NaNoWriMo 2007

So about four years ago I started to hear little things round the internet regarding this National Novel Writing Month. It's been happening every November since 1999, and the gist of it is that people from all over the world sign up to write 50,000 words of a single discrete fiction piece between November 1st and November 30th.

If you do the math, you will notice that that is an average of 1,666 and 2/3 words per day. Every day. For a month. Now, if I write 2,000-3,000 words of fiction in a week, I consider myself productive. A 10,000-word month is pretty decent, and a 20,000-word month is something I don't even aspire to. So it was always a good thing that November, being the month of my birthday, has had a week of vacation in it every year since I found out about NaNoWriMo. If 50,000 words sounded crazy in a regular month, it was doubly crazy in a month minus a week in Paris.

This year, I thought I was OK for excuses because even though I'm not going on vacation, I do have a deadline in early December for a research-heavy feature article for the History Channel Magazine. Somehow, though, I managed to call to myself a gauzy wisp of an idea in the shower yesterday, about ten hours before the official start of NaNoWriMo, and that evening I signed up. Two hours before midnight I still didn't even know who my characters were, but I sat down at 12:01 am and started winging it.

So far today I have written almost 3,000 words. I am not the kind of person who writes 3,000 words in a day. Words trickle from me as though physically squeezed by the Gorgonic editor in my head. Today though, the editor is locked in the closet, because it doesn't matter if the words are any good. It only matters that they are words.

Misc: Google Envy

So I Googled my husband yesterday, because sometimes I do simpleminded things like that to pass the time, and it turns out the Mike Hagen with the most hits these days is this guy:

http://www.strengthteam.com/home.htm

That's right: a weight-training feats-of-strength ministry. It's almost as awesome as the time Gregory Peck played him in 1957.

He is also an photographer-adventurer, at least one lawyer and an electronics company in Kansas City. And a minor character in a Star Trek novel, but that one's really him.

By contrast, the most popular Kathy Monahan after me sells real estate in Toronto.

Misc: Fun at Work (History Buff Edition)

Last week someone wrote on the whiteboard in my department:

No Justice, No Peace!
Free Paris Now!

Today I came in and discovered an addendum:

(done 1945)

Knitting: It's Hortense!

Finally, she makes her debut:


This is her best side:

And here is an aerial view:

The pattern didn't include horns, but she looked sufficiently like Barney the Purple Dinosaur that I needed to draw more of a distinction. I made them thus:

CO 5 st
1: knit all
2: purl all
3: ssk, k, k2tog (3 st)
4: purl all
5: ssk, slip st back on left needle, k2tog (1 st)
Break yarn and pull through loop.
Fold in half and sew to head, open side down. Shape with fingers into a crescent.

Now, to begin the three additional dragons I have contracted to make for the various associates who have fallen in love with Hortense. I'm going to be an expert before long.

Misc: Happy Anniversary!

Dear Mike-

Seven years ago today was our Big Fat Geek Wedding at Disney World, and it set the tone for our "Happy," "Dopey" and "Goofy" marriage. I love you for your humor, your kindness, your blue eyes, and your toy collection. I love that you can watch Superman II as often as I can read Murder on the Orient Express, and that a typical Saturday night consists of us doing those things in adjoining rooms and not feeling weird about it. I love that you want puppies more than you want children, and I'm sure we can work out the pug vs. golden retriever question, eventually. I love that you support everything I do, and I especially love that you support my learning hapkido with particular gusto because it reminds you of Emma Peel. I adore you; I bless the day we met; and I forgive you for the snoring, I guess.

Misc: Fun on the Street

So I saw a milk truck idling in front of a bodega in midtown. It had a bunch of cows painted on the side, as you might expect from a milk truck.

Only here's the thing. None of the cows had udders. They were boy cows. Steers, when you think about it. Yet the truck was unmistakably carrying milk and not beef.

I wonder if someone got offended by the udders and insisted that they be painted out? I can't think of any other reason not to put cows on a milk truck.

Knitting: Dragonslayer

Waaaay back in January I made this dragon from Knitty. The pattern calls her Norberta, but I made her in purple with green spines and I thought she looked more like a Hortense, so that's what I called her. Unfortunately, she turned out too loose -- so loose that her stuffing stuck out of the holes in her head. Trouble is, I'm an arch-anthropomorphizer, so I can neither destroy nor discard anything with which I have endowed a personality. And I had already named her Hortense. So she sat in the corner with no face for months, waiting for me to either come to terms with her flaws or harden my heart sufficiently to do what needed to be done.

Last weekend, I decided my heart was hard enough. Sort of. I took out Hortense, stood her up on the sofa with my yarn cutter, and explained that she had no quality of life there in the corner with no face, and it was time to undergo surgery that would make things better for both of us. I had to reassure her very emphatically that I would knit her again even better in order to make the first cut. At least she couldn't look at me reproachfully because she had no face.

So I took her apart. It was awful. There was a point of black despair when I thought I was going to end up with a bunch of two-inch scraps of yarn. My husband, seeing how het up I was, thought he would make me feel better by telling me I was a dragonslayer now. It made me cry instead. But in the end, all was well. I managed to salvage most of the yarn and now that I'm using 4s instead of 6s, I don't need as much anyway. I've got her back, belly and spines done, and now I just have to work on the legs and wings.

But it was a very eventful time.

Misc: Fun on the Subway

Graffito at the 2nd Avenue F station:

-RIP-

-died waiting for train-

Reading: The Brontë Myth

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller is a lit-crit examination not of the Brontës' work, but of the carefully crafted story of their lives, starting with the biographical sketch Charlotte wrote after Emily and Anne died, and reflected by her own accounts to literary London. Charlotte's account was the one on which Elizabeth Gaskell based her Life of Charlotte Brontë, and between the two of them they created an indelible image of the poor tubercular sisters trapped in a bleak country parsonage at the mercy of their abusive father and reprobate brother and surviving as long as they did only through the purifying power of their imaginations before dying pitiably young. We learn this story along with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in school. According to Miller it's largely nonsense.

Charlotte could hardly be blamed for bending the truth to salvage her own and her sisters' maidenly reputations by making their isolated Yorkshire upbringing an excuse for their "coarse" subject matter. Contemporary critics used "coarse" in every other sentence when discussing Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell; I was heartily sick of it before I was halfway through The Brontë Myth so I can only imagine what Charlotte thought about it at the time. The trouble with Charlotte's filter, as Miller points out, is that it obscures the work itself by presenting it as having been done almost involuntarily, an inevitable response to the sisters' mythical suffering and divorced from any craftsmanship or talent they may have possessed. Emily is especially cheated by this treatment, being presented as some sort of faucet through which her novel pours without ever touching the sides.

I've always been more a fan of Charlotte's than the rest, just because when I studied Jane Eyre in ninth grade I was powerfully influenced by the idea of two strong individuals meeting across the class divide, whereas when I studied Wuthering Heights in tenth grade I was kind of disgusted by everyone's inability to have an identity of their damn own. "I am Heathcliff." What the heck kind of thing is that to say? But my favorite part of The Brontë Myth turned out to be its revelation of the historical Emily -- that is to say, its revelation that the historical Emily is unknowable, a Rorschach blot for generations of projectionists.

Apparently the real Emily left almost no record of her life, outside two maddeningly elliptical "diary papers" and pieces of a few letters. Her juvenilia (the tales of Gondal, invented with her sister Anne) are gone, believed destroyed by Charlotte after her death. She had no known friends, and her only documented interactions with people outside her own family depict her physically fleeing from them. I'm no particular misanthrope, but that's the kind of writer I only wish I had the courage to be.

Misc: Sick again, but now well

The reason it's been awhile, for the two of you who may have noticed, is that I spent the last bit of February and almost all of March on a bad bacterial infection.

Oh, those halcyon days when I got the flu on Saturday and was back at work by Wednesday. This damn infection had me out of work for two full weeks, twelve days of which were spent with temperatures over 100. I had two five-day courses of Zithromax, which shook me by the guts, and experienced ramifications which I will spare you except to say that they fascinated my gynecologist, and your gynecologist is someone you pretty much always want to bore stupid unless you're at the same cocktail party or something. That GYN appointment, by the way, was such a surrealist satire of a Woody Allen movie I'm trying to figure out a way to turn it into an article. It might as well be good for something.

We were supposed to go to California in the middle of March, but even if I had been able to totter onto a plane, I had hosed through all my paid leave being sick, so we had to reschedule for May. I'm almost back up to speed except that I'm still sleeping ten hours a night and I haven't been able to make it back to hapkido class, in which I ironically earned an orange belt the very night before I got sick.

Misc: Siiiiick

I thought I would be able to go a fourth year without getting the flu, but alas, no. I started coughing on Friday night, felt a little dowly with it all day Saturday, woke up with a stickerbush in my throat on Sunday morning and by that afternoon I had the temperature. It fluctuated between 99 and 100.4 all day yesterday -- pretty impressive considering that my normal resting temperature is 97 -- with the chills and aches and glands that felt like they were about to explode.

With all that, I was still able to engage in conversation, read anything that wasn't too demanding, and play Mystery Case Files for five hours straight (although I couldn't knit -- not sure why, but no way). During my February 2003 flu, I couldn't focus on a page, couldn't complete a sentence, and couldn't commit to any kind of narrative, which prevented most TV watching too. Fortunately the Westminster Kennel Club dog show coincided with the two days of my highest fever, and I watched the whole thing. It was perfect. I didn't have to retain any information for more than ninety seconds, nothing loud or sudden ever happened, and cute doggies!

Last night I started hacking up the component parts of the stickerbush, and my temperature started to drop. Today, it's still not normal and my throat still kills me, but I no longer have the feeling that I'd cheerfully commit suicide just to stop the pain, if only I had enough energy. I'm sure I'll be feeling that again tomorrow when I go back to work.

Misc: More Fun at Work

Heard over the fire safety loudspeaker: "Due to construction workers in the building, you may notice an odor."

Misc: Fun at Work

So, because I don't (yet?) make a living at the freelance writing, I have a fulltime desk-jockey job doing legal word processing for a big corporate law firm in Midtown. It's relatively painless in a McJob kind of way, but it wears down the old creativity after awhile, so I've been known to use unconventional methods to try and head-trip myself into thinking I'm doing something else. Before last fall's trip to Disney World I would listen to ride soundtracks on the subway so I could feel like I was on a ride. When I got back, I brought in my monkey-head coconut from the Polynesian Hotel luau to drink my water out of. Recently that's gotten kind of tired, so I've started listening to James Bond soundtracks on my way into the building so I can think that I might kill someone while I'm there. It's far more interesting to come into a Manhattan high-rise when you're infiltrating it than when you're just coming to edit contracts.

Reading: Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade looks at the years from 1920 to 1930 through the lives of four professional female writers: Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber.

I didn't know Zelda Fitzgerald was a professional in her own time but it seems she wrote both articles and short stories that were published under her name together with Scott's and earned a reasonable chunk of change thereby. Scott himself would alternately bristle and scoff when Zelda described herself as a writer; I guess her stuff was good enough for him to put his name on but not good enough for her to derive an identity from it. Or something. Truth be told, I can't read about Zelda Fitzgerald without intense frustration, because she's so hyperfeminine that she gets my back up but her husband was such a piece of work that I can't help being on her side when sides are being picked.

Edna Ferber was the only one of the four about whom I'd never read and I left wanting more because she seems to have been the only one who "survived," in a way. She died in 1968 at the age of 82 in her own home and unmarried. The Amazon review says she suffers in comparison with her more colorful colleagues but compared to the needy, suicidal Parker and the perpetually adolescent Millay, not to mention Zelda Fitzgerald who died at 47 in a mental home -- well, the best stories don't always make the happiest lives, evidently. There's a moral in there somewhere.

Knitting: Uh Oh

I can go on for months deluding myself that I merely dabble in knitting until something occurs to warn me that I will swiftly become a Knitter with a capital Kn if I don't watch out.

Yesterday on the subway I earned my Knitting Scout Obsessive's Badge when a small girl of about three got on the uptown F train with her dad. She was riding one of those little pedal-cars that turn into strollers by the addition of a long pole manipulated by the aforementioned dad; she had a tangle of blonde curls on her head and a pair of amusing sunglasses on her face; around her neck was a handknitted scarf like autumn itself spun into gossamer silk.

I looked at this picture of precious, whimsical youth, tended with loving care, and I thought: "Well, if it isn't Crystal Palace Splash in the Turning Leaves colorway. I wonder how long it took to knit?"

Misc: Erfolgtraurigkeit

It's the opposite of Schadenfreude, according to the coinage of David Baddiel in the Times of London in the fall of 2005: success-sadness, the feeling described by Gore Vidal when he wrote: "Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies." Consider it a gift from me to those of you for whom such a concept would be useful. Come on; I know you're out there.

I can't be the only person who has one acquaintance by whose unremitting success I can always be kept humble no matter what I accomplish. In my case it's an old college friend who I'm not going to identify even by gender, although anyone who knew me in college will immediately know who I'm talking about since this person was clearly branded in gold on the forehead from the day said person was born. The person has everything he/she has ever wished for to my knowledge: a fulfilling career in the arts without the concomitant hassle of fame; a spouse and career partner of more than a decade's mellow vintage; a young child whose rearing will never curtail the aforesaid career in the arts due to the unparalleled free childcare provided by its grandmother; homeownership in quite an expensive area of a very expensive city.

Does it turn your stomach like it turns mine? It gets worse. Due to talent, diligence, confidence and intelligence, this horrible person deserves every bit of it. It makes me want to chew off my own ears.

Misc: 2007 Goals

Since my keynote 2006 accomplishments were quitting my novel, losing my cat and gaining eight unneeded pounds, my substantive goal for the coming year is the modest one of not doing anything worse.

On a separate but related note, of the seven things I either knit or attempted to knit for Christmas presents, only one turned out exactly as I had planned. I'm told that's part of the fascination of knitting, but I have my own opinion about that.

I will say for the Christmas knitting, however, that I knit about ten miles of alpaca and I'm still not sick of it. Mohair did not stand up to this test, so I think I've found my new pet fiber.