"Winner!"

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Well, I did it. Wrote 50 000+ words towards a novel. Here's a summary of my odyssey. Not the novel, just me, trying to write it.

For the first 6500 words, I plodded through a memoire of my early childhood experiences. I mean really plodded. I had no idea what my story was about, not having planned ahead. I was hoping that the muse would drop by while I was writing, as she sometimes does. Not that I believe in the muse, other than as a useful metaphor for whatever that psychological shift is that moves me from the mundane into something, well, inspired. (Ack!)

I switched back and forth between first and third person, sometimes I was speaking and sometimes my character “Katie.” Eventually I got fed up with the whole thing, which was boring and going nowhere. And did I say "plodding"?

So I introduced "Josie," who I think is an older incarnation of "Katie," but I don't know for sure. I just had to do something different. So I had Josie go grocery shopping. Cool, eh? She grocery-shopped for 1500 words.

I got side-tracked a little on American election day, November 4, and wrote a few words about momentous history.

On November 7, I finally told a tale, entirely imaginary, about my parents, circa 1940. Oh - this was what I was going to be writing about! The story wrote itself till about the 19,000 word mark, when suddenly Beat and Bert, Peggy's parents, appeared from Brighton, 1918. They stuck around for 3000 words, then left.

On November 16, I wrote a 3000 word story about a Ceylonese butterfly catcher. His story served a purpose in the larger story that was taking shape. Now I was getting somewhere! And I'd hit 25,000 words.

At this point, I dried up for a couple of days. I experienced the same thing I've experienced writing poetry: after a particularly creative burst, I'm spent. Anything I try fails. It's a pattern I wish didn't happen; a writer has to be able to write day after day, right?

I finally found my novel at the 35,000 word mark. Chris Baty, the originator of the novel-in-a-month idea, says that 35,000 words is a turning point, but I don't think he meant that the novelist wouldn't know what the novel was until that point. At 35,000 words, I began to really write about Ed, my father who has been dead almost thirty years.

I became obsessed with World War II history, particularly the history of the South East Asia Command and the bomber squadrons based in Ceylon. I combed through Ed's pilot's log, which he kept meticulously until 1955, and matched his missions with the official records and with anecdotes I found online. I made contact with a couple of people interested in the subject, including a man in England who had been on Ed's squadron.

My story - which might become a novel - tries to get inside the head of a twenty-five-year-old man (a kid, really, if the war hadn't made him grow up in a hurry) who must fly out deadly missions almost daily, who watches his comrades die, who drops bombs on an unseen enemy. It tries to answer the questions I've always had and which he and so many other veterans of that war have refused to answer.

It has ended up being a very emotional experience for me, and I find myself grieving the loss of my father, something I never did when he died.

I will post an excerpt here shortly, assuming I find something in the mess worth excerpting. Why not, eh? It might be the only light of day the thing ever sees.



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