NaNoWriMo II

Hi friends. Wonder where I’ve been since October 31?

Well, it’s not entirely true I haven’t been blogging… it’s just been on my Cowbird platform. I was really happy with this little piece for the changing of the clocks. As you’ll see if you read it, the day after we “fall back” is the most productive day of the year for me, using my extra hour over and over again.

But really what I’ve been doing the last five days is writing a NEW novel. I had so much fun last November, and for the many months afterward as I went through five more drafts of my novel Officer Down, that I decided to try another.

Also, when I got back from my North Dakota research trip for a short story I wanted to write, I realized there was a lot more “there” than I could use in just a story. And it interested me. I wrote one story from that trip, too, and posted it on Cowbird. There’s not much to it, but it kind of encapsulates what I care about in the story– the loss of a fundamental purposefulness to work in so much of today’s world.

One thing I’m not so happy about is it is another “guy” story. More fathers and sons. I have daughters, too, but the core of the story is a man riding around and delivering burial vaults with his aged father. Learning about and revisiting the past, struggling to make the present work, and wanting to have a say about their own lives and their own deaths. As far as we can, anyway.

I’m five days in, and so far so good. These people were more immediately alive to me, more real in some ways than the characters I had to work with last year. But also, there’s less plot, no mystery to solve. Which is fun in its own way, because I do know that these people know how to get themselves into trouble. I’m just not sure what it is yet.

So if I’m a little quieter than usual this November, or seem a bit distracted, it’s because I’m really in a different world, spending lots of time with people who don’t exist, trying to get to the heart of things.