I’m starting NaNoWriMo today, so I figure I ought to get comfortable. I have a lot of writing ahead of me.
This is a sweater my mother-in-law gave me a few years ago. At the time, I was living in Wisconsin and renting a duplex from a wonderful couple who knew I taught at the local university but didn’t realize I wrote. When my landlord’s wife found out, she confessed to me that she had a deep fear of novelists. “I’m always afraid to be around them for very long, because I’m scared they’ll put me in their novels and I’ll come off sounding like a crazy person!” I laughed at her joke, but she didn’t laugh along. “No, I’m serious,” she said. “You should have warned me. I’ve been talking to you for years and I didn’t know I had to be careful.”
I had just received this sweater (it was a Christmas gift), so the next time I drove over to pay rent, I wore this to the front door. She was not amused, though the homemade cookies I gave her helped restore our good relationship. 🙂
The next year, my wife and I moved to the Middle East, which is where I first started formally tackling NaNoWriMo. And even in the dead of winter, temperatures never got much cooler than the upper 40s, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night — in the city, we were lucky if the temperature dropped into the 50s. So I never had a chance to wear this sweater while writing a novel in November.
Now I’m in Portland, the weather this morning was a chilly 34 with dense fog, the streets are quiet and the crows are calling in the trees. And I’m wearing what is now my official NaNoWriMo first-day sweater.
Time to get writing, gang!
(For more about my project, check out my NaNoWriMo page or my NaNoWriMo profile.)
Samuel Snoek-Brown 