DONE!
Well, at least I’m done with the National Novel Writing Month’s challenge of 50,000 words in 30 days.
I’ve written 50,350 in 20 days. So where’s my free ticket to Papeete? There’s a snowstorm out my Michigan window!
I’m having so much fun writing the characters for Touching the Bones that I am going to keep on writing; taking this to true novel length. I’ll be back when I’ve typed- The End.
What do you do when you’re about to begin a huge kitchen renovation project?
You also start writing a new book. Of course you do.
For the past several years I have been watching from the bleachers as writers got down there on the floor and dug in for the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. Start day- November 1. End day- November 30. That’s not really a novel at 50G’s. More like a novella. But there’s no rule that you can’t write over 50,000. So I am. Writing over the amount that is.
It’s day thirteen of NaNoWriMo 2014, and I am currently 24,005 words into a brand new, adult paranormal romance novel. It’s happening, Writing in the early morning hours and late afternoons. Touching the Bones, is coming into focus and I am really having fun writing these characters.
It’s happening, in spite of my Olympic levels of distraction; ordering materials, fixtures, furniture and all it takes to transform a 1933 kitchen into something less; Katherine Hepburn stars in Little Women and more, well, me. Right now.
There have been three families before us living in this old house, and we’ve been here twenty two years. We’ve lived with the original pale yellow and black accent tile that looks like a diner Billie Holiday might have frequented for three in the morning breakfast’s with the band members.
A few years ago, an elderly woman and her friend were walking past the house while I was outside. She stopped to tell me that she had lived in our house when she was a child. I invited her in and found myself watching her face as she moved, room to room, lost in memories held in these walls for eighty years. She noted the tile in the kitchen being the same and most of the other features typical in an old Midwestern house; laundry shoots from the second floor, milk door that opens to outside to the drive way, small alcove in the front hall for the telephone-back when folks had only one.
As she stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, her hand flew to her heart and she whispered, “This was my parent’s room.” My full laundry basket on the floor suddenly seemed to defile the now, sacred space. As she left, she touched the Brass door knocker on the front door. I had painted the old door gold on both sides; for golden opportunities every where you look.She asked if I knew about the knocker. I didn’t. She said that back in the day, door knockers let people know if there was a specific crafts person or professional person living there-like a business shingle. This knocker meant a doctor lived here; her father. I had no idea and I’ve seen that thing every day for two decades.
It makes me feel a little bad as we take crowbars and hammers to the pale yellow and black tile that’s stood guard all this time in that old kitchen. But not bad enough to stop whacking it into dust and getting excited about the brand new space that I will [finally} have where I can create my food wonders.
So, as I am writing, writing, writing… I am also jumping at the loud sound of the doctor door knocker. UPS, delivering my new bronze pendant light.
My cat is hiding a lot. My dog is getting her cardio work in running to the door to greet/interrogate delivery and construction people; and I am falling into a schedule of trying to write before it all begins and after it ends…so… I’m a little busy. It’s a really good busy though.
And like all things that need to be born into the world or transformed, there is disruption. There is chaos. There is pain (hammer…thumb). There is exhaustion. There are tears. And then…there is something worth every minute and every stupid crappy thing it took to get there.
I’m smiling through the plaster dust and typing like a mad woman with band aides on my fingers.
Happy Fall.
Happy everything new.
On wings of words I fly into your heart…
P.S.: If you want to see a snip of the new novel, go to the home page and on the top you’ll see the appetizer menu- a taste of Touching the Bones. You can read chapter one there.
or click here……… https://wordninjagirl.com/appetizer-menu-a-little-taste-of-touching-the-bones/
So, what is the story that you tell?
If, every single day, the story you tell starts with, “You never…” or ” You always…” then THAT is what you create and what shows up, in your face, every…single…day.
Want the world around you to show up differently? Tell a different story; a better story…about good things.
Magically, THAT is what will begin to show up, in your face, every…single…day.
I’m doing it. I’m writing a novel in a month-along with thousands of others during the NaNoWriMo 2014 event (National Novel Writing Month). The folks that run this thing suggest … Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2014
I’m
I’m a Galleria Mall in a National Park,
a French film noir in a grocery store,
art school in the kitchen,
An erotica book on a Wednesday noon,
And a heated debate at 2 a.m.
I’m the cookie baker
trouble maker
heart breaker
claim staker-
I want everything to change
While the good parts stay the same.
I want the freedom of the road
while harvesting the flowers I’ve sowed.
I want a home that feels like love
and all the laughter it’s made of-
I want a soundtrack worth a movie
And then I want to leave behind
A mountain of creations
For my progeny to find.
That’s all.
So, this poem arrived in a dream, intact, and I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it down, just like this. There’s music too, but since I can’t write music, its just in my head. I wrote this in 1998 but I think about it every 9/11.
America: The Long Dream
America,
as we awaken from this long dream
we look around to see what’s happening
and wipe the sleep out of our weary eyes.
Long ago,
we came from every nation on the earth
our skin is shaded like the mother lands
our eyes reflect the places of our birth.
We’ve lived for years a nation under God
but never dared to say which one that was
now deep from sleep a restless voice is heard.
Until we see,
we came together here to start anew
and find the likenesses in me and you
we’ll never reach the point where love is true.
The purpose of our lives has always been
to learn to love regardless of our skin
The God we call out to is all the same.
The only difference is the man made name.
We bow our heads and ask
direction for
our lives again.
And in the middle of the darkest night
we hear the whispered voice and see the light
that fills our hearts and somehow makes it right.
This is the dawning of a brand new day.
Our turmoil leads us to another way-
to handle change with grace.
America,
as we awaken from this long dream
and look around to see what’s happeneing
we see the truth within our open eyes.
We’re standing truly at each other’s side.
Our learning hearts are finally open wide
to let the new day in.
The last thing you expect when you go to Old Orchard Beach in Maine on the long Labour Day weekend is to keep your sanity. The second-last thing you expect, among the tourists, souvenir shops, fried-everything stands and carnival rides, is a book store. But there it is, right on the strip. Granted, it’s full of remaindered books, and you have to dodge the caricaturist parked at the entrance, but it’s a little bit of paradise among the bikinis. Incidentally, if you’re looking for something called Paradise Among the Bikinis, you’re in the wrong kind of store.
But I did find a dirty book. Tucked into the row of fiction was a book by one of my favourite authors, Nicholson Baker. His novel, The Mezzanine, is particularly good. It’s set entirely during a ride up an escalator. Baker writes a type of fiction in which not much physical action…
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Tomorrow is my birthday. It’s a big one. Sixty. At this auspicious moment I am wondering how the hell did this many years pass so ridiculously fast?
When my kids were young teens itching to do something they weren’t ready for yet, I would get out the construction tape measure. I would lay it out to 100 inches and chalk where their ages fell and how long their wait really was to participate in the activity that eluded them. Then I would point down the line to how many more times they could do that forbidden thing in the one hundred or so years they had to live their lives. It made the two inches from 14 to 16, when their driver’s license would come seem like the paltry eye blink that it was.
Looking back down my own line of numbers, already passed, I am embracing my million moments that drew together to make me. Gathered knowledge is just hoarding thoughts until you share it. For what it’s worth, these are some of the things I have seen.
Even if you grew up watching shows like Friends and assuming adulthood would be a constant coffee klatch with your across the hall neighbors, you will spend most of your time alone in this life. Unless you are conjoined, this is the way of the world. And if you can’t be at peace in your times of solitude, why in the hell would you think other people would be interested in spending time with you either? Learn shit. Get interested and then you will be interesting-to yourself and to others.
The greatest lesson for young teen abstinence should be the fact that the first person you get naked with will-in all likelihood-not be the last. With the exception of the four couples you will meet who are childhood sweethearts-you will swim into and out of tubs, ponds, raging rivers and oceans of love in all its forms until you find somewhere that becomes your place in the world. That’s where you will build your home- however early or late in life you find it and trying to pitch a tent anywhere else will give temporary shelter and nothing more.
When people close to you lash out it is usually because they want you to love them more than it appears you do. If you pay attention, people will tell you what they want-so listen.
Most people, even the most hardened among us, still have a soft, gooey center and if you are paying attention and listening you can figure out what they love. That is what made them gooey like that in the first place. If they showed you the gooey love, they shared the keys to their castle. Honor that.
There are seven billion people on this planet. When you are not famous, the statistical magic of finding one person who can see you for the blazing light you actually are is a gift rarer then the most expensive gemstone. Own that.
Real love never dies. It only changes shape to accommodate the way you live now.
The secret to happiness is this: figure out what you want and find a way to ask for it.
Love is your own personal experience. It sparks and blooms inside your own head-like a private revelation; a movie only you can see. Even if the object of your affection does not return your ardor with the same intensity or at all, never hold regret for having felt that feeling. To know what love feels like is like visiting the most beautiful place on Earth. Not everyone will go there in their lifetime but you have, and you can tell others what it feels like to stand in the center of all that beauty; what it is to see the blazing light of someone else and have it warm your soul even if it’s just for a moment. It will change you forever; no matter if life or death moves you far away from that other person, it will remain part of who you are now.
What I have seen while I have run, swam, played, danced, loved, fought, created, walked, crawled, bled, cried and laughed my way through the sixty years on planet Earth comes down to this: love. It always comes down to that. And on the last day I get in this life, it will still be about love; who I loved and who loved me.
That is where I have a cave of treasure like Aladdin. I remember all the love my heart has felt. It fills my pens, my brushes, my cooking pots and the large broken parts inside of me. It is my gold.
The Japanese have a practice called Kintsugi. It’s a ceramic pottery ritual where a beloved broken vessel is pieced back together with molten gold used like glue. It gathers the shattered parts together; making it whole again in a new and beautiful way.
Today, I will visualize all the love I’ve known as gold and let it fill the cracks and broken parts of me to make me whole like the day I was born only different…better. It will be my private gift to myself; the strengthening of my weak places. What I’ve seen in my sixty years has been a kaleidoscope of wonder and I am filled with anticipation as the curtain rises on the next act.
Word Ninja Girl 