surprise, surprise

A Month of Flannel and Uncomfortable Chairs

: kev_bot; December 1st, 2008

12-01-08

Current Word Count: Roller Disco Saturday Night, 100, 421 words

What I'm Reading Now: Palm Sunday, by Kurt Vonnegut

Ruth said: “It’s a long story, Max. And I’m not sure it makes much sense.”

“That’s okay,” he said back. “Those stories are my favorite kind.”

* * *

It is with those words I crested the mythical one hundred thousand mark, on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I sat in the window of my favorite Starbucks and leaned back after I closed the quotation, looking at the work I had accomplished.

Accomplished. Well, that’s a fine word, isn’t it? As fine a word as any to keep us warm and dry and safe as evening draws closer toward night. A good word to say, too, a lot of syllables … though it feels like a short way to sum up what has sometimes felt like a very long journey.

One hundred thousand words – I can get my mind around that. Sure I can, it’s easy. I hit 100,000 words for the first time in the year 2000, when I was finally getting a handle on the types of novels I was good at. I began Open All Night in May of that year and finished in September. The book saw me through the summer, and it seems to me that there’s never a better summer than when you’re working hard on a long book. A novel being thrashed out under your hand is like a cool drink of lemonade during the dog days of summer … or, on a nasty night like tonight, a warm cup of steamed milk, with maybe a little nutmeg to soothe you to sleep.

I’ll repeat it again, because it bears repeating: one hundred thousand words, and we’re not strangers. No sir and no ma’am. After Open All Night, I brought Dry Lightning there. And Carry That Weight, and The Taste of Concrete On Your Tongue, and I’ll Work For Your Love. I even doubled it on occasion: Find the River, The Legend of Jenny McCabe, and Maybe You’re Right all topped up over 200,000 words – Jenny was nearing 300 when she soldiered toward the finish line. That book wore me out. This one’s wearing me out faster.

See, there’s the rub. I’ve written novels in a month before. National Novel Writing Month and I are old pals. Welcome to Bloomsbury was a particularly easy birth. November 2005 blasted by and I finished a whole book in a month. It was a feat. I was overcome with hubris. In November of 2006, I launched into Mary’s Place, and failed spectacularly. Not even 10,000 words in and I gave it up like a bad habit. By 2007, NaNo was no longer a gimmick; it had become a necessity. Everything I wrote was coming up dead roses. Apprehensively, I began I’ll Work For Your Love … then took to it like it was my only hope. Maybe it was. Writing novels isn’t easy. Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it’s easy. And nearly twenty books in, it’s only gotten tougher. I got through about 72,000 words in I’ll Work For Your Love, then spent the next four months rounding it out. Then the block again. It seems lately that block is waiting around every turn. I must be watchful.

After struggling halfway through Tangerine this year – a novel that wants to be written, but on its own terms – I paused and sketched up an outline for a long-gestating book with a silly title I’d been trying to get a handle on for years. The only thing that really stuck when I thought about it was a girl looking out at the stars on her front porch. The question of how to stitch that image and my ridiculous title – Roller Disco Saturday Night – had loomed over me for a long time. It was time to put up or shut up. I decided to put up.

I’m not sure where the fervor came from this year, or why on a daily basis this book seemed so damn important to me. For a month, I wrote like a man possessed, routinely spending large swaths of time slashing through 4,000 words or more. Edgar – and later Edgar ][ - had a lot to do with that. A brilliant new laptop who practically begged to be written on, well, how can you say no to something like that? I carted Edgar everywhere this past month – to the library, to the Astro Wash, to every Starbucks in the Boston Metro area. I sat in those places, some silent, some noisy, and I wrote until I was exhausted. Then I wrote some more. Two or three times, I literally wrote until I was dizzy. At one point near the end of the month, I complained to Shawn that my knuckle hurt but I didn’t know why. He just looked at me until I figured it out. I took pictures to not only document where I was, but where my mind was. Most of the time, it was nowhere near reality.

I passed the NaNoWriMo requirement less than halfway through the month. Fifty thousand words in fourteen days; that’s no small feat. But it wasn’t enough for me. Writing this novel had become an obsession with me. I didn’t think I could have stopped, even if I wanted to. It never dragged me in, screaming and kicking. It seduced me, every day. Seduced me into putting more words into it, making it grow, making it honest. I don’t know when the idea of getting to 100,000 words before November was out hit me, but it served only to stoke the fires. It was a goal. I am all about goals.

Yesterday I spent two hours in the library, building in the 90s. At 99,000, I closed Edgar and meandered across the street. It was providence that put me in the window, looking out at the rain as it fell and fell and fell. I sipped my hot chai and carefully built paragraphs and dialogue, watching Max and Ruth sitting across from one another at Kipplemack’s Burger Time, both of them poised on the brink of information, and their author poised on the brink of achieving the improbable. I passed 100,000 words just after four in the afternoon, my eyes bleary, my head pounding, my hands aching. Everything still hurts. But it was worth it.

As it stands now, Roller Disco Saturday Night is unfinished. It needs a lot of work to see it through to the end. Will it be 200,000 words? Who knows. Maybe. All I know is that I’m excited to get to it.

But normal now. Normal for awhile. I think 1,500 words a day makes more sense in the long run. This means I can get back to the gym, and to my life, and to LJ, and to … well, more carnal pursuits. It’s a bit sobering to realize how much of your life is spent doing something alone when you give it up to do something else alone. Um.