Some disappointing news today. Rejections are a part of any writer’s life, but sometimes it’s just harder to take than others. Those are the days when you wonder why exactly you keep at it, a tough question to face in the middle of a NaNoWriMo quest. Even tougher when staring down a future full of student loans.

So I guess I’ll just try not to question for now.

My poor little brain will start emitting steam at any moment. First I got a poor night’s sleep and then I needed to drop off the car for service this morning, wrecking my newly established writing schedule. So here I was, late afternoon, with zero words so far on the day and my brain in neutral.

Why neutral? I knew what I wanted to write about, but I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t decide on an activity that fit the characters, and until I picked the activity, the characters just weren’t coming into focus. I tried napping, hoping that some rest would make me more alert, but I couldn’t sleep knowing how many words I was getting behind in my NaNoWriMo quest. So I took out the laptop and just started writing notes, anything to have words on the page. Then came the silly Google searches. “Rich people hobbies” actually came up as a search term. Who knew?

After much wandering down Internet paths, I found what I was looking for. I researched, took notes and jotted down some specific things for the chapter. Now I’m shutting down the laptop and letting the tired brain do what it does best. Daydream it’s way through.

Less than three hours until our writers’ group meeting — and 300 words to go. All I want to do is nap, but such is life. Today was much harder, as I’m accustomed to doing quite a bit of daydreaming before committing to paper (well, keyboard). No such luxury this month. I’ve been confining my cringing to the shower, where I think of all the revisions I’ll need to do on these lifeless drafts. Did I really just write a chapter with no sense of smell or touch? Did I really develop my new characters so little?

Not my problem. That will be Editor-JoAnn’s task, in December. Mwahaha. Time to get back to my 300 devils.

Of course, I mean “mission accomplished” in the George Bush sense of the phrase. This is only day one of NaNoWriMo, and I was adding on to a draft of a chapter I’d already started (though I didn’t count the already existing text in my word count). Yes, George, this is just the tip of my iceberg of a novel. But if I can’t go grin like a chimp on the deck of a war ship, I can at least brag on my blog. Why? Because it just ups the expectations for me tomorrow. Ha!

And I’ve learned so much already. Eventually I will automatically block out the blaring music at Starbucks, despite having to sit directly under a speaker. Why, oh why, can’t they just have a speaker-free area? I learned that my ability to focus on writing has a shorter life span than my battery, so no need to drag along the power cord if fully charged. The Kitten is learning to curl up behind me rather than on my lap — or on my laptop.

Plus, I nearly had a nervous breakdown when Evernote mysteriously hid all my notebooks. The beat goes on.

And so begins the month for the psychotically optimistic — NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Yes, I’ve signed over my soul. A draft of the sequel in 30 days. Of course, I’ve already been working on the sequel for some time, but the goal here is to write 50,000 words and have an actual rough draft by the end of the month.

On top of that, I’m even going to blog during the trial-by-fire. This month will give me the chance to test out some new gizmos and gimmicks for writers in extremis, and I will bring you the scoop on it all.

The experiment that most excites me (other than the novel writing itself, of course) is trying out the Scrivener software. They have extended their already generous 30-day free trial for NaNoWriMo participants. Scrivener allows me to keep all my chapter and scene drafts together with my research notes and character and location cards. I can even write short synopses for each text and lay them out like cards on a bulletin board or list them for a makeshift outline. It looks like it will be helpful, but the real question is whether I’ll wind up just using it to procrastinate.

I’m also getting used to working daily on a Mac. I’m ditching the old PC, finally, and upgraded from an old Macbook to a Macbook Air. The transfer of files was soul-sucking, given that I’ve been terrible about revisions. I’ve re-edited all my work many, many times — sometimes just a few words here or there — but I’ll be damned if I can remember if I last made changes on the Mac or the PC. Even the file info can’t always help. Ugh.

But now I’m down to one, little itty-bitty computer. I got the 11 inch because I love being able to throw the machine in my purse and go wherever. I first tried a netbook some years back and it was lovely for writing, but it constantly overheated and broke down (Asus EEE). It could also be a little difficult to type on. So far, the Air is a dream. Light, quick, reliable so far, and very easy to use. I’m falling in love with the multitouch gestures (most didn’t work on the old Macbook).

When I first got the Air, I bought Pages, Apple’s word processor, so that I could try using it to sync on the iPhone. But now that I’ve had this machine for a few days, I know I’m never going to do any editing on my phone anymore. This laptop is just to easy to take along with me. Plus, the document syncing for Pages and iCloud doesn’t work quite how I thought it would. I still need to log onto iCloud, even though I originally thought it would simply sync in the way the calendars do. I could use Google Docs for that.

I guess that means I won’t have much to say when my iPhone 4S eventually gets here, since I likely won’t be using it for writing. Maybe the new text recognition will prove a bonus if I happen to get an idea when I’m out and about. It might also serve me well on the blog, since I’ll be able to speak it in if I’m in a jam. More likely, Siri will tempt me with her distractions right in mid-month. Oh, did I mention there’s also a new Sue Grafton novel coming out on November 14th? I’ve been waiting two years for the newest installment — not even NaNo can stop me from reading it. I’ll just have to try to get ahead before then.

Is it just a coincidence that democracy as we imagine it seems be getting sand kicked in it’s face when the economy goes south, or is it just a legacy of Bush appointees? I wrote Faith, in part, to examine the challenge of having faith in a people, country or form of government in the face of actions that go against human decency. Lately it seems like the news is attacking such faith full force.

The Supreme Court lately has been the deadliest battleground in this assault. Though they vacated the man’s sentence, the Court refused to extend the right to free counsel for those who are facing jail time if the case is in civil court. Why did they vacate the sentence? Because without a lawyer, the guy wasn’t informed of any of his rights and the state didn’t even investigate his claim (he said he couldn’t afford to make his back child support payments). In other words, this guy (who sounds like a douchebag, but still) was sentenced to up to a year in jail without anyone showing him the forms he needed or even finding out what his income was. But we don’t think we need to make sure he has counsel?

Naive as I am, I had no idea people could be sentenced to jail through civil court — I assumed that if a defendant did not pay or fulfill his court-mandated duties, he or she would then be charged with some crime before imprisonment. How is this any different than debtor’s prison? Yes, the Court said that judges need to make sure there are alternatives so that defendants know their rights, but if you were facing imprisonment, wouldn’t you want representation?

How about the man held for 16 days, under enemy-of-the-state conditions, as a material witness, despite the fact that he was never intended to serve as a witness? Or the recent renewal of the Patriot Act surveillance? Or more locally, a woman here in Rochester who was arrested for standing in her own yard?

It feels like this goes beyond the law enforcement and military rationalizations made following 9/11. This has to do with power, and I think the real correlation here isn’t just the economy or the Bush appointees. In fact, I think those two factors are just symptoms of a greater disease — the spreading gap between the wealthy and the not-wealthy. As the rich get richer, they get more powerful in overt and more subtle ways. And to give power a pretty spin, it’s being cast as “responsibility.” Thus if you question power, you’re being irresponsible. For those of us who feel that speaking our minds in a democratic society is the truly responsible act, it feels like the environment is just getting worse.

I just saw Limitless this week, the terrific movie with Bradley Cooper as a writer who is blocked both in his novel and his life. Later I wondered if were maybe a sign that I’m on the right path with writing when I was shocked to hear the character think, after taking a drug that boosts creativity and finishing his novel in only four days, that he wouldn’t be content with just writing — he had to move on to bigger things.

What?! Can I just weep a little here? If I could write like that, the bad guys would have had to pry the pills out of my cold, dead hands.

Having nothing to do with the movie, but everything to do with jealousy, my husband — an iPhone developer — got the Beta release of iOS 5. Whimper, whimper. Can I have some, please?

Dear Mr. Franzen,

After reading your New Yorker piece, I admit I engaged in a little wishful thinking. This article had to be bordering on fiction, with the author himself serving as the basis for a fictionalized, somewhat self-involved, late middle-aged writer’s response to a terribly painful event in his life. Dealing with a close friend’s suicide doesn’t make one less self-involved; it just colors the pain in a particular hue. So the character chooses his own means of masking the reality of what has happened — in ways that seems even worse than that reality to the rest of us. The character is smart enough to know better, but prefers his tortures comfortable, familiar. That was the only reasoning I could imagine behind publishing a piece of work that was both offensive and rambling, full of solipsism and disturbing conclusions.

Sadly, the essay adaptation of your Kenyon commencement speech in the New York Times shattered my suspension of disbelief. Let’s sum up: You can’t buy me love. Love is risky. Liking, not so much. Consumer products would make for bad, superficial people, if we suddenly made them human without giving them any actual human traits. Technology is bad because it adapts to people’s wants and needs. Bird-watching is uncool but good. You have to love something to really care about it. Life is short. (Except for the weird, sci-fi human cell-phones, I could probably have done this list entirely in pop music titles, if I gave it some time. But that would be minutes of my life I would never get back.)

This is the insight you had for graduating college students? Disneyesque comments on love, combined with a technology-is-evil rant? This speech was more self-centered and reductionist than half of the comments of Facebook. I get the impression that you’re going for an effect, but that you don’t have the feel for the difference between speaking personally and speaking narcissistically.

Please, please stop publishing essays. Go ahead and write them, if you want to take your risks and expose yourself. But when you’re done, shove them in a drawer for a year or two or ten. Read them later when you will likely cringe at the idea that you found it captivating for an audience of young adults to hear about your Blackberry love and the funny thing that happened to you. When your face will flush at the realization that “life is short — take a risk and love something” is neither original nor deep. Just because you can publish something doesn’t mean you have to.

Please just go back to writing fiction. There’s a reason we write and read fiction — as you know, given the many theories you shared in your New Yorker article. Fiction catches us off-guard; it reveals. Some great essayists can do something similar. Your essays do not.

Sincerely,
JoAnn Welsh

Writers’ group meeting is at my house tonight. I’ve promised to finish a draft of my prologue, which happens to be coyly playing hard-to-get at the moment. As the day drifts on, it will be a mad dash to the finish. Which is just fine by me, because I find it so much easier to write for real once there is something — anything — on the page. It’s like peeling a boiled egg — after the first tap and crack, the rest comes off eventually. Even if some of the shell pieces are harder than others.

I have officially taken the plunge — I’m now a full-time writer. Not only does that mean a new rarity in Starbucks visits and a lot more home cooking, it means freedom. Mental freedom, emotional freedom — and freedom from excuses. There’s no motivation quite like watching your husband patiently trying your newly developing culinary skills (due to lack of take out funding — they should have grants for that) in his commitment to your desire to write.

So while my blogging has been erratic, I’m challenging myself to write daily, both here and on Trust. There will be some other projects along the way — I’ll keep you posted.