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.

A Year of Creative Challenges

Refer to the first post of the year "A Year of Creative Challenges."

As 2023 comes to an end next week, I see it go with a small level of sadness mixed with a pinch of pride. I started this year with notion that I would do a creative challenge a month every month. Many of the challenges I took required me to work on them daily. That was a lot of commitment. Some of them I finished quickly, and some took longer than the month they were intended to take. Some of these I did with friends. Some I did with strangers. Some I did alone.
Here's the rehash:

January—Daily drawing challenge with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

February—Daily watercolor painting with Kimberly. I did 28 watercolor paintings.

March—A mini comic. I made a four part mini comic in a zine format. I made hand drawings that I put into vectors with illustrator and did the layout in InDesign.

April—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a 50,000 word novel called The Cataract.

May—Daily photos with Kimberly. I made a photobook from Smartphone photos. I also made a second photobook with some film I had developed during the month. So, two for one this month.

June—Painting project. I painted 20 faces. This was a weird one.

July—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a second 50,000 (closer to 60) word novel called Exile.

August—Click it up a notch photo challenge. This was the dog of the year. I used my DSLR and I hated every day of this. The resulting book was not all that bad.

September—Poetry. I did this one lofi. I typed the poems with a manual typewriter and then bound the poems together into a book with some pastel paintings. A true one of a kind.

October—Inktober with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

November—NaNoWriMo. I wrote the third novel of the year. This one is called: Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver.

December—A submission a day. I submitted 31 short stories to 31 different magazines.

Additionally: I read 52 books, wrote 52 blogposts, drained countless pens and filled a dozen notebooks. It's been a very prolific year.

A Submission a Day: Final Thoughts

I love the very idea of getting a story published. I can't think of a single writer who doesn't like this. I love the small literary magazines too. I love that so many of them are looking for writers of marginalized communities. I am tickled to think that so many magazines and editors are after the same thing that I'm after: something different, something new, something with flavor.

I don't fear for the future as some of my colleagues do. I don't think that AI will take over. And who cares if it does? Once the power goes out, so will the computers. I also think that people who read literary magazines are looking for something a machine cannot provide. When you get involved with a literary magazine, what you really want is community.

As for me? Well, it's been a fascinating glimpse into who I was as a person and as a writer. Sure, I have written a great many short stories. I can tell with utmost honesty, and this is not a self deprecating thing, that most of these stories are not very good. I have to ask myself, what was important when I wrote them? Was the product important? No, it was the process. I have always been the writer that will write ten stories and pick the best one and I feel like that provides me with better odds than to just write one.

I will not say that this is the end of my writing of short stories. I will not say that I'm eager to write more in the future either. I have no plans to continue writing them. If I've learned anything over the years what it takes to produce a good short story is to read a bunch of them, and then start writing a bunch of them. I'm no longer willing to do that.

What's going to happen with the stories I've put out for consideration this month? I won't know the outcome for weeks, possible months. The few editors that have sent rejections already I am very grateful to. If an editor is not interested in a story, the most considerate thing they can do is to reject it quickly.

I started this because I wanted to be relevant. Have I become relevant? Again, I won't know for months.

What I do know, I've been enjoying this process immensely.

A Submission a Day: Part 2

As I started this process of submitting a story a day, it came to a question of which stories. I have written just under 200 short stories since 2009. I have, maybe, another 100 that I wrote before 2009. When I say I have 300 short stories, I think this may be a very conservative number. Please don't think I'm a braggart, just because I've written 300 short stories, doesn't mean they're any good. And of the good ones, it doesn't mean that they're publishable.

How does one figure out the stories to choose for submission? Well, it's not nearly as hard as you might think. I decided to forgo anything written before 2009. Of the two hundred that remained, I decided not to use any that had a word count over 4,200 words. Who the fuck wants to read that many words? Not me. Then, I cut out the ones that I knew for sure were not in good shape. Then I chose what I thought was a good representation of what I write and who I am.

Who Was I?

What I discovered, and alarmingly so, is that writers really do write what they know. So many of my short stories are about chain smoking, heavy drinking and fucking on the floor. These are things that I don't do any more. But I did. And now, I realize that it's cliché. It's all so very cliché.

So, if I remove all the stories about being a drunken buffoon, there wasn't many left over. I picked 13 stories, all between 900 words and 4,200 words. And away I went.

By the end of the second week, I had held true to the submission a day. I used newpages.com to research my markets. I've already received a few rejections.

A Submission a Day: part one

For December's creative challenge, I decided I would submit a short story a day all month. The reasons why I decided to do this are so many that I don't know if I'll be able to organize my thoughts on the subject.

For starters, I have been feeling low lately. This happens to me from time to time. It usually happens in the fall and into the early part of the winter. I really loathe the winter. I live in Colorado, and I do appreciate the fact that it's sunny all winter. It's dry. It's brown. It's really fucking dirty. And to circle back around to the submission process, when I feel down, the rejections that will inevitably come my way just don't affect me negatively. In the event that I get a publication, well, it really improves the overall feeling.

Also, I feel like every few years when I don't feel relevant anymore, a few publications make me feel like I'm still here, I'm still alive. To put it into perspective, my last publication was in the fall of 2020. That's a long time ago.

Then there is a practical element to this. When I submit to magazines, I treat it like research for my own magazine, Umbrella Factory Magazine. After all, UFM got it's start because of a rejection letter I got back in 2009.

The other thing I know, and this happens almost without fail, 90% of these submissions will be rejected. If not rejected, then ghosted. That leaves me with the 10% that will run in a magazine somewhere. If I submit all month, 31 submissions, if all goes well, I can count on 3 publications.

NaNoWriMo 2023 Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver: The Conclusion

I would be remiss to exclude my feelings with this project, this year's NaNoWriMo, this Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver. The feelings, all of them, intense ones too, are all over the place. The truth is, I really don't know how I feel or where to begin.

I could begin in 1999, November. I wrote the original story then. I was living in Southeast Portland and working for the Cascade Pacific Council, Boy Scouts of America. I was 27. I was very unhappy, and for the life of me now, I have no idea why. I was unhappy with work. I thought I was a sellout. But being a sellout, as such, doesn't seem that bad of a thing to me now. I felt like a fraud working for the Boy Scouts too. I didn't like Southeast Portland. All I wanted to be was a writer, even if I didn't know what that meant.

NaNoWriMo 2023, part 3

I have so many feelings right now with my NaNoWriMo manuscript that I am really unable to order them. It's really the reworking of Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver that I'm overwhelmed with. I did not feel the way that I do now when I wrote the original story 24 years ago.

Twenty for years is such a long time.

I was thinking about things the other day when we went to the Veteran's Day Parade. I was thinking about it because so much of my current novel and all the novels that involve Sam Foley, the main character of Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver, has so much to do with being a veteran. Specifically, a veteran of war. I suppose all veterans deal with their part in the war in different ways. I say this, because there is nothing more unattractive to me than seeing old men wearing the uniform of their younger selves like they're trying to prove something. I mean, most of us were in the military for short amounts of time, 2 to 4 years mostly. Why try to relive that? It puts me off.

NaNoWriMo 2023, part 2

I have been to Vancouver, BC only twice. I was there in November of 1999, and that visit was only twenty-four hours. Admittedly, I did so much during that visit that it seemed like a much longer time. And, as the case was, I was alone during the road trip to and from, so I had ample time to think. Also, I faithfully wrote everything down upon my return to Portland.

The second time I went to Vancouver was a year later in November of 2000. That trip I was with my girlfriend at the time, and one of my best friends and the three of us visited another friend once we got there. The second trip to Vancouver, needless to say, was vastly different than the first. I found myself taking everyone around to various sites of my first visit, but I did not tell any of them why.

NaNoWriMo 2023 Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver

What more is there for me to say, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again this November. It is the third NaNo event I've done this year, as I did Camp NaNoWriMo in both April and July. And like the former two, I'm doing a complete rewrite of an old novel.

This month, it's Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver. There are a few things worth nothing as I'm getting into this. First, I wrote the initial story in November of 1999. It was, in fact, a story about 24 hours I had in Vancouver. I had gone there for a quick get out of town, and since I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, Vancouver, British Columbia was not so very far away. I wrote the original in a period of about 2 days. It wasn't much of a novel, properly speaking, being just over 17,000 words. It wasn't even much of a story. But I also wrote it 24 years ago, and things for me have changed a great deal.

Since I rewrote Exile in July, Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver is now the oldest manuscript I have. I think I always wanted to rework it, but I never knew how. I think in the past, I thought I would just have to go into it and work little bits out. But as I've been in the business of rewriting old work this year, I have found that it is a completely new thing. After all, The Cataract of last April retained only the setting of the original piece I wrote in 2001, and I didn't even read the 1993 Exile before I completely rewrote it.

Inktober, Last strokes

Day 31: Fire

If now is a good time for honesty, I may as well say, I finished Inktober early. This is nothing new for me. All of the creative challenges I've done this year, with the exception of the “Click it up a Notch” photography project, I have finished early. Some days, I just have more energy than others, and I get more done.

Some final thoughts:

These were my favorite prompts, and they were not the best things I drew:

Day 8: toad
Day 11: wander. I drew a Neil Young looking dude with a bindle
Day 24: shallow and
Day 29: massive

I feel like this was a challenging endeavor and I'm glad I did it. Often, I worked on these drawing in the evenings after my family went to bed. If nothing else, I'm grateful to have spent my quiet hours doing this and not staring into a screen.

Inktober Week four

Day 14: Castle

This week as I've been drawing I have continued to muse about time. Not time in the indexing of memories or the future plans sort of time. Now, this week, it has been less of a question of where did the time go and more of a question of how did I not see all this time before?

I've been trying out new things. No doubt. I find it funny that since August, I've been doing creative challenges that do no need a computer. Sure, the photography challenge and subsequent photobook in August needed a little tinkering with InDesign, but it wasn't necessary. And the poetry book I did in September, much like Inktober, didn't even require electricity.

I find the time I spend on these lofi activities makes me feel a certain way. It's like I can spend a couple of hours watching a movie on Netflix or endless YouTube videos and when I'm done, I feel tired, but I can't sleep. I feel wound up and exhausted. But, if I spend the same amount of time drawing or writing in my notebook or reading, I feel relaxed and sleepy. It probably has something to do with being wired a certain way, I have no scientific proof. By the anecdotal evidence is profound.

Going into the final days of Inktober, I don't know if I'm ready for it to en

Inktober Week three

Not really a drawing. Day 5: Map

As this drawing challenge continues, I find myself musing over other things. I didn't have a specific thing I wanted to think about during these hours. I did not have an overarching theme to consider. I didn't even think about having something I wanted to learn.

What I could have had, this whole time was something drawing related. I mean, I wouldn't have considered the paper I'm using as I'm still using the same sketchbook I've been using all year. I have not really considered the pens either. I am still using Micron pens, but I've decided to make a move to the Staedtler pens as the Micron wear out. This is for no real reason, except maybe I like the way the nibs are shaped a little better.

No, what I've been musing over is time. My mind wanders when I draw. I have ample time to think, which I like. Since Inktober has fallen between the poetry project I did in September and the Novel writing project for NaNoWriMo that I plan for November, being able to clear my mind of all verbal noise has been a blessing. I find I've been thinking about the deep past, my deep past. Things that happened very long ago, and how they have impacted me now. I've also been thinking about dead friends. I don't care for the autumn very much, and I've lost friends and family members during this time of year. But that has nothing to do with drawing.

As the weather has been cooling down, I know it's time to get serious. I'm in the middle of the third week of the Inktober challenge, I don't feel like I'm slowing down anytime soon. There's just under two weeks left. Maybe I will have a revelation between now and then.

Inktober Week two.

The process has been going fairly smoothly, I think. As I sit down to draw, I've been thinking about the prompts. I think about it because of these two questions: what can I draw that will be unique and what can I draw with my skill set?

Sometimes, I'll Google the word and look at images. Sometimes, this is not a good thing. For instance the prompt for October 9^th was “bounce” and drawing a blank, I looked it up. I wouldn't say I was horrified, horror isn't the right word. But looking up bounce, I just didn't think I was going to get what I got. Rather than drawing big body parts, I chose to draw a pogo stick.

Interestingly, the pogo stick brought up many miseries of childhood. I was never mistreated by a pogo stick, but thanks for asking. I was a troubled child, and I was often shuffled around to different babysitters. I have a spotty memory of one babysitter in particular. Their was a rusty pogo stick in the alley. There was also a little girl there too, and when my mother came to get me, I remember this little girl specifically asking my mom if I could stay a little longer. I don't remember anything else, and I may have been there only once.

It was a funny memory to have, for sure. I was enjoying it, the memory, as I was drawing the pogo stick. I think if it weren't for that act of drawing, I would not have had the memory, not at least until the years of senility get here.

Pogo sticks aside, I've been scribbling away

Inktober, the preamble

When I started the graphic design program at Front Range, I was terrified of the two art classes that I had to take to earn the degree. It only made sense that I would have to take some art classes, after all, because not everything can be generated with software. Of course, the trends as they continue will make this thought obsolete. Enter AI generated art, I just don't know how I feel about it. On one hand, it's great because you can make a mockup very quickly, and go. On the other hand, it is AI. I suppose you can train AI to do things a certain way, but babysitting a computer was nothing that I had in mind. There is still something great about human generated art. If not the art itself, then the fact that someone took the time to learn to do it, practiced it.

When I took the intro to drawing class, I was nervous about it because I never felt like I had much in the way of artistic inclinations. I also know that art is subjective, and I know that there is a great deal of discipline in art. I was delighted by the class, and I have been drawing nearly daily since.

What I find when I draw is a peace of mind that is different from other practices that I have. When I draw, I don't care about the outcome as much as I care about how I feel. It's strange. I don't generally share my drawings, not even with my family. The exception to this, of course, is when I do a creative challenge with my friend Kimberly.

Kimberly has become somewhat of a character in these blog posts, poor thing. But, we have done a few of these challenges together, and it's fun to see what the other is doing or how to entertain each other. We did Inktober last year, the first year either one of us has done it. We did a second drawing challenge last January. This year, Inktober is our third drawing challenge.

My intent, is to draw with my micro pens and sharpies in my sketchbook.

Our Part of the Night, the outcome.

As it started to happen, it began to happen very fast. I was typing up my poems and enjoying it. I was doing it during the day. During the day, I was so lofi with the typewriter that I wasn't using any electricity at all. Sometimes I was outside. Beautiful.

I made a mock up of what each page should look like, and then I made a page jig. I cut out the place where the title would go, and the page number so I could stamp those in later. I measured where the spine would be, where the poems would start. And then, success.

What I found was this: I could choose the order of the poems later. I could choose the order except on the individual pages. I typed all the poems and then ordered them. On each page, the poems are placed in the same spot. The titles, having gotten stamped in later, were also on the same placement on each page.

Then, although it is not part of the poetry itself, and these were not something I did this month, I decided that I would add in some of my pastel paintings. I had done almost all of these in 2020 during the great lock down. They had been in a folder for years.

I cut the images to size, I ordered the pages, I numbered the pages. Then I cut the cover, a plastic folder, to size. Then I started stabbing. And I only stabbed myself twice.

I drew a self portrait and added it in.

I have a one of a kind poetry chapbook. The finished project is a delight to hold and it really seems more important than the bad poems and the messy drawings in between. What it is, ultimately, a lofi expression in a final piece.

Our Part of the Night, Part 3

As I was starting the writing process, I started to think of the final product. Since I was going to have at least 30 poems, and front and back of a piece of paper, I would have a minimum of 15 pages.

Last June, I was at The San Francisco Center for the Book. I had a week long intensive course on how to bind books. So, I knew I would bind the poetry chapbook by hand. I thought about all the styles that I learned, and all the different structures for a book. Which one was going to be the best was left up to debate.

Then there was another issue. I have a manual typewriter and when the keys, some more than others, hit a piece of paper, it leaves a big imprint. I found that sometimes the key would tear though the page. There was no way I would be able to type on the front and back of a single sheet with any success. Sure, I could have found thicker paper, something with a better bond, or an appropriate tooth. Or I could only use on side of the page.

Ultimately, I decided to use some 8.5 x 14 paper we had here. I would fold it in half, making each page 8.5 x 7. So, in a way, I was only typing on one side of the paper.

I decided to fold the paper, make the loose ends go into the binding, and leave the folded edge out. And with that, with the necessity and with the confines, I chose to do a Japanese stab binding.

Our Part of the Night, part 2

In the past when I've done this poetry project, I had always composed them initially in a notebook. What I've done is simple, I will write anywhere from 2 to 10 poems in my notebook that are either the same poem, the same title, or the same thread. Once that's done, some time later, I'll go back to them, edit them by either finding the piece that works the best, or by combining some parts of several poems into a single one. This usually happens on the computer.

I put the individual poems into a folder and sometimes I'll title the folder with the intention of making a chapbook. Sometime I'll make the chapbook. When I make the chapbook, it is digital, it always stays digital. I've never once printed a chapbook. I consider the project completed and I move one. Over the last several years, I do this in September between a photo project in August and Inktober in October.

But this year, I decided to skip the computer outright.