Welcome, May!

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The past few weeks have been stressful. Training new employees, dealing with difficult customers, not sleeping well, not exercising (I’ve gained 20 pounds in the last two years), getting through family drama (two life-threatening events in the same day, 2000 miles apart: my dad’s heart attack in NM and a 9 year grandchild starting the rest of his life with Type 1 Diabetes) . . .  My CrossFit lifestyle withered into oblivion when I lost my job at the University in 2020, as Covid got going. Deep depression brought me to a standstill as I took a few months to try to reset. Since then, my physical status has been on steady decline. Now my daily schedule looks something like this: Work 3-11 pm (on a good day), Go to bed at 4 am, get up between 10:30 am and noon, get booted up and go back to work. If I get one day off a week I’m fortunate. At least I don’t have to work all night for now. That was the worst.  So I haven’t had time or energy to do much, even read, much less write. And since my

NaNoWriMo report 2

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  • Current Word Count 5912
  • Words per Day to Finish on Time 1575
  • Total Words Remaining 44088
This is breaking me out of the academic mold.  I am so accustomed to writing academic papers that (in an overly simplistic way) merely address a topic and reflect in some manner on that which is reported.  Novel writing is something else!

My latest experience is thus: I have direction I would like to go, create the scene and draw out the action in my mind.  After pouring myself out, I have an entire paragraph!  Boo.  Now, I set it down, come back and look again at that paragraph, which has now become an outline in and of itself.  I am fleshing out and am causing to happen through characters and dialogue.  I've even seen characters leap onto the page I had not planned!

For example, I could say there was an assassination attempt on the King; or I could describe an afternoon on the playground where a group of children through their imagination make a play of the news regarding the King, as they try to understand it.  I liken this to when I was six or seven years old and the principle of our school came in and asked us, "what is 'Watergate?'"  Can you imagine how a child answers that question?

Right now, my biggest hurdle is making my main character suffer because when he has suffered, he must suffer some more.  And then some more. 

It does not make sense now, but it will.  Oh, it will.

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