Red Cedar

I’ve been beset with the irrational fear that I’m not doing enough lately. Not only, but I’ve decided that others are judging me for not doing enough on top of that. Which is nuts, I know (see irrational) – but even so it produces a lot of self-recrimination and anxiety. it also paralyzes me in working situations and instead of being more productive it has the exact opposite effect.

So I managed to do it, 50,000 words in a month, my last few jotted quickly during this past crappy week – but I’ve now got about 140 pages and a clear idea of where the next 25,000 words are going to a finish of sorts sometime in December. 1000 words a day and I’ll be done by Christmas time. I’m looking forward to starting something else already. Perhaps short stories for awhile? Or a new novel draft? A break, anyways, between one project and the next.

In January I’ve decided to do a month of photographs. One per day for the blog, carry my camera everywhere for awhile. That isn’t the same kindof project but it does require a particular attention that I haven’t had to the external world for awhile. I’ve been thinking about photo/word projects again lately, wish I had more time for all kinds of creating.

This last week was one of those times where I felt weighed on a lot by the futility of making change, and the brevity of life. What is the point exactly? You know, of using ones few precious years in the pursuit of changing human nature? That’s a question to myself at the moment. A challenge to decide what the best use of my time is. Music and writing? Or labour politics. The former seems obvious, the latter hard to disentangle from. If only it was the first time I was asking this I wouldn’t feel so sheepish about it, if only I didn’t feel like all sides had an equally loud voice in my head.

And work too, it’s been making me a little crazy. Extra work assignments, and then a peer in another unit tried to bully me into changing the intranet publishing policy just for him at the end of the week. Threats abound, that he is going to go above my head, going straight to the head of our department, because he decided not to follow the advice I gave him last summer. I’m not worried about so much as annoyed. When I first came to work there (more than ten years ago now) I was bullied by a group of people for much the same reasons (I had to enforce an internet publishing policy they did not like), and hell if I’m going to put up with it now that I’ve actually got some cred under my belt!

But whatev you know? Christmas shopping today, writing a letter to my friend Chelsea in prison, dinner with friends tonight. Our cozy house and morning coffee. I’m hoping next week is a reset so I can get down to finishing my damned novel.

I’m very very close to 50,000 words right now but I cheated a little and posted 2000 words from prior writing so I have to get 52,000 words before November 30th in order to complete Nanowrimo. Still, I’m less than 4000 words away from the goal and that’s kindof crazy if you ask me. I’ve never written this much on one topic, or gotten this close to finishing a first draft of a novel. Right now I have 136 double-spaced pages and am about 2/3rds of the way finished and it’s mind-boggling to me. Which I suppose is always true of daunting goals once completed – the act of having done it can seem impossible even in hindsight.

Today I had another little breakthrough on the novel front which may turn out to be a hokey plot device once all is said and done – but we’ll see. It’s basically leading to a four part novel in which the first part is told all in conversation and internal monologue, the second part is an exchange of letters, dialogue and a little internal monologue, the third part is straight first-person storytelling, and the fourth part is three letters/notes. I know that doesn’t tell you much about what’s going on with it – but I’ve got the drafts for part 1,2, and 4 almost done and I’m starting on part three tomorrow which is some of the trickier writing because it relies on stuff I don’t know anything about – like building a log cabin by hand.

Yeah. It’s going to be a fun December as my writing slows down and I try to make a plausible backdrop for Frances – but I gotta say that as much as the nineteen-thirties sucked, it seems a lot simpler than the economic crisis of today, especially if you lived in a place where you could still grow food and tend some chickens and stuff (noted that this was not the case for most of prairies and plains people who were driven from their land due to the dustbowl). At least there’s something comforting about writing characters who you know are going to live through it no matter what’s going on around them. So it’s nice to go hang out with them, you know? Even when their lives aren’t easy.

I’m a tad fed up with reality at the moment, you see, not my personal life (which is going swimmingly) but the general political climate around us has really got me down. Right wing governments, toothless workers and a labour leadership who doesn’t seem to get that the reason they can’t rally the vote is because it isn’t the answer people are looking for. Sad isn’t it? In the middle of an economic crisis that is only bound to get worse (don’t believe the hype, things have *not* turned around as long as the recovery is “jobless”) it seems like we’re damned any which way and I pretty much feel like giving up the fight right now. Because it’s so much nicer to hang out in my imaginary world, or write songs than sit in rooms full of people who know that things are bad but are limited in their imagination for *real* change.

Somehow the labour-left has completely lost its ability to envision the society people might want to live in and the only program is election, election, election. Which is a hard sell if you ask me. I’m not sure any of us really buy it anymore and when the call is that “unions need to change” we can’t hear that either. I’ve got some articulate rant coming on this subject I’m sure…. but I’ll try to hold off until after the BCFed Convention so I can at least get through tomorrow without grimacing too much.

Novel-writing this week has been a bit of a struggle, what with late nights, meetings and work all slowing me down, but still I’ve managed to get to almost 39,000 words and 107 double-spaced pages with another eleven days left in Nanowrimo and no doubt I’m going to make the goal of 50,000. Hell, I now know I can write 10,000 words in a day if I have to…. so I could even space out from now until the end and still make the word goal without too much cursing on my part. But of course I won’t do that.

The unfortunate thing is that my novel is going to be longer than 50,000 words at first draft – perhaps double the length – which means come November 30th I’ve still got another month (at least) of first-draft writing to do. It’s a little daunting to imagine doing this every day for another month. But at least now I know I can, and that at times it’s even enjoyable to do.

In the beginning I was in a real race to get words down, but since life has intervened with other priorities, I have allowed myself to approach this whole exercise from a more relaxed place, and that allows my characters a lot more room to act and say. It’s more enjoyable even as the end seems increasingly elusive. As much as it scares me, I’m also looking foward to hacking this thing apart later and going at it a second time – there’s a lot of rich material and detail I want to either hammer in or expand on still, things I’m learning all the time about people, about the historic time period in which I’ve set my story, about the subconcious and how it fills in symbols and detail all on its own. I’ve included here another description of the project, a little more detailed than the one I posted three weeks ago….. just for those of you who wanted a bit more of an idea of the story-arc. Sub-plot details include a granddaughter who lives in East Vancouver and is a single mother and writer whom Frances tells her story to over the course of the book. The granddaughter’s story of her own disappearing lover and explorations of those on the margins is starting (finally) to form a subplot of its own which isn’t described below.

“Loosely based on the life of my great-aunt Frances who was raised in rural British Columbia in a large homesteading family. A woman whose life is already difficult because of her masculine looks and overcontrolling father, when she gets pregnant out of wedlock at the age of nineteen she is shunned by most of her community. As a way to support herself and son builds her own house and store by hand and without help from anyone and proceeds to set up the first store and post office in the community of White Bay (a fictionalized place). Her itinerant lover returns after several years of depression-era living and attempts to woo Frances once more, partly out of his own desire for family but mostly because he is interested in cashing in on her hard work. It is here she must make a decision between social acceptability and continuing to live on her own terms. The main story takes place from 1915-1936 and is set in a fictional White Bay, BC and the real Salmon Arm, BC both on the shores of Shuswap Lake.”