Carolyn Paul Branch

My husband and I recently celebrated our 48th anniversary.  I went online to see what kind of gift would traditionally be associated with 48 years. Turns out the answer is: nothing.  According to Anniversary Ideas   the 48th Wedding Anniversary has no traditional materials, symbols, flowers, or gemstones associated with it.   After the first twenty, anniversaries are only special every five years!

I didn’t know that. Probably because this is the first anniversary that I have had time to think about it.  We are slowing down this year, working part time, even spending an occasional morning sleeping late together. It feels like a milestone to us because our lives are changing, entering a new phase. We wanted to do something special, to celebrate in a way that would last beyond the day. We wanted to spend a quiet day together doing something we would both enjoy and remember with smiles.

So we went to the dog pound.

Yes, I know the politically correct term now is “animal shelter”, but it’s still the place where dogs are impounded, caged, and if not adopted, eventually put to sleep.  Our local shelter is a better place than it was in 1963. The staff there were friendly and helpful. We were allowed to roam freely to make our choice. Every pen and cage was full.

The staff warned us the mixed terrier puppy we chose was a “live wire”.   They were right. I’m sure I will be telling stories about Cookie and how she took over our hearts and our home for years to come.

It may not be on the official list, but for us, the 48th anniversary will always be the year of the puppy.

It’s November 21. National Novel Writing Month is two-thirds over and so far has not gone according to plan.

It was already out-of-wack on November 6 when I found myself in the hospital recovering from an angioplasty and stent placement. I’d been ignoring the off-kilter feeling just as I ignored the chest pain and shortness of breath.  My husband, who knows me very well, refused to let me ignore the physical signs of a flagging heart. Thus, a visit to the cardiologist and a hurry-up stent was efficiently placed to take care of the 95% blockage that was stopping up my heart.  All fixed.

Home from the hospital I settled in my little office and forced my fingers to tap-tap-tap for a few days, even though I knew I was writing crap and it was HARD to even do that.  Just keep the words coming, I told myself. That’s all that matters. Word count. By November 14 I was up to 20,542 words.  That night I went back to the hospital emergency room again. Pneumonia, they said. Not all that uncommon after a heart “event”. Antibiotics. Prescription cough syrup that actually  slowed down the coughing enough to let me sleep.

Sleep. That’s what I did for several days and nights, waking up just long enough to swallow pills and more of that lovely cough syrup. Once in a while I staggered to the computer to check my email or scan my G+ stream. But I did not write.

When a day came that I was feeling human again, I went outside, sat in the sunshine on the ground, and planted red tulips. That bag of bulbs had been lying on the counter, bothering no one, for at least two months. Suddenly, it seemed essential to get them in the ground so they could rest and be ready to burst into beauty next Spring.  As my trowel dug into the soft black earth and I patted each papery white bulb into its bed, I pictured myself striding down the walk on a sunny morning, smiling at the brilliant red flowers blooming beside my door.

It was a good day. But, still, another day I did not write.

November 21. I  know I will not write 30,000 words during the next week. It is possible, some people have written entire novels in a weekend. But, not me. Not this time.

I will sit quietly while a fat yellow cat snoozes on my lap. I will sip tea, listen to my wind chimes tinkle in the breeze.  I will feel grateful for the steady beat of my own heart, the breath easing in and out of my lungs.  If I wait quietly, the tulips will bloom.

And the words will come.

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Procrastinating on my nano novel, I followed a link to the “I write like” , site, pasted in three pages and came up with this surprising result.  Couldn’t be vain enough to say this for myself. But, hey, if they think so, who am I to argue?

National Novel Writing Month starts in a little less than two hours. ( My alarm clock goes off in seven hours.)  I want to write this year, to write well, and especially, to write to the end.   I want to be able to go into my critique group in December with a completed novel.

But how much do I want it? Do I want it enough to give up constantly checking my G+ stream? Do I want it enough to stay away from the nano forums? Do I want it enough to completely lose track of the Republican primary? Do I want it enough to never know how Lohan comes out with her community service? Do I want it enough to miss Good Wife?

Because if I don’t want it enough to do without all those things, and others,  for one lousy month – then I will never be a writer. I’ll just be an aging wannabe.

When I finish this post I plan to unplug my router.  I’ll plug it back in tomorrow after I write 2,000 words.  Any day I don’t make 2,000 words there will be no internet, no blog posts, no email, no weather report, no forum browsing.

This morning I went to a National Novel Writing Month Kick-off.  Lori Robinett, the Municipal Liason for Fulton, explained the whole concept to the newbies and helped them get signed up on nanowrimo.org.  She had workbooks, stickers, and Black Warrior pencils for each of us.  I sat there munching on a doughnut, sipping my coffee, enjoying every moment until she pointed out the countdown clock on the nano website. Two days?  It starts in two days?

I’m not ready. Will not be ready in two days. No way.  It’s not like this is my first nanowrimo rodeo, this will be my 7th year, so I don’t have the excuse that I’ve never done it before and don’t know HOW to get ready. I know. I just haven’t done it. Here are the essential steps:

1. Tell your family and your friends all about National Novel Writing Month. Explain how important writing  is to your sense of personal happiness. Ask them to please do all they can to help you have free time to write during November. You must do this every year. Trust me, they will not remember what you said last year.
2. Get your living space as clean and well organized as you possibly can. Get all caught up on the laundry. Put everybody’s socks and underwear away where they can be found without assistance from you. (This won’t last all month, but it gives you a few days to get started.)
3. Stock up on groceries. Even if you don’t usually buy in bulk, this is a good time to do it. Buy stuff your family likes well enough to fix for themselves.  Make sure you have plenty of essentials like toilet paper, shampoo, and kitty litter.
4. Take care of your computer. If it’s been freezing up on you lately, take time to figure out what the problem is and fix it NOW, before November 1. You will not have time to mess with a cranky computer.
5. Decide what you will write about. If you only have a vague idea, fine. Don’t let that vague idea just swirl around in your head. Write it down in a sentence or two.  Then ask your self questions about your idea. Where does the story take place? Who does it happen to? Why does it happen? How does it change your VP character?  When an answer to one of these questions comes to you, write it down. Each question you answer will inspire more questions. Write them down, too, and answer each one as fully as you can.  This is FAIR.  The nano rules allow for planning during October.

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A simple four-item formula for turning story into fiction 

The execution may get complicated, but the basic maneuvers are simple:

1. Move and keep moving. Tell the story you want to tell without shilly-shallying around. Move your characters out onto the board, get them into interesting situations, and have them do big, consequential things as early as you can. Then, continue making situations interesting, and keep the big, consequential actions coming.

Note: Strong characters who assess, decide, and react quickly are especially good for holding the reader’s attention. Our eyes are naturally drawn to objects in motion.

2. Make it consequential. To the greatest extent possible, have later events be caused or motivated or shaped by earlier ones. Every causal or consequential link you can build into the story is a steel cable holding your narrative together. When you can’t find any way to link an event via consequence, see whether you can link it thematically to what has gone before.

3. Recycle your characters. Give preference to characters already used in earlier episodes, or to characters connected with them, when you’re peopling later events. Characters are made more interesting by being reused, and it increases the overall consequentiality of the story. One-time single-purpose characters are occasionally necessary, but they don’t support as much weight.

Cherish your good secondary characters. They’re infinitely useful.

4. See if you already have one. Whenever you need something new — prop, plot thread, setting, minor character — go back through the parts of the story you’ve already written and see whether you can find it there. It’s surprising how often the exact thing you need is already sitting there in plain sight.

This list is a an excerpt from Teresa, over at Making Light .

Opportunities for all at the Public Library

I didn’t have to think very long to find an image that means “opportunity” to me.  This is the front door to the Callaway County Public Library in Fulton, Missouri.  I was about ten years old the first time I visited this library.  I was amazed and delighted by all the wonderful books I found there, especially when I found I could borrow an armload to take home and read for FREE.  The only book in my home at that time was the King James Bible.  My classroom at school had two small shelves of books we could read while we were at school.  The library was wealth and opportunity I had never even imagined existed.

When I went to work in that same building years later, I could hardly believe they were paying me to be there. That was almost 35 years ago.

The Public Library of today has changed, just as the world has changed.  Children (and adults) come for the opportunity to use computers and the Internet, to listen to books on tiny self-contained mp3 players, to download electronic books, to fill out online job applications, type resumes, and learn technical skills.  They still come for the books  on the shelves, too.  They come for the glorious bright dust jackets and crisp white pages. They come for the opportunity to wander down the rows, to pull out any title that catches their eye, to choose whether to learn something new or escape somewhere magical.

Picking good books for the diverse group that  comes to our public library book discussion isn’t always easy.  I found a good one this week:  Bill Warrington’s Last Chance by James King.

Protagonist Bill Warrington realizes he has Alzheimer’s and is determined to repair a lifetime of damage to his estranged adult children. He takes off with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter April on a cross-country drive, bound for San Francisco, where she dreams of becoming a rock star. As the unlikely pair heads west, Bill leaves clues intended to force his three children to overcome their mutual distrust and long-held grievances to work together to find them. Unflinching, funny and poignant, this novel speaks to that universal longing for familial reconciliation, love, and forgiveness.  By the end of the story I felt each member of this normal and normally dysfunctional family was a good friend I knew very well.

Great work for a debut novel!  We plan to discuss it in December.

I’m glad the Daily Post asked this question because the Occupy Wall Street Movement has been on my mind.  It seems to be getting bigger and there are variations all over the world.  It reminds me so much of the protests and marches of the late sixties.  Not all those memories are good.  None of us who were adults then will ever forget the horror of Kent State or the fear and confusion of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was a scary time, and in some ways, as this movement builds intensity, I can’t help worrying that more turbulent, frightening days are ahead.

We need to be ready. But no one should back away from this fight out of fear.

Yes, the sixties were scary.  The comfortable status-quo got a hard kick in the behind and everything changed. Would I be willing to go back to those quiet days when blacks rode in the back of the bus, a woman’s place was (only) in the home, and gay people were simply invisible?  No. I would not go back there. Changes needed to be made.  It was time for good people to protest to ask for those changes.  I think the time for protest is here again.

The librarian in the photo above says “things are messed up” and I  agree with her.  The politicians don’t seem to be able or willing to do anything at all to fix the heart breaking problems so many are facing. People my age have been hit hard. We’ve worked all our lives, contributing to our 401Ks, building equity in our homes, paying our Social Security taxes out of every paycheck.  We thought we could send our kids to school and have a respectable retirement. Now most of us are working past retirement age, our kids are unemployed, and congress keeps talking about the social security fund running out of money.

Shake the numbers any way you want and the answer is the same: Millionaires are getting richer fast, and their tax burden has been cut in half since World War II. The middle class is slowly sinking, despite working longer hours with greater productivity. And the army of the poor is flooded with new recruits, most of them with a long history of working in lousy, low-wage jobs.

I support the Occupy Wall Street Movement. I am part of the one percent.

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The possibilities are endless when you look into these young faces.  What mischief have they been up to?  What fun are they anticipating for later?  What will they be like as they grow into teenagers , young women, mothers? Where will they go? What will they see?  What wonders lie in their future that we have not yet begun to imagine?

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