Brought Up Short

I was all set to come in here and update the crowd on our trip to Disneyland over Thanksgiving, or discuss the end-of-the-year madness around here, or even compare various versions of A Christmas Carol in the hopes of steering you toward the good ones, but a strange and sobering event has occured in the meantime that brought me up short, and it's been coloring my world for a couple of days now.

I'm not sure where to begin, because I don't know that I've really come to grips with it myself. During my time in the graduate creative writing program up at Eastern Washington University, I made a dear friend named Sherise. She was warm and generous and brilliant, and we shared a lot during those strange years. When the program ended and we went our ways, it turned out she lived only an hour away from Running Springs, down near Murietta. In fact, she was instrumental in getting me the first adjunct positions I had, setting up interviews and talking me up to the administrators at the schools she was part of--heck, for two of the jobs, I didn't even have to interview; they just said, "Oh, Sherise says you're great," and that was it. She also penned one of my recommendation letters that helped me get my current gig at SBVC.

Over the seven or so years since school, we've kept in touch off and on, getting together occasionally and chatting. She was probably the most devoted instructor I know and was a wizard in the classroom; I learned a lot from her. We fell somewhat out of touch in the last couple of years, but we still spoke occasionally or traded emails. Yesterday I realized it had been nearly a year since we had last spoken, so I sent off an email to check in and see how she and her new husband and her two kids were doing.

But the email bounced back, and when I went to the MSJC website to look up her office number, it wasn't listed. Curious, I dropped her name into Google to see if she had changed schools or gotten out of the teaching game.

What I found was a newspaper article detailing how Sherise had been killed in an automobile collision back in March. I stared at the article for a long time, trying to make it fit in my head, but it wouldn't. I had to find the memorial page describing her funeral and look through the picture gallery and read the guestbook comments to make myself believe this was the same woman I knew.

It felt utterly surreal. My friend--who had shared tea with me every day in her office across the hall from mine, who put me on a writing regimen because she believed in my work, who had sat next to me in endless writing workshops and had the study carrel next to mine in the library--was gone, and I had missed it totally.

I sent an email to the EWU folks who I'm still in contact with to let them know. My old roommate Garrett, wise in these things, said, "This is a good reminder for me of how removed we really are from people, even with e-mail. If any of my long-distance friends were to be in such an accident, there would be no reasonable way for me to know. And because I am so willing myself to let correspondences drag at a glacial pace, it would be literally months and months before I even suspected that something was off. Discovering an online obituary is a particularly harsh form of clarification." Indeed. Far-flung as we are, it's easy to go for a very long time in our insular little worlds. I'm terribly grateful for this little blog network we've got going, though I think I'll be more nervous now if someone doesn't post for a while. (Christina, you're okay, right? Jen?)

So say a prayer for her family during the first Christmas without her. And check in on an old friend this week; better, call up those you love and remind them of that fact. This is going to end up sounding like a Hallmark card if I'm not careful, but we sail through this life as though on untroubled waters when, in truth, we're on rough seas no matter what the horizon may look like from here. I thank God that Sherise knew Him and that she's not lost to us forever, but these losses, even if temporary, are a hard blow for those of us left here.

Be safe out there, kids.

Confessions

The month has done. It is finished. At least, that particular batch of 50,000 words is finished.

However, I must admit I bent the rules a bit.

See, Chris Baty, the guy who came up with this idea in the first place, is pretty insistent in his book No Plot? No Problem! and on the website that you come into the month with no prior writing (other than outlines and such). Half-finished manuscripts are verboten. To wit:

Do I have to start my novel from scratch on November 1?
Yes.

This sounds like a dumb, arbitrary rule, we know. But bringing a half-finished manuscript into NaNoWriMo all but guarantees a miserable month. You'll simply care about the characters and story too much to write with the gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush. Give yourself the gift of a clean slate, and you'll tap into realms of imagination and intuition that are out-of-reach when working on pre-existing manuscripts.

But I am a naughty monkey, and I abandoned this rule after the first day.

I had built a beautiful, grotesque, wonderful vision in my mind of the novel I would write but had purposefully not set anything down about it before the first day. That morning in the Ontario airport, I wrote about two pages of the strangest blather that had ever been carved in electrons via the medium of my fingers on the keyboard. It was weird, wild stuff. At the time, I was almost disgusted by how bizarre it was and began to despair.

Then came Bootcamp NW in Oregon with Skaggs, and a good deal of my time in prayer there was seeking after God, asking, "Do you want me to write? For Your sake, why? And if so, what?" I vowed to hold on like Jacob until I got something like an answer.

And I think I did. I'm pretty sure God tapped me on the shoulder and said, casually, "You're not done with the first one yet."

So this month has actually been comprised of me adding additional material to the Leaf story I began in March. I do not have two 50,000 word novels; I have one 100,000 word novel.

I've still felt kind of guilty, though, so I'm confessing here and now. Forgive me, Chris Baty! I still had a grand time, filled in a lot of gaps in the first draft, came up with a few more scenes that made me choke while I wrote them, and am more confident about the story than I ever was after the first time out. I'm still far from a finished product, and I don't know what will happen with this great, unwieldy, it-all-has-to-be-printed-out-cut-apart-and-reordered-again thing, but it's got some purpose, and that is a happiness.

And I've got some other stuff to write now, too.

So this was fun, but (Lord willing), it's only the beginning.

ps—Having gone back and read that chaotic madness of the first day, it turns out to be not as bad as I had thought. Really, there's some interesting stuff in there. So perhaps one day it may rise again...