Those of you who actually follow may have been wondering where I’ve been. What’s more, you’re probably wondering what happened to NaNoWriMo and the Writer’s Notebook. As for the latter, the short answer is that I didn’t finish, for the first time since I started.

The longer answer I hinted at in my last Photo blog post: my wife and I bought a house. As weird luck would have it, we got the keys the day before Thanksgiving, then we spent the holidays and the week after moving. Meanwhile, life goes on, so this week I was wrestling with final exams and major research papers and finishing my fall term at my community college, attending senior thesis presentations and panels at the massive art-fair/academic-conference-like “Focus Week” at my art college, putting together a special issue of Jersey Devil Press and prepping JDP’s regular issue, and putting together a special issue of my sangha’s email newsletter. All in the same week I’ve been cleaning our old apartment and still unpacking and setting up our new home.

So, as you may have noticed, the blog took a backseat, to say nothing of NaNoWriMo.

I’m not that broken up about NaNoWriMo, though. I was trying out an idea but I knew from the start that the required length of 50,000 words would be a bit of a stretch for the scope of the book I was working on, and when I packed it in on the writing so I could focus on moving and teaching and editing, I’d actually written about as much as I think the book needs. It’s going to be a small book. So I’m happy.

Anyway, here is some text from the last I managed to write before I got busy.

from Library Stories: Don, the jailbird, and Jess, the Librarian

I know that she’s into me because she smiled at me when I came in. It’s like she knew I’d be walking through those doors in that moment. All those teeth, just for me.

It could have been a fluke of timing but it wasn’t. I know that she wants me to make a play for her because when she helped me log into one of the computers, she leaned over my shoulder but didn’t touch my hand as she reached for the mouse. She could have touched my hand — it would have been perfectly innocent, a complete accident — but she avoided my fingers with her fingers. She wanted me to touch her, not the other way around. She wanted it to be on purpose.

I know that she’s playing shy, wants me to try harder, because when I stopped by the reference desk and told her she has beautiful eyes, she smiled at me but didn’t reply. Not a thank you, not a you really think so, not an I can’t believe you even noticed or an I wish I didn’t have to wear glasses. No words at all until I’d stood there for more than half a minute, and then she said, “Is there something I can help you with?” And I knew that she wanted me to make my move then, to say, “Actually, there is — could you perform CPR on me? Because you’re so beautiful that my heart just stopped.” But I didn’t say it then, the way she wanted me to, because two can play at this game, and I won’t let her think I’m coming on too strong.

I know she wants me to take her home because she parked in the same parking lot as me. She left the library at night through the same door I was waiting for her at, and she said good-night as she passed me, and then she led me to her car. Because she knows I can’t take her home until I know where she lives, and she waited for me to get into my car and pull in behind her. She’s leading me on.

I know all the signs, I hear everything she’s not saying, I know exactly what she wants me to do.

from Zoo Stories: Martha, who loves to visit the elephants

I washed in the red dye just like the box told me, but it came out burnt orange and now the elephants are angry.

I never should have given in to such vanity. I love the elephants so.

But last week I got up on my stepstool and changed the bulbs in my bathroom, removed the two that were burned out and the three that were fine but outdated, and I replaced them all with those new florescent bulbs, the ones that look like regular bulbs but with bigger globes to accommodate the coiled glass inside them. They burn brighter but use less energy, the box says.

They shine like sunlight, something about the gas inside that imitates a natural spectrum.

And when I stepped down from the stool and looked in the mirror I saw how absurd I looked. My beautiful red hair faded with age and all those strands of silver and iron ruining the luster of the curls. I’d had no idea how old I’d gotten.

The box said results would vary, but I assumed they couldn’t sell the dye if it didn’t produce at least roughly reliable results. And all I wanted was to restore my hair. I’m not so foolish as to think I could look younger, but I always loved my hair — people said it was my best feature, but I realize now they hadn’t said that in a long time.

Elephants do remember, though. It sounds like an old wives tale but it’s true, they have remarkable memories. If you introduce change, though, sudden and without reason, they become upset. It contradicts their memories, and they rely on their memories.

from Park Stories: William, with all the balloons

When the accident happens he closes and hides his box and gives his balloons away for free. He is going to lose a fortune, as far as fortunes in balloon sales go, but someone had to keep the kids from the carnage. This is why he’d gotten into balloons in the first place: the protect the kids. People thought it was to entertain, but it wasn’t. Balloons saved lives. Give a kid a balloon, and you distract a kid from a video game, or a cigarette, or rooting in daddy’s closet looking for the handgun. Give a kid a balloon, and you give a kid something to look after, to protect, to care for. Something as fragile as they were.

Final word count (for now): 26,110 words.

For more about my NaNoWriMo project, check out my NaNoWriMo page here or my profile on the NaNoWriMo website.

Man, I cannot believe I have only a week left. And you know what? This might be the year I don’t make it.

It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve just been busy with schoolwork and, somewhat unexpectedly, moving. Because, you see, my wife and I have just bought a house. Or will have when we sign the final papers next week, and then we move like mad!

Fortunately, the house is literally down the block from our current apartment, so the move will be relatively painless, but we’ll also have the rare opportunity to spread out the move a bit, spend a little more time hauling things down the sidewalk, which is good for our backs and our schedules but isn’t so great for getting a 50,000-word novel/story cycle finished.

C’est la vie. I’ll just keep plugging away as I have time for, and we’ll see what happens.

This is what I did this week:

from Museum Stories: Leona, who longs for the food in the paintings

I started with the soup. Red and white cans of it, all in a row. Tomato, vegetable, green pea, clam chowder. The beef was tinny; the asparagus thick and sour. I saved the scotch broth for last, hoping it would taste of whisky, but it didn’t. It was small carrots and barley water, sodden ohs of pasta and gritty bits of mutton. The broth was too salty, but it was the best of the stack.

— 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol

I moved from the pop Americans to the French a plate of peaches and green pears with a carafe of chilled white wine. All circles and oblongs, hard, clean outlines, the colors crisp but the flavors chalky. The apples kept rolling off the folds of drapery.

— 1893 Still Life With Drapery, Pitcher and Fruit Bowl by Paul Cezanne

The fish was dry but the lemon complemented it perfectly, the tomatoes a tangy sweet juice that seeped into the flaky flesh of the mackerel. The eyes staring up at me, the briny burst of them against my tongue.

I drank a tankard of clean, clear water.

–1888 Still Life With Mackerels, Lemons and Tomatoes by Vincent Van Gogh

from Library Stories: Walter, the poet who is also homeless

I’m sorry to come in like this I know how I smell. I’m sorry to come in this way I know I look a mess I just need to set awhile. Just need to set. Use the computer just need to use the computer. Need to find a job know how I smell need the bathroom just a moment. Won’t be long in the bathroom need to use the computer. I’m looking for a job. I won’t bother no one I just need to set awhile. My bones are tires, all my bones. All of them. See this one here? This here bones? This here bone is tired. I know I look a mess and I’m sorry to come in this way.

I need a job in maintenance can you help me? I can fix a car or some plumbing or refrigerators or door frames or lawnmowers too, lots of things. I done lots of things can do other things too. I can’t fix computers or work computers can you help me I can learn it? I can learn computers cause I need to find a job. I need the bathroom my bones are tired just a moment.

Just a moment. Just a moment.

You know someone who needs some tools? I got some tools I can sell them. I can use them too I need to find a job. Anything with tools I can do it, you know someone who needs some tools or someone who knows tools? I mean needs someone who knows tools can use them. I can’t use my tools on computers or electricians, electrics, elect– anything with the electricity I can’t do it, can’t do it yet but I can learn. I know I look a mess I’m sorry can you help me find some books? Need some books. Need some books on the electricity, I can learn it. I can read books on the computers — not on the computers, ha ha ha! On the computers, books on computers so I can learn them so I can find a job and use my tools. Use my skills. Skills I have skills I don’t have but I can get them I can fix a car those old cars some of the new cars some of them. I’m sorry.

I’d like an interview can you help me? I know how I smell I need the bathroom I’ll just wash up. Won’t make a mess just wash up. Get clean and keep it clean I’m sorry can you help me? Get clean so I can interview I need a job. I know the plumbing, I’ll keep it clean.

I just need to set awhile. I know I look a mess I’ll just wash up can you help me? Need a job need a job.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

from Zoo Stories: Charlotte, who gets divorced

It is not long past sunrise. I talked the zoo into letting me in more than half an hour early. A cold wind moves between the the rocks and trees but it stirs only the surface of the ponds, snakes over the run of the creek. Down in the quiet, cold water, small fish doze while above, a blue heron stalks through the waters, more tai chi than hunting.

Two of the zoo staff wade into the deeper end of the creek where the water is calmest, tools and bags slung over their shoulders, there to repair some pump.

I have come here to this removed enclosure to repair myself. Here, I am the only human being the animals aren’t used to. At home, I am the only human being still used to home, the only one willing to repair not only myself but my marriage. I am alone.

The heron looks between the tools cranking against something heavy underwater and me leaning heavy against the wooden rails overlooking the creek. The heron pulls long his neck like the unfurling of a
new bamboo leaf, leans toward the men, then collapses his tube of a neck like a hook, his head low near the water, as though to explain that the fish are small and not worth catching.

But I have come for the small. I have come for anything worth catching, even if it’s only myself.

from Park Stories: Oliver, the newspaper horoscope writer from Wisconsin

Today my horoscope reads, “Activities such as fishing, swimming, and boating are good choices for today. Find a way to work them into your schedule.” This is because I’m quitting work early and sneaking out to the lake this afternoon. I’ve invited some of the girls from advertising to come up and join me — I told them there was a party, but it’s just me up there and I’m hoping to score with at least one of them. Laila, if I had my pick. That’s why in the love category I added the line, “You are appealing to everyone today and by sundown you will have many potential admirers. Be ready for romance with that special person.” In Laila’s horoscope I wrote, “A gathering of friends will present an intriguing new partner — be adventurous and spend more time with someone you already knew but want to know better!” But she might know I just make this stuff up.

After I turn in the horoscopes, I’ll slide the paper pointer on that stupid sign they make us keep on our desks, make it point at the clipart picture of the restrooms, and then I’ll just slip out through the printing room, all those machines cycling away and thrumming so loud people can’t even see straight. I’ll slip out back, pop in that cd and blare “Spirit in the Sky” as loud as my car speakers will play it, and hit the road with the windows down and my sunglasses on.

The lake house is my grandfather’s. He was going to donate it to his church to use as a retreat, but my dad talked him out of it, some crap about a legacy for the family, a vacation home we could proudly hand down the generations. It’s a cabin, and barely that, and nothing worth handing down really, but my dad needed a place to take his girlfriend so my mom wouldn’t know he was cheating. Now my grandfather is in the hospital and my dad is down there taking care of my grandma — “It’s time to reconnect with your family,” his horoscope says; “Expect a call from long-lost relatives,” my grandmother’s horoscope says — so I know the lake house will be free this weekend.

Total word count as of this post: 24,722 words.

For more about my NaNoWriMo project, check out my NaNoWriMo page here or my profile on the NaNoWriMo website.

Is it week 2 already?

I’m all over the place in the stories and characters I’m playing with, and the writing is coming in fits and starts — some days I manage fewer than 1,000 words, some days I knock out twice that many; sometimes I hammer out all the words at night after work, sometimes I clean a few hundred during office hours, and last night I managed several pages of handwritten work in my little paper journal on the light rail coming home from an evening class — but so far, I’m managing to stay more or less on track.

I haven’t written anything new today, so the total will look a little light, but it’s coming. And I’m hoping a day off on Monday will help me get a little ahead again.

In the meantime, here’s some of what I’ve been working on:

from Museum Stories: Devin, with a gift for caricature

Other artists came to compete. The museum security chased them all away. He alone sat on his stool at his easel on the top step outside, catching visitors as they waited in line or slipped out into the evening. The other artists complained, often loudly. When the guards were feeling generous, they would gesture to the doors. “Come in,” they’d say. “Apply for a permit and copy the art. Draw cartoons of Rembrandt — what jowls on that guy! What a hat he wears!” When the guards were out of sorts or low on coffee, they simply shooed the competitors away. “Go out in the park where you belong,” they’d say. “Draw the guy doing yoga. Draw the guy selling balloons.” Once, the guards came out in force and silently erected a velvet rope around the caricaturist. One of them stood by, his arms crossed, and scowled. When the competitors shouted he went round the length of the rope, inching it outward, farther at each corner, blending the competitors into the line, where they turned and stormed away, or forcing them by inches off the top step, down the next, until they fell and spilled to the sidewalk, pages and inkwells scattered on the pavement.

Once every so often — rarely, but perhaps as much as four or five times a year — the caricaturist would tear away the portrait he worked on and turn his easel from the customers. He would hunch over the white tablet, his brush a fury against the paper. The bristles were stiff and they scratched at the grain of the pulp like fingernails in beard stubble. His breathing came quickly, his shoulders quaked. Sometimes an elbow would wing out from behind the easel like a rifleman taking aim. When he finished, he would rip the portrait from the tablet and push past the crowd, through the doors, past reception and behind the long ebony ticket counter and into the cloakroom where visitors lined up with plastic yellow tags, giving or receiving their garments and bags. Past the back row of coats, concealed from view, was a door with a key pad. He would ignore the keypad and knock quickly, four times, and call out “It’s happening.” Sometimes he would say, “It’s happening next Thursday.” Sometimes he would say, “It’s happening in forty-five minutes.” Once, he whispered, “It’s happening the third Wednesday in March, two years from now,” and then he looked at the portrait in his hands and waited. When the door opened he was gone, the portrait folded neatly on the floor with a note on the outside that read, “Never mind.”

from Museum Stories: Carl, with a beautiful singing voice (and the woman in 3B)

Each morning for a week, Jenny B. followed Carl from their apartment building. She had been watching him for three weeks, through the window of her apartment and the window of his, across the quad and up down one floor. He had been singing from his window, across the quad and into her window, for just over three weeks.

His voice was gravelly and had terrible pitch, but the emotion in it was consuming. His breath was deep and his tones came sometimes in hitches and jerks, other times in long scratchy wails. His singing sounded less like a song than like a prayer, a call to god.

And this is what enraged her. The last thing she wanted was for god to appear in her apartment complex, to get anywhere near that close to her. With sight like hers, the revelation would be devastating.

Already she had to keep the shades drawn at night and had ordered heavy blackout curtains. Already she slept with a thick eye mask and the blankets drawn over her head. She woke several times a night soaked in sweat, but she couldn’t remove the blankets. Because already the angels were peering in at the complex, spectral flames and electric lights arcing into the air between the buildings. Few others could see them — the woman below Jenny B, down in 2B, complained of migraines more than usual, and she might have a sense of the angels without knowing for certain what they were — but Jenny B. was inundated by light, was drowning in it.

from Zoo Stories: Stieg, the photographer (can make the penguins pose)

I switch my camera on and lean on the fence but I slip against the rail and cut a gash in my elbow. I swear the leopard rolls its eyes. The blood is on the rail but I can’t afford to feel the cut. I hold the camera still. I get the shot — I get another.

When I shut out everything that happens outside, I can feel the inside ignite and thrum, like a generator in the dark. Sparks in the shadows of my cavity. Flashbulbs — steady, and I get every photo I can see. I’m not capturing on film what comes through the lens, I’m projecting through the viewfinder what I want to capture, and there it is, and I catch it. Snap. The engine revs. The blood from my elbow flows redder, but I don’t feel the outside.

I move on to the lemurs. A young boy points and I pull a spare lens cloth from my bag and wipe away the blood from my elbow. My flesh stings and the feelings on the outside are coming back as inside the engine sputters and threatens to stall. Get some oxygen. Close the valves. Shut it down; rev it up.

The lemurs are docile when I lean on the glass but then I raise my camera and squint one eye and there they are in the viewfinder. The blink and glance my way, then they’re up, all at once. They move in acrobatic leaps, the arcs slowing at their apex and the shutter snaps three rapid clicks, catching all the movement, all the grace of the curled tails and splayed limbs, their lips pulled wide in grins. Exactly the way I wanted to see it. Rapid fire. The engine thrums. The lemurs ricochet from limb to limb, corner to corner. I lower the camera and they settle on their perches, list a little. One drops immediately to sleep.

from Park Stories: Lydia, on business from Texas

Lloyd had stood beside the woman for ten full minutes before she spoke to him. She said, “What am I going to do? I can’t take him on the plane like this.”

Lloyd had sat her in the grass and told her to hold on. “To what?” she’d said. He’d come back with a small cardboard box and his fireplace shovel.

The maples hang with moss and the spruces smell of sap, and a recent rain had sponged the earth. It smells clean. Across the park, some college students play kickball; nearby, a lean man does yoga and a woman throws a ball for her huge dog. Lydia cringes at the dog, but Lloyd touches her shoulder, says, “Don’t worry. They don’t know.”

He walks into a copse of trees, shows her the stones, and she understands without him having to explain. She takes the shovel from him and pokes about until she finds a soft spot on a slope. Here the dirt is loose and easy to shovel, and she sets down the box and begins to dig. Its takes her ten minutes, but she manages a hole the size of the box and about three feet deep. Lloyd is watching; no one notices. She raises the box to her lips and whispers something to it, then she sets the box into the hole and buries it. Away in the park, someone shouts and they hear laughter—a team has scored in the kickball game. Lydia watches through the trees for a while, then turns and walks through the park, Lloyd beside her. No stone marks the cat’s spot.

Total word count as of this post: 13,828 words.

For more about my NaNoWriMo project, check out my NaNoWriMo page here or my profile on the NaNoWriMo website.