National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) officially ended yesterday. I had signed up, and I got nearly 19,000 words written, out of a goal of 50,000 total words. Then work intervened — an unexpected memorial service, craziness in the office, too much to do generally. I’d come home, and all I wanted was to sit and do nothing. Writing a novel involved too much mental effort. So I stopped.

My older sister, Jean, had warned me:– November is a bad month in which to try NaNoWriMo. She did it in July. Maybe I’ll try again come July….

This past week, work slowed down enough that I actually had energy to engage in mental effort when I came home. But instead of resuming work on the abandoned novel, I found myself picking up an old book project that I had gotten stuck on about three years ago, and had filed away. I’m not going to say any more about this project, except to say that I finally seem to be getting somewhere with it.

Today I fianlly had time to get back to work on my National Novel Writing Month project. Prior to today, I had done nothing on it since November 8, and I had fallen far behind the 2,000-words-a-day pace I had promised myself.

Earlier today, I had almost decided to give up NaNoWriMo. It’s bad enough having a sermon churning around in my head all week; I don’t need a bad novel to be churning around in me as well.

But then I decided that I couldn’t just abandon the story; now I kind of want to know how it turns out in the end. In spite of my efforts to forget it, the story has been stewing in the back of my brain for the past week. I sat down and churned out about 3,500 words of the story this evening. Then I had to stop because bedtime rolled around; but I wasn’t ready to stop. I wonder if I’ll wind up dreaming about the story and the characters tonight, or if I’ll lie awake for an hour with the story turning around in my mind.

And now it’s far too late, and I have to go to an all-day meeting tomorrow, and a dinner meeting tomorrow night, and then church most of the day on Sunday, and when will I ever find the time to get back to the story?

Most of you probably think that what’s most important about October 31 is Hallowe’en. But around the world, thousands of people anxiously await the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, which begins at midnight tonight.

Yes, NaNoWriMo is the month when thousands of would-be authors sit down and churn out pages and pages of fiction. The idea is simple:– for people who have always wanted to write a novel, NaNoWriMo provides a structure for actually sitting down and writing that novel. The would-be novelist gets a deadline (November 30), a minimum number of words to write (50,000), and therefore a daily writing target (1,666 words a day). The point is not to produce a finished novel, but to get through the first draft of the novel.

Not everyone writes a novel, though. Last year, my older sister decided to produce a non-fiction book during NaNoWriMo. She figured non-fiction was harder to write than fiction, so she decided she only needed to write 45,000 words during NaNoWriMo — still enough prose to fill a book.

This year, I’ve decided to take on the NaNoWriMo challenge. I’m not exactly going to be writing a novel (no, I’m not going to tell you about my project here), but I do plan to write 50,000 words in all. I figure I have a one-in-two chance of actually reaching this goal. If things get crazy at work, I won’t be able to reach my goal. And writing 2,000 words a day is a stretch for me — my usual output is 500 words a day. On the other hand, I’ve already got 3,500 words written and November hasn’t even started yet.

Participating in NaNoWriMo is a stupid thing for me to do, really. My life is full enough as it is, I don’t need to write 1,666 words a day. But I’m thinking it’s maybe a kind of spiritual discipline, a kind of self-flagellation for a religious liberal. Or maybe it’s not a spiritual discipline at all, maybe it’s my descent from being blogging-maniakku into becoming a writing-otaku.

Yesterday I was reading up on fathers, in preparation for the sermon I’ll give for Father’s Day, this Sunday. I ran into too many sentimental stereotypes about fathers. I got sick of all the rhetoric around fatherhood and responsibility and family values. I got tired of the usual worn religious cliches about fathers and father-gods that have only a tangential relationship to the real live fathers I know. I made the mistake of rereading the story in Genesis where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Abraham’s son Isaac, which only served to raise my blood pressure.

Then I remembered the second section of Robert Kroetsch’s long poem “Seed Catalog,” a section which seems to me to break away from lots of the stereotypes about fathers; probably because it’s a documentary poem which presents a more-or-less accurate portrait of a real man. Concrete rather than abstract. It’s an odd text for a sermon, but sometimes you have to take your religious sources where you can find them….

My father was mad at the badger: the badger was digging holes in the potato patch, threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote). My father took the double-barreled shotgun out into the potato patch and waited.

Every time the badger stood up, it looked like a little man, come out of the ground. Why, my father asked himself — Why would so fine a fellow live below the ground? Just for the cool of the roots? The solace of dark tunnels? The blood of gophers?

My father couldn’t shoot the badger. He uncocked the shotgun, came back into the house in time for breakfast. The badger dug another hole. My father got mad again. They carried on like that all summer.

Love is an amplification
by doing/ over and over.

Love is a standing up
to the loaded gun.

Love is a burrowing.

One morning my father actually shot at the badger. He killed a magpie that was pecking away at a horse turd about fifty feet beyond and to the right of the spot where the badger had been standing.

A week later my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance. They eat robin’s eggs. They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers.

Just call me sure-shot,
my father added.