So I participate in this meme to remind myself, at the end of the year, what I remember of what I did.

In 2011:

At day job:

• Kicked ass at one job, but would soon not be needed there anymore.
• Rewrote my resume at least 25 times.
• Applied to 97 jobs
• Had “informational” and phone interviews for at least 20 jobs
• Found a wonderful team, boss, and product to work on.
• Learned the new job, new tools, new people, new jargon.
• Took on big projects, made new friends. Counted my lucky stars.

At home:

• Help Dietrich get convinced to quit his job and become a full-time knifemaker.
• Rebudgeted. Everything.
• Played Kinect games with Mom, long-distance.
• Earned NAR High Power Rocket certification level 1.
• Celebrated the Kid’s high school graduation.
• Planted tomatoes, potatoes, basil. Ate well.
• Hosted several friends for many great dinners and conversations.
• Exercised my franchise at our 2nd annual Voting Party.
• Helped get the knife business off the ground.

Writing:

• Saw “Automatic Selection” published by DailyScienceFiction.com in January.
• Met every couple of weeks with Type & Gripe group, plus many, many Saturdays.
• Wrote experimental “Natural history of carnivorous unicorns.” Submitted it several places (serially), all rejected.
• Re-re-re-revised post-apocalypse novel “Struggle and thrive.” Still grievously fragmented.
• Wrote “How Frank Delano Changed the World But Not As Much As He Thought.” Sold to Timid Pirate Publishing for “Finding Home” anthology.
• Arranged a Browncoat’s rebellious NaNoWriMo write-in, which was great fun.
• Wrote 50,000 words of silly dreck for NaNoWriMo.
• Got back in the habit of daily morning writing.
• Bi-weekly Type & Gripe decided to meet weekly. (And still on Saturdays.)
• Met post-NaNoWriMo, 1-month challenge to write and submit a short story to a pro market: Wrote “Golden Rule.” Submitted, pending response.
• Revised “Natural history… unicorn” to remove experimental bits. Considering where to submit “Speak to your daughter in the language of unicorns.” Also considering a better title.
• Signed up for Write1Sub1.com challenge in 2012, in which I’ll write and submit at least one short story per month.

More:

• Imagined an app I’d like, and started to work on it with a couple of exceptional co-workers.
• Sent Pieforge back to Black Rock City with a few upgrades and a new logo.
• Started but didn’t finish knitting a blue cotton sweater.
• Started but didn’t finish making a hand-sized skeletal marionette that fits in a top hat.
• Cleaned up an enormous quantity of feline effluence. At 18 and 19, these cats are oooooold.

What I’d like to accomplish in 2012:

• At work: bring big projects to successful conclusions. Start more big projects.
• Sell Dietrich-made knives online and at shows in Oregon and Atlanta.
• Tell better stories.
• Finish the app project, and launch it.

The actual language in Ted Deutch’s proposal writes in so many loopholes that things will actually get worse. It’s revolting. No, worse than that. It’s the fodder for revolution.

Corporations systematically work to deny you your voice in our democracy, and you’re complacent. Put a protest in your commute home, and “it’s so unfair.”

Think it won’t work? The protesters are wasting their time and taxpayer money?
Remember this next time you’re quoting “I have a dream”: MLK and Gandhi – and the thousands who marched with them – were damned inconvenient in the towns, regions, and countries in which they lived. Both were met with violence, and thousands of people said “they were asking for it.” Each of them led peaceful revolutions that millions have benefitted from, and at much higher cost than your damned inconvenience.

FWIW, I changed my route home yesterday. Yes, it was inconvenient.

I’m not mad. I’m grateful.

So here’s my top 5 wordcount-padding strategies.

1. Avoid hyphenation. Some word processing programs process these as one word instead of two or more. See the “start-without-starting,” above: Microsoft Word counts this as one word, not three. If this were November, and a novel, I’d have just cheated myself out of 2/3 of that wordcount!
2. Avoid names such as Mike, Jane, Aloicious, Marmaduke. Not just because they are boring (in the case of the first two) and difficult to type (third), and reminiscent of Great Danes (fourth.) Avoid these names because they only add one word to your count. Why use Jane, when you could have Carrie Ann? Why Aloicious when Hunter Dowley is always referred to by both names?

   In addition, you might consider using characters’ titles. Take care, however: The Inestimable Charlene MacCaden, for example, might be ridiculous in the context of her present-day urban setting. In contrast, Mrs. G. Campbell has been known even to her mother as Mrs. G. Campbell ever since her wedding day, in Macon, Georgia, in 1934.

3. Setting is an opportunity to let the words run wild. If you’ve beaten every bush, intimately describing each leaf, you’re still doing fine. You might not have a novel, but you’ll still have won if you end up with 50,000 words of setting at the end of the month – and I bet you’re better at capturing detail, using metaphor and allegory, and creating a coherent universe than you were in October. True fact: I once spent roughly 2,000 words having two characters cross a lobby. Seriously.

   In editing, much like what can happen with setting, you can pare dialogue down to the words that move the story along. Only in November – and similar zero-draft states – can you allow your characters to discuss any old thing they have on their minds.

4. If you are a planner, you have an outline or notecards or some other means of milestoning your path through the novel, and each piece of dialogue already has a purpose. Great – but if they are having a hard time getting to the point, use the time – and the words! – to explore their own voices. Let them say it wrong, and then take it back. Let them get confused and start over again. That happens all the time in “real world” conversations, and there’s no reason your characters are any better conversers than you are.
5. Don’t stop writing. This is a “duh,” but it’s also the real truth of the NaNoWriMo experience. Here are some solutions:
1. Can’t get a chapter to come to a graceful conclusion? Write “And then the author said, ‘On to the next chapter!’” Start the new chapter.
2. Boring novel? Nobody expects an earthquake. Nor do they expect a tax audit.
3. Want to be writing something different? That’s the stuff dream-sequences are made of.
4. Stuck yourself with a solution that doesn’t work? Write what should have happened in chapter 5, with the heading of, “Here’s what should have happened in chapter 5.”

If you’re noveling this month, whether it’s your first-ever, your once-a-year, or your daily job, I send my best wishes for your savory, juicy, sweet, delicate, precise, and/or savage prose.

Did I neglect to mention long lists of adjectives?

***

He was the international man of… knitting.

His fellow bus-riders knew him as that affable, though quiet guy; one day he looked upset, hunched over, and was asked quietly, sotto voce, ignorable-if-ignored, “you OK?” He looked up, startled, to reveal a particularly tricky bit of casting-on: fingertips of a glove, knit simultaneously from multiple strands of superwash sock yarn.

What they couldn’t tell from looking at his broad shoulders and just-graying hair was that his mind was just as sharp, flexible, and useful as his darning needle. But he interviewed well. His lack of words (when he had none) was generally taken as a sign of far greater intelligence and insight than he actually possessed.

Mostly, he listened.

He listened to his wife – of course he had a wife, whatever gender his wife happened to be – as he was told the state of the bank account, the state of the children, the state of politics these days, and the state of his mind. He listened to his boss, when his boss deigned to talk, and listened to the promises of doctors and pundits and lawyers. He listened to his favorite music when it happened to come on the radio, and listened to the irregular beat of the drummer of his neighbor’s son’s metal band, thankfully muffled by the insulated garage the community covenants and restrictions committee required – to whom he also listened.

If everyone has a superpower, his was not knitting, though that is what 10 out of 11 speakers at his funeral discussed at length. His superpower was remembering.

It is for what our hero, the knitter, was best, that he was killed. It was for this that he had to be erased.

So when I say, ladies and gentlemen, that better men and better women have come before you, have killed and been killed in this service, also know that there were worse, less intelligent, one-trick ponies of souls who have accomplished more destruction than you ever dreamed. You are average – you are each of them. You are the middle. And as we say (here, I point to the letters painted on the wall, retouched every year) The Middle is the Middle. Without you, the edges have nothing. They fall apart without us.

The bell rings, and the sea of average faces attend to their notes, their books, their baggage. They don’t really need to take notes in my class – I just let them keep that fiction, rather than make a big deal about the usefulness of an active brain. No, that’s not for this branch of the service, the Middle ones. That’s for classes on floor 82 of the Excelsior building.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This week off was a GREAT idea, whatever the unknown, unseen consequences-to-be might be. I’ve walked on the beach, walked along Lake Washington, napped on two different afternoons, worked on writerly things (if not the actual writing, for which I am working on not beating myself up.) An incredibly disorganized closet has been cleaned out, and the craft parlor cleaned up. I’ve had a huge amount of time with my wonderful husband, and I think I’ve caught up on sleep. Mostly.

At the same time, the knife business has been pushed through some important prenatal growth spurts. Yesterday and Thursday were full of planning. Progress so far:

• business plan drafted
• pro-forma financial spreadsheets drafted
• time budgeted from now until 2012, and through 2012.

Whew. Actually, a lot of work has been done. I’m excited about it, and excited to see if our estimations are anywhere close to accurate.

OK, so it’s probably time to get back to the novel. I am at the Monkey Grind, after all, for our Saturday morning writer’s group. I’m painfully aware that I’m a significantly better writer now than I was a few years ago, when much of the novel was first drafted. Which means I can do a lot with it, right? Sure – as long as I can wade through the soggy and florid stereo instructions I wrote before, hacking back the prose with a confident editing machete.

Wish me luck! I’m going in.

I spent the morning of frittering time away, then headed to the salon for a long-overdue haircut. My husband suggested escaping for the afternoon, and we did – lunch at Burgermaster, and a long walk at Golden Gardens park and marina.

The sun was bright and the breeze was strong and the tide was going out. I felt the remaining stressyness and weight evaporate, disperse, and ebb. Then we went home and took a nap.

I was pretty much useless the rest of the day; I still Kinect-ed with Mom in New York, and stayed awake through dinner. Just barely.

Vacation dreams are bright, weird, and lovely.

This morning, I dressed up for our newly re-Seattle-ified weather (i.e., rain) in my new rust-orange raincoat and red-with-white-polka-dots rainboots.

I got to the coffeeshop, and went inside. It was warm, but not too warm. I ordered a rice-milk mocha, sat down with my computer, and read the first chapters of a fellow author’s work to provide feedback. I had promised to do so more than a month ago, and this morning, day one of my first vacation in more than a year, I did it.

Now I’m back home, thinking about what delicious breakfast to make.

Not a bad start. Not a bad start at all.

Ugh, I say again, because I am so strongly reminded that I was older than 30 when I first took agency in my romantic life. Relationships were things that happened to me, before that – I fell in love, and it was always a surprise, ’cause wasn’t it supposed to be? When the relationships weren’t right (and they weren’t right) I clung to them anyway. Who knew when the next would happen to me?

For me, this relates to the difference between being nice and being kind. Nice is passive, even when it’s active - no boats are rocked. Kind is a choice, an act – even when it’s the choice to not act. Good females of any age, I learned in EVERY media source, were always “nice” – even if the result was misery.

As an author, am I contributing to this ludicrous poison?

Consider the consequence – do I take the complete-draft 120,000-word novel back from the boy?

It means a MAJOR fricken’ rewrite.

I think I have to. As the author, it’s time for me to get some damn agency, myself. I throw the rocks at the characters – but even my females – maybe especially my females - better have the grit and presence to dodge or bat them right back. If I had a strong sense of agency when I started it, 2.5 years ago (already?!?), I never would have let the boy run with the book. The central female character needs to make choices and drive her own motivation forward.

Other writers – do you have this same problem? Advice and encouragement are appreciated! I may be getting better at taking charge and driving forward, myself – but it’s more pleasant to do with others.