Gallons and NaNoWriMo 2024

I participated in National Novel Writing Month again this year. I have been making a habit of doing all three NaNoWriMo events each year. The big one, of course is in November. This November, my novel, Gallons was really part 2 of the manuscript Go Home Go Home that I wrote in July.

Gallons finds us in Denver, Fourteen and Josephine, specifically. I took a partly sympathetic and partly deviled look at the residence of the house that finds itself as a setting in both Dysphoric Notions and Go Home Go Home.

What I find astounding about NaNoWriMo is that after a little planning, some practice and a moderate amount of discipline, it is not difficult to write a novel in 30 days. Indeed, I do it in about 21 days.

I think for anyone who wants to write a novel and can't figure out where or how to start, NaNoWriMo is the only way to go.

On Acceptance to Lamplit Underground

Lamplit Underground

I am grateful “The Perils of Reading the Classics When You're No Holden Caulfield" was accepted into issue ten of Lamplit Underground which launched today.

It was probably sometime in the middle months of our stay in Portland, Oregon when I first wrote “The Perils of Reading the Classics When You're No Holden Caulfield.” Admittedly, I don't remember writing it. What I suspect, though, it must have been during those months when we lived in SW Portland, and I worked at the kitchen table in the mornings and worked in the restaurant in the evenings.

On an Acceptance to Short Breasts

Short Beasts

 My short story “Poop Sprinkler” appears in Short Beasts today. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be featured in Short Beasts, and I wonder if grateful is too light a word for it. I am delighted, elated, beyond description of my emotions. If you have a few minutes, please read it, and when you discover you have a few minutes more, please take a closer look at Short Beasts and the other writers they have featured.

The truth is, I have more questions about this than anything else. Some of you know me as a graphic designer, some of you know me as a waiter, others know me as the editor of Umbrella Factory Magazine and I hope more than a few of you know me as a writer, a writer of fiction namely. I have spent much of my life fiercely protecting my time so that I would have time to write. I cannot add up the years I have spent with my trusty composition notebook and my pen. They have been the only constant I've known. For many years I wrote full time. I got to spend 8 to 10 hours a day, every day, writing. I was living the dream, and to pay the rent, I was a waiter, every night. The only real difference between “writer” and “waiter” is one letter.

Of Masks and Dolls

It may be too late for a serious reflection on this, but here it goes anyway.

I bring it up now, mid-June only because I've had it in me to start cleaning up files on my desktop. There are a great many digital files that I do not need, many I don't even know what they are, and some I haven't opened up and seen since the day I got them. The real trouble with digital files is that they are much more easily out of sight out of mind. With paper, well, if it's in you hand, you have to deal with it.
So, I did Camp NaNoWriMo in April. I did a complete rewrite of a “novel” I wrote in the fall of 2000. The old version was call Mascaras Y Muñecas, and as I reread it, it was one messy thing. It was messy because that was who I was at the time I wrote it.
Just to be sure, I spent 13 months, starting in April of 2023 (also a Camp NaNoWriMo thing) reworking old novels. These old novels were written in 1993, 1999, 2000 and 2001 respectively. And the Mascaras Y Muñecas was the last one of the four. The title changed to Of Masks and Dolls and that is important only because this novel was a continuation of In Tint or Texture which I wrote a couple of years back.

The rewrite had nothing much to do with the plot or characters from the original.

And admittedly, the whole thing was very cathartic to write. All four of these were. And the beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo, at least for me, it gives my schedule some structure and a sense of urgency. It took all 30 days of April to complete it. At the end, I got a certificate.