Less than a week...

Yeep. It always sneaks up on me. Less than a week to go until November. I am absolutely chomping at the bit to get started, and also dreading that moment 15 minutes into next month when I realize that all the notes I've taken and thoughts I've had are not going to amount to 50,000 words, or something of any substance.... Though, this year I've done more prep work than any year prior, so maybe I'm learning.

Also, looking forward to that moment that happens about 4 or 5 days in when the inner editor's voice is finally successfully shut off and I'm able to put words down no matter what I think of their relative quality.

This year, going to be using Google Docs to write this thing. The acquisition of a laptop (well, this trusty-ish Asus netbook) is going to make writing easier for sure, especially during slow shifts at Morseland. Docs seems to work well enough, even if it runs a bit slowly. Only thing I'm not psyched about is the lack of a running word count display in the status bar. But doing the whole 'cloud computing' thing will make it easier to deal with writing in different locations and on different computers...

So -- we might actually have a setting for this thing now. We're starting off late in our hero's life. He contemplates all that he's done, all that he's accomplished, and the world is falling apart around him. It's verging on an early-1900s post-apocalypse.... But is it all in his mind?

Yes, it is.

Nature vs. Nurture

A conversation about nature vs. nurture last night that I'm still thinking about this morning led me to a realization:

Trying to act like a gentleman (e.g. holding the door, carrying the load, following the etiquette rules) has always been a subconscious aim. I do it naturally. Whenever someone comments upon it, I joke "My momma done raised me right" or something to that effect. This morning I realized that it was no joke -- she did. I remember grumbling every time she and I would eat at some fast food restaurant and she would expect me, at the end of the meal, to carry her tray to the garbage. "Your arms broken, ma?" (never out loud, of course.) Time after time of that, and things like that, and it was ingrained into my head that that's the way to be....

...and this ties into this year's Nano (and therefore this blog) with the idea of order v. chaos because, well, somehow that part of the nurture didn't carry through. Maybe I moved out of her house before she could get to those life lessons (because G certainly learned them -- he owns multiple label makers) or maybe I somehow missed those genes (though seriously, how could I have? They're all over the family tree). I once went to my mother in tears (age 6? 7?) as she was filing things, expressing my fear of becoming an adult (at age 6 or 7? oh, how I wish I could travel back in time and reassure that little kid that at age 34, adulthood was still nowhere in sight -- it's going to be ok, little buddy!) because I was worried that I would never be as organized as she. All those files and papers! I would never be able to keep track of them. (Thank goodness I've discovered there's really no need....)

Mom never truly embraced the organizational aspects of technology. Had iPhoto been around when she was taking hundreds of photos, I'm sure she would have loved it, once G or I taught her the basics of using it. And she would likely have used it much better than I can now. But, I suppose these things just came along too late in her life for her to really get on board. But here I am, having grown up with this technology, having spent entire summers in the basement teaching myself how to type, how to use computers, and every computer I have trying to offer me ways to keep my entire life organized, tagged, labeled and safe, and I have no idea how to begin..... There are too many options, too many possible schemes, too much invested in multiple outlets.

....can't even keep a simple damn blog entry straight here.... This is why I could never write papers in school, so tough to keep to topic, keep it organized. The first paper I ever wrote -- a report on Washington state written back in first grade -- garnered me a C (I think). One of its fatal flaws? In the midst of a discussion on Washington's lumber output I offered the (almost) complete non-sequitur "Washington never had any children of his own." Thanks for that tidbit about George Washington, genius....

Ok, let's chalk this up to a little training run here -- just stretching the writing legs in prep for Nov 1. These runs are erratic, embarrassing, but necessary....

Resisting the Urge

Phrases and sentences keep popping into my head and honoring the tradition of not starting until the actual time-to-start I am unable to do anything but jot them down as vague sketches in Evernote for later retrieval. I've been at this for a while and some of the older notes no longer even make sense. Here now, I share with you the current basis of this year's Nano:

"Melville Dewey's life & times plus ??? Decimal. The intrigue, romance, betrayal, etc. that accompanied their creation of the Dewey Decimal system.
John Decimal -- his friends call him Dec. Detective?"

"He used to get his best ideas this way....."

"they look at those photos and think 'he had a home? he had a childhood? a mother?''"

"Scene with Dui getting high and trying to create music. "The ukulele comes out." Dui's friends call to him to come out with them. No, he says. No. Waking up in the morning, sheets strewn about, dots all over, nothing melodic, listenable."

"Name changes

Dewey constantly switching spelling/pronunciation of name:

Dewey->Dew-e->Dooey->Do-e->DUI"

"opening?
dots->black birds; fleeting rainbow; gray sky; his mother's voice"

"dots
persistence of dots -- failed attempts to do something with dots: sheet music, scatter point graphs, candy(hah!), braille, morse code..."

"There are safer places for my heart to be than in your hands."

Preliminary work....

So, Nanowrimo starts in a few short weeks. This year I'm writing about Melville Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. I got interested in Dewey during a conversation with Halsted, who happens to be a librarian. I don't remember what throwaway joke led to my looking up Dewey's Wikipedia article, bur I'm sure it was a good one. Anyhow -- when I discovered that Dewey was a relentless reformer, inventor of the vertical file, AND a womanizer and anti-semite, I figured he'd be a very interesting character to write. He's not a revered figure in American history, mostly because of those negative aspects of his.

So I bought Irrepressible Reformer, a biography of Dewey's, which I'm making slow progress through.... But perhaps last year, I knew more about Lincoln than I should have.

I don't know what my angle is, except that I'm attracted to the idea of order vs. chaos, would like to write something in the vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and after talking so much at the memorial service for my mother about how ridiculously organized she was, felt some connection to this ultimate organizer.

I have some notes, but nothing anywhere near a road map.... Just like usual.