Category Archives: Writing

Project 366 – Week 47

323/366
wind whips the plastic
sheeting off the unfinished
house across the street

324/366
the first big windstorm
of the season continues
darkness all day long

325/366
it’s a good thing that
I manage to get work done
in spite of myself

326/366
above the city
constellations visible
Cassiopeia

327/366
one dish thanksgiving
dinner: the most brilliant
idea ever?

328/366
drivers snug in cars
don’t see the need to stop for
runners in the rain

329/366
disconcerting is:
this woman following me
wherever I go.

100 novels in fragments

I spent nine years in Oxford (B.A., D.Phil., JRF), then decided I could not face the enforced specialization of academia. Spent seven years working on various novels, trying to combine this with various jobs. In 1995 I decided this must stop. I had 100 novels in fragments, including a 300-page single-spaced MS with terrible structural problems. I quit my job: I would write till money ran out. Had terrible argument with my father, could not deal with this big difficult book. Thought: We don’t pick our parents. If we could choose, I would have picked someone better than this. Thought: OK. I can’t work on this book. I will write a novel with a simple structure that can be FINISHED. I will set aside a month and write with NO INTERRUPTIONS. (Story: Son of single mother, obsessed with Seven Samurai, goes in search of better father than the one fate provided.)

—Helen DeWitt

Ok, now I don’t feel so bad for having eight.

Project 366 – Week 46

316/366
reading with curtains
drawn, listening to rain fall
outside the window

317/366
unexpected smiles
and ‘hi’s from sidewalk strangers
what’s up, Vancouver?

318/366
a cashless soci-
ety? not as long as we
still need laundry change

319/366
is the freezer the
greatest invention ever?
I think it might be.

320/366
so dark I could sleep
all day—I think I need a
SAD lamp alarm clock

321/366
woman carrying
an oversized umbrella
hogging the sidewalk

322/366
mushroom lasagna
inspired by reading food blogs
on the interwebs

Project 366 – Week 45

309/366
a lazy Sunday
reading with popcorn + tea
then a lovely nap.

310/366
the best part about
running in the rain is the
hot shower after 🙂

311/366
after a year of
campaigning, the winner is…
Barack Obama!

312/366
a group of runners
doing hill repeats in the
dark at QE Park

313/366
starting to wonder
if this card is defective
chip error again

314/366
uh-oh! this weekend
I need to NaNoWriMore
and more and more and…

315/366
winter is coming
an unoriginal but true
sentiment today

Project 366 – Week 44

302/366
discovered I have
eight unfinished novels, not
“just” five as I’d thought

303/366
being productive
is more satisfying than
procrastination

304/366
down the hall, knocking:
tap-tap, tap-tap. “open the
door, I can hear you.”

305/366
3-something a.m.
more knocking: thud-thump thud-thump
then: “it’s the police.”

306/366
it’s November 1st
on your mark, get set, go! time
to NaNoWriMo!

307/366
you can’t call someone
a “terrible person” for be-
ing disappointed

308/366
argh, fruit flies! …and then
I recall the apricot
eye experiments…

Project 366 – Week 43

295/366
october twenty-
first, not bad. first time this year
I turned on the heat.

296/366
snow dusts the tops of
the mountains, outlining the
evergreens in white

297/366
my feet are frosty
a sign perhaps I should start
wearing socks again

298/366 eeeek!
cat? raccoon? no! skunk!!!
hold very still and try to
look non-threatening

299/366
oh, number 3 bus
drunk guys rambling on & on
always an adventure

300/366
just 3 weeks ago
I was still running in shorts
and now? not so much.

301/366 (overheard, on the bus)
“…I’m younger than my
niece…” “MAMA!” “…faces on TV
were getting smaller…”

whee! I’m in the 300s!

Blogiversary

Before I run out of day, just wanted to say HEY! It’s my 10-year blogiversary today. Here’s my first post, way back on October 26, twenty-aught-two.

This is where I’m supposed to insert my obligatory remark about being an old-timer or what blogging was like back in the day. So… I think it’s telling that I wrote that I was ‘finally’ starting a blog, i.e. in no way did I think I was a pioneer; I actually thought I was behind the curve. In retrospect, obviously not. And, on the other end of things, maybe a handful of the blogs I read back then are still active. There’s a lesson in that, I’m sure 😉

Thus to conclude this post, a quote from Dr. Seuss:

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…

—Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Oh, the places this blog could go…

Project 366 – Week 42

288/366
sunday afternoon,
the mall as amusement park
filled with families

289/366
hey, a man calls out
he’s just seen a coyote
running in the rain

290/366
someone underlined
the word ‘glistened,’ wrote in the
margin: shine brightly

291/366
on the left, rubble
and, for a moment, I am
disoriented

292/366
all you will want is
for your satisfactions to
outweigh your regrets

293/366
fingernail of moon
illuminating dark clouds
a Halloween sky

294/366
woken by sudden
pounding rainstorm pummeling
the roof with its fists

Photo Diary

This morning at The Happiness Project Gretchen Rubin wrote:

I wish I could tell my younger self: Make a photo diary before you leave this place! You think you won’t forget, but you will! Instead of taking photos of unusual sights, take a photo of the most usual sights. In the future, you’ll be a lot more interested in seeing a photo of your dorm-room closet or your laundromat than seeing a photo of the Louvre.

How about you? Do you ever wish you had photos from ordinary days in the past?

…and it’s been driving me nuts all day because I knew I’d written almost exactly the same thing once upon a time but I couldn’t find it—Snark Zone? no. AB article? no. Blog post? no. Random musings in some long-forgotten writing file? no. And then blam, just a few minutes ago, I realized what it was. First Communication paper I wrote back in 2005. Bingo, in the section titled “The Value of a Diary”:

Once, perusing an old photo album, I noticed I was spending more time looking at the background of the photos than the foreground, looking beyond the smiling faces to the bits and pieces of life accidentally captured in recording the “big” life moments. I suddenly felt that this record of the ordinary mundanity of life was significant—not only did it have an authenticity that the posed foreground did not, but it was important precisely because it would otherwise have been forgotten. Reading a diary is like noticing the background in old photos. It is a record of the things one did not fully notice when one was in the moment because they were just there.

Ok, now I can get back to work 🙂