Polar Vortex. Two words that should not be in my vocabulary. But it’s coming and the first step to acceptance is admission. So says someone. They should stand outside in the polar vortex in their underwear and start opening up about their feelings of blasts of cold air that should never be able to leave the Canadian borders.
I’m a horrible blogger. I used to blog. I have posts waiting for me to hit submit. But hitting submit puts them out there for you to see. And the anxieties built up inside me want to lock them in little compartments and not let them out.
But here I am, wrapping up the first week of November, writing here. No, I have nothing to say. I just wanted to check in. And hey, I just paid for the domain I’ve been talking about for the past year, so I’ll call it a house warming party for StellaSamuel.com Welcome. Or Welcome back. Whichever, grab a drink, put your feet up and participate.
It’s November. That means it’s NaNoWriMo! For those of you that thought I just reincarnated Mork, thank you, Robin Williams, I didn’t. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. Yep, my novel is done. The one that took years to complete. The one that’s not released yet. But it’s November, so I have a new one to write. Now, NaNoWriMo is about words. It’s about getting as many words down as a writer can before the end of the month. It’s not about pretty. My house can relate. The dog hair and back yard dirt that lingers on my floors, the dishwasher that begs to be wet every so often, the piles of papers that have settled in the dust on the top of my desk…None of it is pretty. But this novel should be. It’s evolved already. But it won’t be pretty until Spring. November will look a lot like this:
Name said, “Hey you, keep up the word count and make me do some cool shit in this one, Okay becuase that last one you wrote was filled with all kinds fo tears. Tears were falling here and thre and there were brains all over the palace.” Then Novelist turned to the character with the deep blue eyes and punched her in the face and told her to back the Eff up, it’s not her turn to by up on stage. While they bickered, a bear sat in the woods, a tree fell and no one heard a sound. Polar vortex came down from Canada, swallowed the United States and Stella cried.
See…spelling errors, things don’t yet make much sense, holes…and my own name. November is about development and getting ideas into scenes onto to paper. Or something that resembles paper but is really just a screen. Spring is for filling in all the holes and fixing all those errors. Oh and for figuring out what the hell I thought I may have been thinking way back in November.
However, Tim…is still Tim. For those of you that follow me on Facebook, you may know that I have a character in this novel based on someone I met. Someone that worked on my house for a few months. No, ladies, I couldn’t keep him here any longer. But he was inspiring. He was cute. Yes, he was. Yes, I’m married. No… not to him. But I think I’m still allowed to recognize cute, right? If not, then why do I bother to get dressed and put on make up each day? Yes.. you see my point. So, not only was Tim cute. He had style. No, he didn’t get up on my roof (get out of the gutter and come back here, I’m talking) in Armani suits. But he was confident. He carried himself with an air of security. He was a caring man. He was kind. He was gentle. After the first few days of watching him, I knew he had something. I just didn’t know what it was. He was a character. He had a story. So… I’m a writer. I’m a people watcher. If I see a character, I’m going to follow it up. So I asked him. A lot. I asked him a lot of questions. And get this – he told me. And I was right! He had something. He had a story. And he and some of his story is in my book.
What does this have to do with polar vortex and Colder Weather, you ask? Nothing. But there are dots and they will be connected.
Every day he showed up to work on my house for weeks, he’s set up his radio first. Always first. Music. Click click. Sometimes he’d listen to classic rock and sometimes country. When I started writing his character, I felt the country come out. This character, Tim, is the South. He’s Southern. He’s a jean wearing, water loving, oyster shucking Southern boy. And for some reason when I write his story, Zac Brown Band brings Tim to life for me. So here’s some Colder Weather for you…all the way from Colorado, where the weather is about to get polar!
I should get back to writing. It’s still November, isn’t it?