Guilt

So I saw that Joy put me on her blogroll. As you may have noticed, this project faltered almost as soon as it began. First of all, I think that It’s hard to write all day for a living and come back and write at night. That’s an observation more than an excuse. Second of all, there’s another project in the works that’s sucking up a lot of my time but that I can’t talk about. So, this is going to take longer than a month, but I’m still working on it. Bear with me while the gimmick fades but the premise remains.

Limits of My Imagaination

Characters always live in my childhood houses.

This does not only apply to my own characters. Any account of a parent putting a child to bed appears to me in the room I grew up in from the time I was one-and-a-half years old until I was 11. It is  a room with a shared dresser on one wall,  a sliding closet door, bookshelf, and the door to the room on  another, and  each of the  the two other walls, parallel to each other has a bed. My wall is where the window is. My sister’s bed has a mirror hanging on top. My sisters bed is just in front of the door. If we sit on her bed with the door open we can look down the hall and see the living room television at the far end of the split-level ranch’s maroon-carpeted hallway.

Interestingly, if there is only one child in the scene, I imagine him or her in what would be my sister’s bed; I guess that’s because that was the scene I could see from my bed.

Any teenager lives in the room I moved into when I was 11, one with sloping ceilings, and the dresser that used to be shared. This room is less set; I’m less likely to imagine a boy in it. And, married couples always share a room that looks almost exactly like my parents’ room in that second house, the one we  moved to when I was 11.

If an author gives a description of a room, I can remove the characters from my house, otherwise the tendency is so ingrained that I don’t even recognoze the images evoked by the narrative as the images in my memory.

But it’s more of a problem when I am writing. I need to push to move my characters to homes that look different than the ones I’ve lived in, especially if they are families. I find myself thinking “well that couldn’t happen, because the guest room is too close to the master bedroom” instead of thinking “what if they lived in a house where the guest room was further from the master bedroom? Or in a house where the shower in the master bedroom worked and so the parents didn’t have to share a bathroom with the teenager who lives on the second floor (that would be my youngest sister)?”

It’s time to let my characters design their own homes.

Years Ahead

This book in a month project does not actually start until Nov. 1 so in the interim, I present you with my favorite comic strip ever. It has been hanging on my desk at school or my desk at work for years:

Join The Club

Cinderella’s month is busy, but she’s going to try. And over in New York, Ariel, is going to do a modified 100 lines of epic poem challenge, because rules are silly and she’s a poet.

Meta Meta Meta

So every once and a while I say something like “journalism  is my backup plan. My first choice is to write a best-selling novel.

About equally as often a friend says “you’re insane.”

And then someone says “remember when you wrote a 60-page novella? It took you a whole semester. And now you don’t even like it.” (That someone is me).

And then someone (me again) says “hey! You know what you should do? You should write a novel in a month! That’s 1,666 words a day. It’s also, 200 pages compared to the 60 you wrote in a semester.”

And then I say, OK!

Let’s say, though, that this conversation is not happening only in my head, but in a coffee shop near NYU. And there are other people there. Those other people include my friend Nick. Nick is wise, and smart, and has convinced me not to do insane things before. (Well, once. Once he told me and a friend that we should calm down and eat something other than really stale candy from our college newspaper’s vending machine. (Yes. Candy can go stale. Also, Pepsi can go rancid. It’s true). I don’t think we listened).

Anyway. Nick is wise, and also introduced me to some great books. When I said “I want to write a novel in a month,” he said, “you know what you should do? You should blog about writing the novel and then use parts of the blog in your book.”

And because going to New York seems to make me unable to discern good ideas from bad, I said “haha! Yes!”

And so it was.