This has been a strange week. If you’re following my daily word counts, you’ll see a lot of spikes and dips: on days I teach, my word count plummets, sometimes into the mere hundreds; then, on days I don’t teach, it leaps up as I try to make up for lost time. So far I’m running slightly behind par, but maybe this weekend I’ll catch up again.

Another thing that’s strange about my writing: I’m rewriting a lot. That’s technically against the rules, and really, I’m not deleting much of what I’ve written even as I change course in the story I’m working on. But I’m changing course a lot.

This is turning out to be a good thing, though, because I’m cutting a bit looser and tackling some strange ideas I hadn’t expected and might not have tried otherwise. Like telling a story in the form of artist’s notes on the gallery he’s inventing in his head, or telling a story from the perspective of elephants.

from “The Bones of the Long Forgotten”

We are elephants. This is a human. This human is dead. This human was tall but frail. This skin is drying, this skin feels like my skin. These bones — some are underneath this skin and some are poking free — were old. This human did not die of disease. This human died in pain. I remember this human. My sister remembers this human. My uncle remembers this human. We remember this human. This human was a woman. This human woman was called a name, other humans called this woman a human name. We will remember it. Together, we will remember it.

This human’s name was Martha. She was with us many days, but we have agreed she was not someone who belonged to our zoo. She was a visitor, but not like the visitors who come to point and talk about us and click boxes aimed at us. She wore different coverings on most days but always one piece the same. It smelled the same. We cannot make out the shape or the color very well, but it smelled the same and felt the same. She is wearing it now. It is dirty, it is covered in burned earth and rock dust and there are small holes in it that smell charred, it is thinner somehow and we think something has been eating its fibers, small insects or maybe a mouse. But beneath all that it is the same covering. It is something she wore because she was here, on the days when she was here.

[…]

But here is Martha. She has come to us. All the other humans left. Our friends and feeders and washers and carers. We remember the days when they gave up, two or three at a time. They cried. We cried. They shouted at us but not in a mean way. They were distraught. We could tell. We felt the same way. But you get a sense of these things, and after the first several humans left, we discussed it and realized that they were leaving to be with their families. We are with our families. So we understood. We wished the humans well. I think they understood.

We aren’t sure how much family Martha had. She spent so much time with us. She was not in here, in our home, the way the feeders and carers were. But sometimes she came inside. We let her. We liked her.

We are sad that Martha has died.

from “Like a Cold, Heartless Whore”

We said they’d kill each other in the end. Now we argue about how true that was. It’s up for debate. It’s hard to say.

We all started out in the Seaview, a whole bunch of us up on the top floors. There were six rooms. Well, four. Three of the rooms lost the walls between them and everyone wound up living together. None of us is sure how many rooms there were to start with, before the waves came in. That’s just not one of those things you remember.

There was the older couple on the outer wall, who we all expected to die of exposure right away but who’ve turned out to be heartier than any of us. Ruth and Friedrich. That was his name, insisted we all pronounce it correctly. Not Frederick, but Friedrich, with a lilt on the first syllable, drawing it out. We were not allowed to call him Fred, nor Ruth Ruthie.

There was the larger room next to us, the peak of a separate building, where the family was. They’d rented a whole two-story building, three bedrooms and a kitchen and a large living room. When the waves started, they headed upstairs, and then the water climbed higher and they broke through to what would have been the attic space if there’d been an attic, and they clung to the rafters and the roof supports. The outer walls facing us sheered away, same as all the buildings, and the ceiling dropped out from under them and they were all left straddling wood beams like playground equipment, frozen in some bizarre family snapshot. Two dads and two kids, a boy and a girl, the boy ten and the girl eight. We asked. Took them a while to get chatty, focused as they were on hanging on, but soon we learned all about them.

from “Everything Created Will Be Joyously Destroyed”

I walked my neighborhood today. No stockpile runs or scavenging. I just needed to get out. The winds are quieter and the ashfall is less, and the air is wetter which keeps the worst of it on the ground instead of in the air. I think the forest fires must be dying down, or the volcanoes are settling, or both. I remember old weather reports, the problem of warm fronts meeting cold fronts and all the unstable wind that could produce. Down south it made tornados. Made a few up here, these last several months, but I bet the south really got hammered. I remember a few years back, when it was just our own shitty weather that made all the storms and the wildfires and the flooding, and there was this one summer that had just hundreds of tornados all through the south and the midwest. I think there were two or three whole towns and half a big city that got just flattened in those storms. That one in Missouri wiped clean off the map. I remember the photos on the news, the only sign of the city the grid the streets made. Nothing but shattered lumber like pick up sticks, plastic bags caught in the stripped limbs of the two or three trees left standing. Man, that was a horror to look at. And we had no idea.

I bet the whole south, the whole midwest must look like that now. It must be like Mad Max down there.

Here the tornados stayed mostly east of the Cascades. Which I figured. I figured on a lot of things: I knew people would panic, I knew they’d run. I knew once they’d gone I’d have the place mostly to myself. I knew they’d raid a lot of the stuff I needed but I knew they’d leave plenty behind. I’m like that Oklahoma landrush in reverse. Used to be the first man into a place gets to claim as much as he wants, as far as he can see. Now it’s the last man standing. And I do love my neighborhood.

It’s nice to get outside like this. I think in the coming weeks I’ll start a formal inventory. No sense letting all this space go to waste.

from “When I Sketch a Clean, Measured Line”

Day 112: Self-portrait (reflection).

Soap scum and dried suds on a broken mirror.

This piece is unlikely to last long. Even in the best museums, with their humidity controls and their giant vacuum-seals on all the gallery rooms, sooner or later someone would breath on this wrong and the moisture will melt the soap away. That forelock I still insist on styling in my bathroom each day, it will come undone, will slide over my forehead until I look less like Christopher Reeve in Superman and more like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Until I look like Peppermint Patty in Peanuts. And my face will begin to dissolve, too. My cheekbone will droop, my iris will slip from my eye, or my eye from its socket, and will spill down the surface of the mirror, down my drooping cheek. My arm, which I’m holding crooked around my neck to grasp the back of my head in an imitation (I won’t say how good) of Schiele, it will relax and unfurl across the glass, a slow wave as from a parade float. Perhaps my hand will remain in place and I’ll be waving with only a stump. My pectorals will descend, my stomach will sag, my penis — yes, that’s my penis — will soften. With enough time, or enough people there to gaze upon it, this piece you see now will simply dissolve to become just a streaky cloud on an old mirror.

[…]

Day 154: A dead beetle (found art).

Mixed media in ash-plaster.

On the trail that runs past my studio in Forest Park, among the fallen twigs leaves and now-ancient tracks of mountain bikes half-buried in wet ash, I found this beetle, dead but whole, collapsed head-first into the ash. No deep-treaded hiking boot had crushed his black shell; no surviving forest bird had snatched him from the leaves. He was exactly as you see him here: pristine, glistening like a gem, like the onyx oval in my class ring. (I can’t believe that I still think of things like class rings. But there it is, an association with a forgotten world.) He is the first insect I’ve seen since this all started, though of course I hear them in the undergrowth at night, sense them crawling the old stone walls of my studio. And the more I studied him there in the ash, the more sure I become that this was probably the first insect I’d ever seen who had died of old age. I bent down to see him, thought how wonderful it must have been for him to lay there in the dirt, sucking last oxygen through his shell, and think, This is it — I’ve made it unmolested, I have reached the end. Through all the world has witnessed, not just in the months since the impacts but before then, the wars, the weather, the human swarm marching over the earth. And here he has made it, like the rest of us, grateful to die quietly.

Total word count as of this post: 17,827 words.

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

I’m on day four of National Novel Writing Month. And it’s been a good but strange few days, because while I have a table of contents already and a relatively solid idea of what I’m writing about — the apocalypse, and, now that I’ve done some quick-and-dirty background research and settled some things in my head, I know what kind of apocalypse (cataclysmic double-meteor strike that in turn triggers mass earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic explosions), where it began (one in the Mediterranean and one on the Arabian Peninsula), and what region(s) I’m mostly writing about (mostly the Pacific Northwest, though I might set a story or two in Texas just out of habit).

What I don’t have is an outline, a definite chronology, or a specific set of characters. I’m just sort of making those up as I go. Which in some ways is wonderfully liberating, and in other ways is unsettlingly random. For example, I haven’t really finished the first story in the novel — and in fact that story is currently just a jumble of disjointed scenes — but I’ve already started writing scenes and snippets for some of the other stories.

So this year, I think I’ll post my weekly excerpts not according to the days I wrote but to the stories I’ve worked on during the week. Which is what you’ll see below: bits and pieces from some of the story/chapters I’ve been working on.

from “Lonely As a Weeping Trumpet”

By the time anyone thought to ask why the world was ending, it had already happened. So I can’t tell you exactly what caused it, which impact was first. And as far as anyone knows, it’s still going on, all this loss and confusion and undoing of things and reforming of things, all this dissipation and coming together, so I also can’t tell you when it ended because it hasn’t yet. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s still ending, it’s always ending. An end without end.

This morning I stepped outside without a heavy coat for the first time in months, which felt glorious despite the ashfall and the grayness of things. My footsteps made no sound, the ground like a months-old snow to look at but like a featherbed to walk upon. The air was cold on my face but wet and refreshing, as if I could just lean back and inhale the morning. But I’m not stupid. I’ve seen people die that way, bent over with one elbow on their knee, a hand on a porch post or a tree, blood in the ash.

Each morning when I walk the road to the base of the hill, I think about mail. How I ought to be checking, a rusty mailbox lid creaking on its hinge, the flag half up and half down, no telling what I might have. It’s not something I ever bothered with before, living in the city, my mailbox one of a row of boxes at the base of my apartment stairs. My email felt more important than all that printed junk. Tree killers, I called those things, wholly unaware of what was coming for the trees. This mail-at-the-end-of-the-lane thing, it’s something I picked up from movies as a kid, those quiet homes in the Midwest, out in the country somewhere between the farms and the suburbs, the dirt road, the split-rail fence, the mailbox on the post. Some kid maybe ten years old, maybe thirteen, strolling down the drive with an old stick in his hand, swiping at rocks and thwacking the fencepost as he rounded the turn to the mailbox.

It’s strange how the things we miss are the things we never had to begin with.

from “This Last March of the Human Animal”

When the world was nearing its end, we got all sorts of advice on the morning shows and in the radio broadcasts. Even when the Internet was up and running, you could find lists. Water, food, batteries, first aid. Which made sense. Moist towelettes and cell phone chargers. Which didn’t make any sense at all. Later, the lists became more practical, contained things like bivvy bags and waterproof matches, hatchets and lantern fuel. Alcohol and a handgun. But no one thought to tell us about the coffee.

I lived in a shitty little three-bedroom house I shared with two other guys, out in Banks, which I thought was remote enough. We were only 10 minutes out of Forest Grove, a half hour from Portland. This was when we were still driving cars, but even by bike we could be in Hillsboro in an hour. And on the other side of us, about the same distance, was the Tillamook State Forest, with all the wood and wildlife we could ever need. So when everything went to shit I figured we had it okay. But then the cities became unsafe. They always do.

[…]

We knew we were headed into the forest, where it’d be both easier to hide and easier to survive, even with the horror stories we were hearing about the weirdos holing up in the hills. But we weren’t sure where exactly until Greg started yammering on about the Tillamook Burn. He was a history major in college and he’d written some paper on how the state forest got started, all those forest fires back in the `40s. And I have a thing about ghost towns, so when he got started in on the forest and the fires and the logging, I remembered about Idiot Creek and the old abandoned logging camp up there. So we headed for Idiotville.

from “So Much Simply Lost”

We had bread. It was light, puffed up, full of tiny air pockets. Sometimes it contained seeds, sometimes raisins and spices, and sometimes it was a pale golden color we called “white bread.” It never contained soot or fine grains of pumice. We could bake it at home if we wanted to but not many of us did. When I had bread, I bought it from the store, where it came already sliced, stacked inside a plastic sleeve. I used it to make peanut butter sandwiches and ham and cheese sandwiches and grilled cheese sandwiches and patty melts and clubs and BLTs. That’s an acronym. It was delicious. I knew people who would cut a hole from the center and fry an egg inside the bread. I knew people who soaked it in syrup and coated it with sugar and made a thing called French toast. I never made it that way; instead, I made just plain toast, which I smeared with butter and jam. Jam was crushed up fruit that seemed to last forever. We could bake it dry and cut it into cubes to serve over salad, or we could half-burn it and crush it into crumbs to dust the top of our macaroni and cheese. There was once a time so decadent that we would take old bread we hadn’t bothered to eat in time and head down to the riverside where the ducks gathered in the shallows, and we would pinch off bits of bread and toss them, a piece at a time, into the water for the ducks to feed on. The ducks weren’t hungry — they didn’t need the bread. But we liked to watch them eat. And we had all the bread in the world.

Total word count as of this post: 6,928 words.

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