that numbing feeling in the neck area. 

She had given her morning class not that long ago. The class had done beautifully on their turkeys. They did some in calligraphic flourish style and then some in stencil drawing style. The stencil drawing was a hard concept for students to understand. One had to color in a shape without have drawn it in line. One was to color in as one went along, but to also try to create a smooth edge so that there would be clean white lines between the dark shapes. It took a lot of exposure to this method before people could get away from their habitual way of thinking of something. It so often got confusing for them. The work had been quite lovely. One student had misunderstood the options for the final piece. That had created a third way to do the final piece that she ha the Wrimoer had not thought of before. Do the calligraphy style and color that in. She must remember to add that to her notes for the lesson.

The weather was wet and wild out that day. A lot warmer than it had been the past few days. A respite from the cold.

The armchairs at the library were very comfortable, except that the armrests were still too high for the Wrimoer. There was no way to prop her legs up these chairs were very firm, well padded and roomy. 

She would not be having the watercolor students in the morning as one was off anyway, and the other was celebrating thanksgiving out of the country.

At the library she had taken pictures of her press releases in the newspapers. The regular paper had printed the kids’ class December offering with one of her demo drawings that was right in the calendar box. She hoped people would finally see that. They had chosen the Chanukah themed drawing though, which struck her as a bit odd. The free paper had finally rewritten the article to include both the adult and kids class, with at least the basic themes mentioned, the dates, and a mention of the patrons sponsoring the kids class that was finally doing it justice she thought. She was very pleased to see they had listed the themes, even differentiating the themes between the two classes.

She knew this typing was going to be such a mess. The Wrimoer had started using the spell check and grammar option on the word processing software, but that would not happen until she got this writing put in into that software, and that meant having to send it as an email message to herself through all the channels. It was so frustrating to know she had hit a wrong key but to be so unsure of what key she had hit. Just where in the word had she been? Every time she tried moving the keyboard, she ended up hitting a key she had not wanted to.  

There was someone sitting at a table nearby who worked with a pad and pencil. It was good to see someone writing by hand. They had talked a bit about that in class that morning just because they were using calligraphy for doing their turkeys. They had done some regular calligraphy stroke practices before their drawings.

She ached to stop writing as she again felt as if she was saying nothing. She could not stand not being able to correct her writing. She should probably have been going slower and more evenly.

2:44pm

She just peeked and found she had written a whole section in upper case letters. She hoped there was an easy conversion feature for that. She would not be able to stomach having to go through that to rewrite it.

2:47pm 31 minutes 858 words 27 wpm

Resume 9:07 pm after running the spell & grammar check. 

She had forgotten to note just how long the spell & grammar checks had taken. Her writing speed had been good from her work at the library, but if it took so long to run the spell/grammar check, that speed increase would seem not to count for much.

When the Wrimoer got home from the library in the late afternoon, the apartment felt cooler than it should have. The winds out had been very gusty and the rain was not that heavy or even cold but its whipping made it feel unpleasant to her. She found that the propane heater had been off, with both the red and green lights. She tried turning the heater on. It came on for a moment then shut off both lights again. She had always wondered just how the heater’s thermostat sensed the temperature or where it was. It seemed as if it handled different weathers in different ways. In this case she could not get the heater to stay on. She did not see why the green light should go off when the red light with the little flame symbol on it went off. This green light had been on all summer. She had never turned the heater off. It never needed to come on in the summer because she had the heat setting at a low setting.

She tried getting in touch with someone, the business office, the landlord, the fellow who was to field the calls about such things. She was a bit panicked at the thought there might be no heat overnight. She worried that there would be no time to get in touch with anyone who might fix this. The fellow who was to look after things while the landlords were on their winter holiday, wanted to come have a look at the heater and at the gas tank. She had thought perhaps there was no gas. He checked the tank and found it full.

He tried jacking the heat way up. It did come on and seem as if it would stay on. That frightened her to have it set that high. She did not want to have to be jumping up and down to be regulating the heat. That would not work through the night. They tried several times to set the thermostat, or what seemed to be the thermostat, to its normal position and then just high enough to make the heat come on. Each time both lights would come on, then the whole thing would shut off, and the green light would go off as well, though the button stayed in its ‘on’ position.

She decided she could always use her electric heater in her bed area. It was blustery out, but not so cold that it would get bad in the apartment. This was weather that came from the South/Southwest, never that cold, but usually wet in the winter. The caretaker was unsure whether to call the landlord. She wanted him to. Had she the number she would have. She had tried to, but that number had not worked. That in itself had been a little disturbing.

She had had a problem a few weeks ago where her smoke alarm had been going off intermittently. She had tried calling the caretaker but there had been no answer. Then had come the power outages of that storm. The smoke alarm had kept going. It was because the battery was low. It only beeped intermittently when the heat got too hot. Then it was fine for several days. It started up again but this time it would not stop when the temperature dropped. She had learned to live with it, but it was not good. 

The caretaker had said he could come later in the day to look at it. He did not come or call. She had tried to call him. There had been no answer and nothing to leave a message on. The next morning he called her early, apologizing profusely. He would come by to look at it in a few hours, since she did not want him coming in the morning.

When he came, he had the replacement battery ready, and again apologized. Still, she wondered what would have happened if it had really been something and there had been no way to get in touch with anyone. 

She had always been able to get in touch with the landlord though he was in another state. This made her feel odd to feel that the only line of contact was through the caretaker, nice as he was. She just did not like having to worry about whether the right information was getting through. 

Now with this heater situation, the caretaker had talked to the landlord. The landlord had said in this warmer weather one had to set the thermostat higher if one wanted the heat to come on. That did not change that the green light was going off. The landlord had at least taken heed about that. The caretaker was to call the fuel company first thing in the morning so they could come check out the heater.

The Wrimoer had been able to take care of a few simple chores. She had made her dinner. Made that wonderful apple cranberry dish. Combed the cat. Swept the cat fur off the bed sheet. Then she gave the heater another try. She had also written up an account of the basic steps they had gone through and what the temps had been. This time she set the thermostat high enough that it should go on for awhile. It did. After the heater had run for a few minutes like that – it seemed as if it ran hotter than it usually did – she turned it down. The heater turned itself lower but kept running, with both lights on. After about an hour, the temperatures in both the kitchen and the living room were up to a normal level. The red light went off and the heater turned off, but the green light stayed on. Still a mystery, but at least it had seemed to work normally.

She called the caretaker to let him know what had happened. She had called him earlier to tell him nothing was improved. When he had left, he was saying that he had a ‘feeling’ the green light would stay on or just come back on, though it was off when he left. This had given her such reassurance to hear him thinking so magically. This kind of faith did not appeal to her at all. Why should the green light magically stay on or come on? It might, yes, but could one assume that it would?

She was to call him around Noon the next day. By then she would have been able to watch whether it reverted. She suspected it was somehow related to either the wet or the direction of the wind. From where she sat she could not see whether the green light was still on. 

c. 9:55 pm

There, the heater had just come on, by itself?  Now to see if it would stay on for a little while. No! – It had shut itself completely off again immediately. No green light.

Would she have to set the thermostat higher again to make it come on? She should check where the winds were now.

9:56 pm 2104 words. 51 minutes 24.4 wpm Wow the spell & grammar check went very fast with this round. Very few errors as I corrected along the way.

She tried raising the thermostat and going through the turning on process. It shut itself off again immediately. It made a little thump sound. She had heard an unusual sound the evening before that had startled her. She had not known where it had come from. She had assumed it had been the cap to the homemade strawberry jam jar that had made quite a loud almost bang or pop in the kitchen sink. She had not been able to get it off the jar without prying it loose with the can opener end. She thought it was this lid popping back into shape against the  metal sink that had made that loud pop or bang. Now she wondered if it had been something in the heater. It had seemed as if it came from the heater’s direction.

10:10 pm 2273 words

31 + 51 +10? minutes = 92 minutes, 24.71 wpm

Friday, 11/21/14 12:24 pm

kids opera, cats, games, tree sales, birds

The Wrimoer had a new idea for how to play with word count targets and goals. She had probably thought of this before. The idea was to take a stab at doing 500 words, pause to note the time, and do the little stand-up exercises. One could never guarantee catching oneself at exactly 500 words but it would give one more of a sense that one had completed another block of something, or so she guessed. She would test the idea.

She had started out her morning right, after breakfast, by updating the writing log spreadsheet to include the past two days’ writings. She was making progress in the accumulation of words. At the same time that she was having fun playing this game – for it certainly was a game – she was seeing the ridiculousness of it. She was enjoying it though and it seemed as if it was teaching her things***principles that could be transferred to other activities. She was still mainly thinking in terms of knocking off her word debt or deficit. 

She had seen that morning in updating the spreadsheet that it had gotten her motivated to get going on the writing. She had hastened to clear away her breakfast dishes and maybe go make her bed so she could resume the writing project. Instead she wound up washing the dishes and getting herself all ready for the day. She had done this very fast where she usually dawdled over it. She had been very eager to get to work. The cat, who had gone out in the blustery bright cold day just before her breakfast, she had just seen bounding and racing across the neighbors’ lawn towards the parking lot of her building. She thought perhaps he was running to see the lady who often brought food for the birds and any cats hanging about. He might also be thinking that the Wrimoer was coming out for something and that her could come in for whatever reason. She had run down in the cold to whistle out for him. He came bounding home. Upstairs he ate, then kept miaowing up at her. He had taken to just looking at her and miaowing rather than indicating what he wanted. She used to be able to get him to scratch at the door if he wanted out. Now he just lay at the door miaowing at her. She would crack it open. Where he used to complete this action by pulling the door further open, he now just sat there waiting. The only thing she could think for this change was that when he pawed and clawed at the door during the night when she was sleeping, she would shoo him away. Had he understood that he was not supposed to open the door? She let him back out into the cold bluster.

She was doing the writing. The act of updating the word log had gotten motivated to do the writing. She wanted to think up a list of ideas like this that could get one motivated.

12:47 pm 516 words stand up 3x  23 minutes 516/23 – 22.43wpm

12:51 pm resume

She would probably have to cut the Nano writing short though. The evening before there had been an email from the leader of the civic committee she was part of asking the members for what time slots they could help out in selling Christmas trees right after Thanksgiving. They had been doing this for a few years now. The last year they had only broken even, because the weather had been so bad. They had also never put out a press release about it. There may have been and advertisement. There was a poster. The Wrimoer felt that a press release was most important. She had done it the years before and always just adapted whatever she had written previously. 

No one had asked her to do a press release the previous year. Apparently it had not been considered or just considered too late in the game. Now she was surprised that they had chosen to do the sale this year. Talk at the last meetings had sounded as if they would not be doing it again. The leader however had always really enjoyed doing the sale. She may not have remembered that they had decided not to continue it. Or maybe in her mind they had not decided anything final about it. 

The email was also qualified – ‘if we can get the trees…’ This would mean that sending out a press release could not yet be done. The request for assistants said that the weekend after Thanksgiving only needed one seller in all. Apparently because it was not busy in that time slot. Again the Wrimoer thought that could be because they had not gotten press or any publicity out in time for that weekend. 

The Wrimoer was torn between wanting to pull out her previous press releases, (she had even done that right after she found the message), and knowing that if she stepped in to do this, she would be keeping up the role of doing press releases. Doing press releases that she had already written and was simply recycling was easy. It seemed foolish to have someone else start the process all over again. This press release, if she was going to get involved, was what would put a limit to her Nanowrimo project work that day. She would probably have to give up for the day her strong desire to get through that deficit. She had had hopes of thinking of it segment by segment and maybe, just maybe she would get through it. It still remained to be seen. This was still proving to be an odd experience to be writing about writing and seemingly mostly writing about word accounting. It showed the fascination with games and strategies that one could have.

She always thought she was not one for playing scorekeeping games. This was not as much a scorekeeping as it was a form of watching something grow and having a hand in making it grow. Just like doing a crossword puzzle, a picture puzzle, a needlework project, knitting. They all grew cell by cell, row by row, bit by bit. 

1:16 pm 1050 words. 25 minutes  stand up 3x

1:19 resume

The Wrimoer had again not made any lists of topics she might want to tell about. She had been running through her head various things she had heard on the radio, or read on the social media. Another bit of advice or encouragement from one of the groups or forums for the writing project told of how important it was to keep on trying with one’s writing efforts. This was from someone who was a very dedicated writer. They had written 13 novels. On the 13^th the writer was on the verge of giving up. Every novel submission had been rejected whenever the person had tried. Then one day, when the author was just considering giving up, there came a message from someone, (a publisher or agent), who was desperately trying to find the author. Some message or something had gotten lost for two months. This person had liked the manuscript so much and was trying to get hold of the author to sign the author. This all led to the author’s becoming published and to now being able to work only on writing. The author’s main point after that story was that the author had realized it was simply impossible to stop writing because one just loved telling stories so much. That was the most important thing for the author. It did not matter whether one got published. One just had to write. That was why one wrote, or at least that was why that author wrote.

This had made the Wrimoer think on her own reasons for writing. She was still just dabbling and experimenting with the making up of stories. She did not think for her it was that she liked telling stories, but more that she wanted to capture them, to remember them. Not ‘a story’ so much as whatever it was that had happened of importance, (in this case it was often just a matter or the importance of a day’s or a moment’s ambience), how an experience had been for her, what she had experience, what she had learned from something, revelations she had had. The fiction story telling was still such a new thing for her. She had no real faith in it yet, but was interested and willing to explore it. Writing a novel was way out of her league so far. She knew she should not even be considering it. And she really was not. It was small stories she should be playing with. The only goal in this Nano project was to get words done, and to experience and learn from the offshoots, the side effects, of doing this work.

1:38 pm 1501 words 19 minutes  stand up 3x  (451/19 = 23.7 wpm)

1:42 pm resume

She was getting very hot sitting in her sunny window. The heater was running again. She had long ago taken off her sweater. The laptop was hot on her lap, and this time she had been wearing thick woolen socks. They were too thick for her shoes because of the way they were too bulky in the toes. She’d worn them the day before for going out of the house. They were perfect for using as slipper socks, or at least as writing slipper socks. She preferred walking around barefoot. It gave better traction on the floor, and it felt so good to have immediate changing contact with the floor instead of the unchanging contact of socks. She loved the sensation of gripping the floor, feeling the texture of it on her soles.

The light was already getting that late afternoon look to it. She had been determined that this year she would not let that bother her. She had to keep in mind that the light would start growing again after December 21. She just realized - that was now only a month away. There was pleasure to be had in each aspect of the seasons as they traveled through their cycles. Just the throwing peanuts out to the calling bluejays in the morning made her anticipate the pleasure of giving them peanuts out the window the previous winter. Then it had been crows too. The crows were not around as much this year it seemed. She hoped they might start showing up again. It was always fun to try to sneak a peek at them when they came for peanuts. They would land in the tree opposite the window and eye the peanuts on the roof or fallen to the ground. They would try to fly to the roof to get a peanut but if they saw her watching they would take off without getting the treat. They were so skittish. Not the bluejays. They would practically beg for the peanuts. The latest gang of bluejays had been coming since they were out of the nest this summer. One had been quite a scrawny almost bareheaded bird when it showed up with its siblings. She could not resist putting out a handful of peanuts most days through the summer, but the bird feeding felt like something that mostly took place in the winter. She associated it with winter, and for that it was a very pleasurable memory about winter. It made the idea of winter much better for her. 

A little story on the radio news was about a performance of a little opera company or performance. It could have been an annual event. It was a little opera for children that the composer had written before the war and then in one of the Nazi death*** camps the composer had adapted it for the children to perform. The children had spent quite a bit of time doing this. The Wrimoer could not even remember for whom the children had performed the opera. It had been filmed and later used in a propaganda film. Since it was written and performed in a different language, those who listened to it had no idea of the meaning or the message of it. The composer had meant for it to give hope for the prisoners. Now it was being produced again with children performing. The last survivor of the original cast was involved in its revival. She spoke telling what this had meant to them all back then, and that she felt it was important to keep this alive, even if it had been used in the propaganda machine. 

The Wrimoer had been intrigued with the idea of being able to create something that others could perform. There were so many things that could be made for children that way. Of course children could also do it themselves. These were qualities she wanted in her creations and artistic endeavors. It was one of the reasons she so enjoyed doing drawings that would be coloring pages. All of theses aspects were still percolating for her. She was feeling as if she was getting a better understanding of just what she was after. Sometimes the search for this clarity took a very long time. There was a lot to discover along the way.

She had far overshot the 500 word segment mark. Now she felt she had to just continue to the 2500 mark – if she could think of another thing she had wanted to relate.

If she did not stop, it would be very late for anything else. The previous day she had gotten herself out to the fast food place to have a bite, and to use the wifi. She wanted to check the newspapers that came out on Thursdays to see if her press releases had printed. That she would have to do at the library. She went for the food first, just so that she would not be eating there too late. There she had run into a few people. But not stopped to chat at length with anyone. One couple was the same couple she had seen the last time. 

The burger had been terrible as it usually was. It was a new ‘associate’ who had taken her order. He had let it sit too long because he had not noticed it was ready. He had thrown out her receipt though she had told him she would want it. When she finally asked him to check if that was her order waiting there, he discovered it was, and put it in a takeout bag, instead of preparing it for eating in. When she told him she’d wanted it for eating in, he started taking it out of the bag to lay on the bare tray. When she saw the bare tray without the paper liner, she could see how unwiped it was. She reminded him that the trays were to have paper liners. He was a nice and friendly enough person, but apparently so inept still. As for burgers, she might try going back to the chicken sandwiches. 

2:24 pm 2539 words 43 minutes 24.13 wpm!

… Re: newspapers at the library