A Challenge I Can Almost Hope To Meet

Last November I wrote a short novel as part of National Novel Writing Month. It was extremely difficult. November, though I love it dearly, is a dark, wet, maudlin month and I was in weeks 6 – 10 of pregnancy so I was tired, belchy and unable to go longer than 20 minutes without eating a Mandarin orange. Two things helped me make myself finish the novel:
1) Monkeypants was doing it too and
2) The story needed to be written. I didn’t realize this until just a few weeks ago when I was walking with Trombone. I was considering how I had come to be comfortable with the idea of becoming a parent, trying to remember how I had moved past the fear of failure and the unknown to think that making a copy of myself was a good idea.

As I walked and considered, I suddenly remembered my novel’s hero – and, more relevantly, his mother.

It had taken a few days to write the background of the mother & father’s relationship and the early childhood of our hero. It was that easy writing where the story flows like juice from a fruit and you believe in the characters as people with their own lives, histories, motivations. But then, as I typed, things started turning. The mother became angry and resentful, mean to her husband and indifferent to her child. She decided to leave them both in a terrible, calculated way: when our hero is 6 or 7 years old, mom gets a job, keeps it a secret for a year, saves her money and then she tells her husband and son she’s leaving by getting a cake made at Safeway and having the bakery ice it with “I’m Leaving: Goodbye.” (yes, I believe there was actually an icing colon on the cake.)

I reached the end of my word quota for that day. All I could do was push my chair back from the desk and be appalled. Where the hell did that come from? How did she turn out so nasty? Who DOES that to her family? It really was, like all those people say, the character doing what the character wants, despite my best efforts to steer her in a different direction.

My subconscious fears about parenthood manifesting themselves? Aye aye and goodbye.

The novel may never see the light of day again, but if I had not written it, I think my pregnancy, birth experience, experience as a parent, all of it would have been different. Probably I would not have fostered a silent resentment for 7 years and then left (with a SAFEWAY CAKE my parting shot, I mean, The Fuck?) But things would have been – would be, now – different.

That being said, I don’t think there’s a novel in me this year. Plus I could not, I don’t think, type 3,000 words a day with just one hand at my disposal.

However, I came across a compromise thanks to Fussy.

National Blog Posting Month!

My Regional motto: A Post A Day or Black, Slimy Shame Will Follow.