Shift in Nano Project

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Please do not be disappointed in me. I just can’t string together enough minutes in the day to write a cohesive work of fiction. My mind is too bogged down with other thoughts of money, family, careers, and my place in this world.

I am not complaining, nor am I looking for any encouragement to “get through this” or “just keep writing.” I just need a little time to sort through this whole moment.

Thus, the shift in my Nano Project.

I started writing a story called Cafe Yesterday. Then I came up with another idea for a seven-book series that is a lot like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. The ideas are flowing like crazy. The actual time I have to place Butt In Chair and write for any sustained period is practically nonexistent.

Take today for example. Leave house by 6:30 to take H to the gym. Pick up H at 10, then take M to soccer tournament at 10:30. Take H to skating lessons at 12:15. Take M to horse lessons at 3:00.

Again. No pleas for sympathy. We’re all in the same boat. I get that.

But as a writer, I can’t just flick that creative switch on and off as easily as I can start and stop the Jeep in the carpool shuffle. As much as I’d like to be like those writers who can do that….I cannot.

Yet….I will not abandon the Nano Project altogether. Instead, I will attempt a creative nonfiction piece of no fewer than 50,000 words that chronicles my attempts to locate, lasso, and enliven my muse, to discipline myself as a writer to somehow do the things I’ve always wanted to do.

Could be ultra boring to read, and I promise you nothing. I may not even share all that I write. But if I can do this–If I can fulfill this promise to me to spend 50,000 words exploring the writer within, then I believe something good will come out of it.

Now. Back to the car pool line…

Nano ‘08: Cafe Yesterday, Chapter 1

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Café Yesterday, Chapter One

by Rus VanWestervelt

At first, Devin let the panic consume him almost as fully as the speed with which he was falling. The panic started much earlier, of course, when he was still on the ridge, that first slip and then the desperate lunge for the small branch that gave him just enough time to realize what was happening.

He had been in the woods for nearly three days, hiding, surviving, eluding Jake and the others who wanted him dead. Their reasons were no different than any of the others; Jake was just better at the game. He had a way of running his business that way: smooth, clean, with a reputation of giving you every break you deserved—and then some. But when your time was up, when you had crossed that line and missed his final deadline, Jake made sure the payback was swift. It just made good business sense to clean up and move on.

But Devin was different from the others who had crossed that line. Everybody who knew of his survival skills in the woods was already dead, and so he played the role of the senseless fool to Jake and all the others, knowing that when he needed to fall back on being a Rambo in the woods, he would fool them all.

Jake was hundreds of miles south, still in Baltimore, combing the Medfield district one block at a time, getting a little more agitated with each homeless idiot who hadn’t seen Devin in days. They suppressed their smiles, their laughter in seeing Jake a little unnerved by Devin’s disappearance. Stevie and the others on the street knew better than to let Jake sense their delight; marked men like Devin didn’t survive this long, and the fact that Jake was now the one conducting the search-and-kill mission told them all that this payback was anything but swift. Something was going wrong. They hoped Devin was enjoying this brief reprieve; once Jake found him, the payback would be anything but swift. Devin was in for a slow and torturous end to his life.

Devin knew it would be this way with Jake. In the past, death was never waiting at the end of the game. He had been beaten badly a few times, and one of them—Carl—had dished out his paybacks by getting a little too friendly with Devin’s little sister. Jake’s rules were different; his reputation rested on his kindness and faith in his customers to honor their end of the contract. When they didn’t, it was never a question how it would turn out. It was a matter of when.

In the seconds before the thin branch snapped and Devin slipped over the cliff’s edge, he cracked a smile in his panic at the irony of eluding Jake. He had made it this far north without a soul following him. He had been extremely careful in remaining anonymous since leaving Baltimore. He had pocketed the last few sales of smack to give him enough cash to run, and the slate-gray Honda Civic he stole from the Fullerton Park-and-Ride was too common to warrant a stop along I-95. Devin was 400 miles away before Jake—or anybody else for that matter—had even realized that he had run. As far as the world was concerned, Devin Andrews had disappeared completely, just as if he had never existed at all.

The smile didn’t last long, though. The crisp crack of the branch wiped all expression from his face. His feet dug into the dry dirt trying to get some kind of leverage, but the ground crumbled beneath him as pebbles and patches of grass tumbled down into the ravine, lost in the darkness. He was at least 100 feet from the bottom (as far as he could tell), and he was nearly certain that he would not survive the fall.

When the branch snapped, he searched desperately to the left, then to the right for something to cling to. Every vine and branch in sight was thinner than the one he held on to, with the exception of a single root about 8 feet below him, protruding from the cliff.

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Writing High School Yearbook

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This is a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be.As I continue to work on my Nano book/musical, High School Yearbook, I am pleasantly surprised with its depth in plot and the gentle steer away from stereotyping my leads. When I was planning out the story, I was a little embarrassed with how pop-ish it seemed and how Disney-esque the whole story line felt. Some of my students (for those who don’t know, I teach high school and advise our school’s yearbook team) wanted it to be exactly like High School Musical, where I would write more of a fan fiction piece than an original story. This would have been easy to do, of course. Just watch the movie and plug in “yearbook” every time they said musical. Change a few of the names, and you are set.But I knew that, by doing any such thing, I would be compromising my own vision of this story; I would fall into that trap of reinventing the wheel and wasting my time on something that would never, could never get published.So I broke every rule and did not study the tapes.

Yes, I confess. I am writing High School Yearbook, and I have never watched High School Musical.

I get the main idea, though, and I’m running with it, using every stitch of previous knowledge I’ve gained about working with yearbook teams over the past 20-plus years. What I’m realizing is that these teams that I’ve worked with are micro-dramas capturing all that is real to the rest of us, regardless of our age. The concepts of love, fitting in, doing your best, and working together are universal themes that, even if you’ve never worked on a yearbook team, you can relate, even if you’ve found yourself on the other end of any of these concepts.

Maybe that’s what is so fun about this: I’m writing about you, about me, about the rest of the world, and I’m having the time of my life doing it.

Back in Mac

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First, my kudos to Carl for his incredible R.I.P. Challenge that concluded this week. I am deeply sorry that I did not participate more by posting about the readings. Carl, you got me reading nonetheless, and I thank you for that. Keep up the great work, Friend. You inspire many.

Second, I’m done committing myself to any Challenges online for awhile. I keep trying to do these things, and I keep falling way, way short.

Third, as if this seems foolish to write after I just said no more challenges, I’ve begun my third annual NanoWriMo challenge, which is to write a book during the month of November. Believe it or not, I was successful in my previous two attempts (and the first year’s fruit, Journey to Cold Rock, will be released in March 2008–pushed back a little because of some last-minute necessary revisions). I had planned on writing a serious, deep novel about a person who learns he has a gift to heal, but I opted for the much less serious, more superficial book that spins off of High School Musical and is aptly called, High School Yearbook. I’ll post excerpts here whenever I get excited enough about a particular passage or chapter. So…stay tuned!

Fourth, I’m Back on my Mac! It’s old, it’s taped together, but it WORKS, and now that I figured how to be a little creative with Comcast, I should be back online more regularly. . .

woohoo!
Fifth, more meaningful stuff to come later tonight/tomorrow. Just had to share the good news that I’m finally back with a computer in front of me! WooHoo!!!!!

Finished. . .and Selected

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4:15 a.m.

Uploaded my still incomplete novel a few moments ago….Total word count submitted: 51,777. I’m feelin’ really good about this. Second year in a row I’ve written 50K in the month of November, although this work is still unfinished–unlike last year’s book, which I was able to type “The End” on 11/30 and feel like I had a complete draft to play around with. I’ve still got a good 15K to go for this book before those lovely two words can be typed after three hard returns and a shift to the center of the page….

Now, I should probably try to get an hour or two of sleep, because at 9 I need to be at the courthouse for jury duty….That’s right! They selected numbers 50 through 687. And because I’m number 625, that makes me the big jury winner….

Wouldn’t that be great if they gave you juror door prizes or parting gifts?

And special thanks go to Juror no. 7, who leaves us today with a brand new blender and a $20 gift card to Kameras R Us! We think he did just a great job of intimidating Juror no. 2 to change her vote to convict! Congrats, Juror no. 7! We hope to see you back here real soon!

Ah, yes. Sleep is a definite priority for me right now!

I’ll update when I return. I can’t wait! I’m taking HP and the Half-Blood Prince with me, as well as my Moleskine Reporter’s Journal (I have a Moleskine for every occasion!) and “plenty of quarters for the vending machines” as the district court’s recorded message advised me to do in my special instructions phone call….

Enjoy the day, all! And for those of you who are wrapping up your books or who are blogging for the 30th straight day….waHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Congrats to you!!!

Nano: The Final Week

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Those of us who are writing novels or blogging daily in the month of November are facing the home stretch; many of us are being asked many of the same questions, so I thought that I’d address some of them here…

Q: Will you finish?

A: Of course we will. It’s what we do, we crazy writers. We set a goal to write 50K in one month, and we do it. We never said it was going to be pretty (although some great things do happen when you write 50K in one “sitting”).

Q: Is any of it good?

A: It’s all good, if you ask me. It’s a vomit draft, and therefore it serves its purpose to have words on a page to work with. This activity, this exercise in writing, is making the clay–lots of clay–to spend a whole year molding into something worthy of sending off for representation.

Q: What happens after you finish?

A: You take a breather–at least I do. Last year, I took off two weeks before I just had to jump back in and start working with what I had just written. Some people take a longer break. I think that there is another nationally sponsored revision month (maybe March) where you spend a certain number of hours in the month revising what you wrote in November. I can’t wait that long. It took me a full year to revise Cold Rock, which was last year’s Nano creation.

Q: What’s this final week going to look like for you?

A: It’s going to look a lot like the screen on my laptop. Virtually every possible minute will be spent on this draft to make sure I make the November 30 deadline. That means night time sleeps turn into short naps whenever absolutely necessary. It means lots and lots of coffee and very little sugar (causes too many quick crashes, which is devastating for any artist). It means I send my internal editor on a week-long trip to the Bahamas so that he doesn’t try and stop me from finishing.

In a nutshell, it means insanity.

And I love every minute of it.

:)

Revisiting Nano

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For the last 14 days (including today), I have been working on a novel for National Novel Writing Month (Nano) that is requiring too, too much of my time. It’s not that I don’t want to invest the time in to this story line, it’s the fact that it just cannot–nor it should not–be done in 30 days.

So. I am, on Day 14 here, tabling all of my work on The Pact and beginning anew with a stream of consciousness piece aptly titled, Seventeen Days in November.

This will be the ultimate of discovery drafts for me, and I’m not sure what I will end up sharing with my larger community, if any of it. I am committed to writing 50,000 words this month, though, so I may very well produce something worthy of posting here. . . .

Did I mention it’s good to be back?

I have one more major deadline to complete for a pub that’s going to press for release on Saturday, and then I’ll be free to post on a more-daily routine…I can’t wait to trip on over to all of your sites as well and see what y’all have been up to in the last few weeks.

Love to all, and in peace,

Good night. :)

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