Tag: Long September

NaNoWriMo Day 30 – Victory!

And so, it is complete. I have defeated NaNoWriMo for only the second time in my life. Yesterday I rather fittingly decided to hunker down at the same Panera Bread where I beat it a day early all the way back in 2008, though this was one of the few times when I could have done so over the past few years – I’ve been all over the place since then. Last November found me in Colombia, the several before that found me in Central Illinois as a reporter. The very first one I defeated happened just as Barack Obama won election to the presidency the first time, and now here we are miles into his second term.

I have a few observations about this go-round. Firstly, I feel okay about what it is I wrote. I have the distinct feeling some things will ultimately be done away with, but I also feel as if the greater majority will remain. This writing also helped me get through a deeply muddy time in the book, when literally every character is moving in concert and it becomes difficult to keep them all straight. That is going to be a major difficulty moving forward, but it’s also important that it be done: The story is partly one of a town, and not just the three main characters. Some advice a girlfriend (at the time) told me was that I should peel back the other stuff, and she’s right. I think I overdid it in some scenes, but cutting is easier than producing, and if we must cut later, then we will.

Writing this in concert with reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was also weirdly instructive in a few ways:

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NaNoWriMo Day 27 – I am not thankful for this novel

winters5

Authority changes hands. | Kenneth Lowe via Notegraphy

Okay, I won’t bitch any further about hating writing this thing. After an evening where I lost my lead again because I dicked around, had a friend over, and couldn’t be bothered to remain conscious long enough to write more than 1,000 or so words, I was finally able to power through and produce a good day’s writing today.

Part of that was circling back and adding in a clarifying scene in the past, one which should pay off here in the future in a little bit. While what I am writing now seems scattershot, it really is clarifying the whole book to me. These 50,000 words, you’ll notice, are going to be somewhat more than a quarter of what I’ve written over the past several years so far, and they’re solidifying the imagery, some of the characters and their relationships, and really setting up the bad guys, who don’t get much detail in the first chunk of the book. All told, while I worry that I may have created a jagged mess. I’ve also dumped on a lot of raw material that I am totally willing to rework.

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NaNoWriMo Day 25 – In which I can’t believe it is Day 25

One of the few lines I can remember verbatim from my own damn book. | Kenneth Lowe, via Notegraphy

I keep composing these on my phone instead of when I have my manuscript in front me, so the result is I haven’t posted excerpts lately. Last night was the perfect exemplar of how stunningly tired I am of the whole enterprise – I wrote maybe 1,000 words, just enough to be over the Day 24 goal, and then called it a night.

It did not help that the heat in my apartment is out and that I could barely think straight it was so cold. I am resolutely sick of Chicago, sick of a winter that hasn’t even properly begun yet, and sick of hearing of the awful violence in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury as I simultaneously get grief from family members about the possibility of going back to Colombia after this is all over. Which country is more dangerous, I have to wonder?

As I compose this, I am on my way to an official function where the president will be speaking. I am excited, but also exhausted, and an ice-cold apartment and this relentless novel await me when I do finally get home from this thing that is only going to start at 4:30. (Update: Turned away at the door… it was so packed they were declining VIPs.)

Fatigue, I have been assured, is a real thing when it comes to writing. More and more lately, I have come to appreciate that writing is work and not solely diversion. I am fiercely determined to finish though, so tonight I am going to push back ahead.

And then tomorrow I’m going to my fucking mom’s house, where the godshitting heat works, possibly until this tedious fucking return to my blighted homeland is blessedly over with.

NaNoWriMo Day 12 – Dysphoria

It had been a girl once, not yet quite a woman. The little white choir gown it wore was fouled with stains; Winters could not tell if they were from the rusted chains that encircled its body and ran through the pitons driven into the back wall and floor of its cramped little cell, or if they were long-dried blood or filth. The hands and feet were desiccated, the flesh drawn back so far that the nails looked like claws, the individual bones of the hand and foot glared out under the patchwork light the cell let in.

Over its head it wore a shredded canvas bag, but holes in it let out two matted cascades of tawny, malnourished hair.

“Rhonda?” Winters whispered into the cell. “Rhonda Younge?”

It had been looking downward, but as it raised its bagged head, Winters realized the bottom had been clawed at, frayed away enough to expose the chin. It opened a black mouth filled with shattered teeth – but no tongue, Winters would remember later as she tried to sleep in her savage triumph. The scream that came out was the scream of one for whom words have never held meaning, a wretched howl that beat against the walls of its cell.


 

Don’t worry, I’m still writing. I did completely screw off on Day 10 and wrote barely 900 words on Day 9, but it is still all right, since I was more than a day ahead to begin with and the last couple of days have kept me just barely ahead of prescribed word count. That video up there is sort of the cultural “it” thing of the moment, and you’ll notice it is incredibly disturbing after a certain point.

That sort of ties in with what I’m writing about now: A weird place that occupies the ideal of something but is in fact a creepy backdrop for a total psycho killer. In my current storyline, the woman a shady group of people have sent to track down this creepy killer has reached that killer’s hiding place. I’m not sure if it came through or not, but I wanted to invest in her just a little bit of the heroic as she tries to navigate this sinister, dark place and is finally shaken by the terrible things she finds inside. Of course, that wouldn’t make for a good rest of the book, though. What will happen next is a treacherous alliance between the two of them, as he offers her the secrets of the townspeople, who are more important than she’s realized. This is a big turning point in the story, and I’m nearly coming to the end of it, thankfully.

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NaNoWriMo Day 6 – Villainy

That was pertinent, I promise.

Today I got a bit later of a start to my writing than I ought to have, but I did get out another big chunk. I think I’m more than a full day ahead now, amazingly. This is probably entirely a function of me having so much of the story already figured out and the rest of this just now naturally flowing.

“Flowing” is a fitting descriptor here, considering that the bad guy I am employing here resides in a twisted sort of nightmare world where water is an aesthetic bit of creepiness as well as a very real hazard. Today’s scene had him cleaning up a weak link in his organization, because he’s evil you see. Like (my now favorite [fictional…?] depiction of) Shia LeBeouf, this is a devious, dangerous cannibal.

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NaNoWriMo Day 5 – A people’s republic

Pictured: 1 Lt. Governor, 0.75 Chinese people. Chicago's Chinatown near W. Cermak and S. Wentworth, Sept. 30, 2014 | Marilú Yee

Pictured: 1 Lt. Governor, 0.75 Chinese people. Chicago’s Chinatown near W. Cermak and S. Wentworth, 65th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China | Marilú Yee

I have for the past several months been working for Lt. Governor Sheila Simon here in Illinois. Yesterday was the big mid-term election rigmarole. It was strange because of all the elections I have witnessed since becoming a professional, I have functionally had the least involvement in this one despite actually working in government. The tangle of explanation is long, but simply put: Lt. Governor Simon ran for a different position (which she did not get despite a hardfought campaign – she ended up with 45% to her opponent’s 50%), and I had absolutely nothing to do with the campaign. This was out of a personal ethical stance and not at all out of a lack of respect for her as a candidate; I voted for her proudly. I mention the whole thing here only because it’s the culmination of so much stress, worry, and hard work on the part of so many of my friends and colleagues, so I feel if I’m taking a daily note of things as I Wri this NaNo, it has to include a mention of this, for it is surely in my brainspace today. I’m interested how that kind of thing affects a writer’s process.

National Novel Writing Month, I should note, invariably falls on an election, because despite people’s stubborn insistence on only noticing elections every fourth year, they do actually happen each year. I told a friend earlier today that I’m “disappointed” in today’s results, but I realize now that disappointment requires expectations, and I had very low ones to begin with. I am chiefly saddened by the almost complete lack of good choices. If you want a perfect example of that, well may I invite you to get a load of this, courtesy of the Daily Herald.

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NaNoWriMo Day 4 – Don’t Be Stanley

Stanley is sleeping in on Election Day. Stanley doesn't vote in mid-term elections. Don't be Stanley.

Stanley is sleeping in on Election Day. Stanley doesn’t vote in mid-term elections. Don’t be Stanley.

He had needed to fall asleep, he had had to fall asleep, not even grief or rage or any of it could stretch the endurance of a six-year-old beyond the point of endurance and when he fell asleep it was like a kind of unconsciousness, not like nodding off but actually falling beaten and broken from the church spire to crash through the glass dome below, and landing there in his misery he found himself falling still, plummeting through the sky alight with stars and moons of colors he had never seen before, and they sang with her voice. He knew then, even in the dream, that it was not her, that she was never coming back, and that this was some message left behind for him in the full knowledge that he would find it and take something from it. And when he reached the ground he realized that he had been falling like a feather, cradled by a warm wind like the breath of the woman whose bossom he had clung to in his first moments in the wide, cold, senseless nightmare place that was outside, the place with its unfair rules and its twisted, mean people. His feet touched the carpet of grass as if he’d taken no more than a step. Abe looked up with a smile, and he wasn’t green but true, immortal brass, and along the base of the statue was a winding vine from which sprouted white flowers. As he watched, it snaked downward and the ground sprouted more, the plants forming for him a pathway that lead down the hill, faster and faster, faster than he could run on his legs, and as he feared he would lose this messenger it stopped and from the ground ahead of him burst the trees and bushes and underbrush that parted as he sprinted into it and came to a scraping stop. There in the center was a statue—


I promise, I was writing yesterday. Tonight, as I wait for the election results to roll in, I am staring at a whole day of writing that amounted only to 1,679 words. I continue to mash my way through a long, complicated scene that is actually two parallel scenes intercut, and which will end in alarm on both ends. Unfortunately, my plotting was such a mess leading up to it that I have also been going back and adding some stuff to build up to this scene.

The source of the problem here is that I have for the past two freaking years or so been writing this very intermittently. Now that I’m diving into it, there is so much stuff that I wrote aimlessly or with no clear plan. This is the tangly, hard-to-pin-down part of the book, where many threads are going at once and a lot of the main characters are not yet truly confidants. That will resolve itself soon as I approach a unification of a lot of these threads, but it is such a tangled thicket in the meantime that I feel as if I am bludgeoning my way through it out of sheer meanness.

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Let the NaNoWriMo-ing begin!

Halloween is over. Archer Avenue, McKinley Park, Chicago, ca. October 2014 | Kenneth Lowe

Halloween is over. Archer Avenue, McKinley Park, Chicago, ca. October 2014 | Kenneth Lowe

I have resolved to finish this novel I have been writing for years now. I don’t think another 50,000 words will quite get it there, but it will definitely get it closer. I’ve already posted an example or two or three here, but I notice that it really doesn’t give you very much in the way of what the novel’s true, sinister tone will be like.

For those just beginning, Long September is a story about a group of young friends who live in rural Illinois, in a small town where the sudden and unexplained death of another girl shocks the community and then drives the entire town into a cycle of recrimination and suspicion based on it’s deepest secrets.

More would give too much away, but it’s also about how children are used as a football by their elders – how the young are forced into the genuinely shitty systems that grown-ups insist are the way the world must work. This reinforces awful behavior, encourages people to be snitches, discourages individuality, and may allow evil to flourish because “it’s always been that way.”

The only reason this damn thing has taken so long is because I haven’t buckled down, and the real reason I haven’t is because I’ve been intimidated by the scope of the novel. It necessarily requires a LOT of characters because it is in part about a town and what a town goes through. So there would be no way to get it done in 50,000 words, but that’s fine. I will crank the 50K this month, and that will get us to a place where the rest will seem easy. Right?

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In-between places (and a novel excerpt)

Orange Line elevated train stop at 35th & Archer, Chicago, 10 Sept. 2014 | Kenneth Lowe

Orange Line elevated train stop at 35th & Archer, Chicago, 10 Sept. 2014 | Kenneth Lowe

That’s my view on the way to the Orange Line each morning. I’m not 100% on being here in Chicago, but I do know that it is affording me some great opportunities that I did not have. Writers trade on experiences. One of the reasons I got into journalism originally was that I wanted to draw a paycheck for writing (heh), but another was that I knew it would give me broad license to go places and meet people that others do not.

As a reporter I met governors and senators and the ragged and unwashed people so many of their policies fail to help. You might recall people sneering about Barack Obama having been a “community organizer” ; I actually met community organizers, still have some on speed-dial, and I see the kind of work they do. I’m less intensive a reporter now, since my freelance is limited to document-driven pieces in the interest of avoiding any conflict of interest in my current public sector job, but I do still find myself feeling the outsider-looking-in feeling that I’m pretty sure every writer feels.

In that regard, one thing about my time living in the various places I have – suburbia, ag-industrial-rural nowhere, urban South America, City of Big Shoulders, &c. – has been my fascination with in-between places. In places like that, we all feel like outsiders.
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Long September Excerpt – the wild one

Eddie didn’t realize it himself, but the entire interior of the trailer, while neat and orderly, looked like somebody’s childhood room – close and personal and piercingly revealing of the mind or minds responsible for it. There were trophies from school achievements, movie posters Nyssa and Eddie had stolen from the store or which had been thrown out. There were band posters, childhood drawings, one or two knickknacks Nyssa had found in the road and couldn’t bear to part with and so nailed to the wood-paneled wall: A mix CD she’d never  played, a beaten up old baseball cap she had washed, a discarded U-lock for a bike.

There were no family heirlooms or photographs of any kind.

I once told a friend who read through my progress that Ian is who I was as a kid and Eddie is who I wish I had been.

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