“The way you tell it, Aunt Elaine, her prediction came true and a week later, the cow died. Yeanda’s father did not want to share her telling with the townspeople, but her mother was religious and told the preacher of the town, a sexist little man who never saw a woman he didn’t want to belittle. Does any of this ring a bell, Aunt Elaine?” Lenny said.

“No, not a word of it, but it seems a good story. Please, do go on,” his aunt said.

“The preacher decried Yeanda, named her a witch, and generally brought upon the wrath of the town upon Yeanda, who had turned thirteen-years old the previous week. While the town wanted to burn her, her father saw the preacher and the townspeople for what they were: narrow-minded and scared of what they did not understand. He stole out of the village with Yeanda, taking his meager belongings and some pilfered money from the church. Yeanda’s father introduced her to the way of his family, which were old people, who lived off the land and understood how all of the gifts could be used, including the gift that Yeanda showed: the gift of foretelling,” Lenny said.

“Yeanda? I think I had an aunt named Yeanda. I met her years ago, I think. Many, many years ago when I was very young,” Aunt Elaine said.

“I don’t remember you telling me that,” Lenny said.

“I didn’t remember it until you started telling me, which is strange, since you told me I told you that story—this is all very confusing. I wish my brain worked like it had before. There are huge holes in my head and it’s frustrating when I fall down one,” his aunt said. She continued to look out the window, more forlorn than before.

“What do you remember about Yeanda?” Lenny said.

“Your grandmother introduced me to her. She was young, maybe in her twenties, and she looked sad. My grandmother was really interested in what she said, and repeated her words to me almost verbatim, like she was translating, even though she said the same words. It was strange,” his aunt said.

“When was this?” Lenny said.

“I’m not sure, Lenny. It was a long time ago, back when I was a child,” his aunt said and laughed. “Can you imagine that? Me a child. It seems so improbable.” His aunt turned in her chair and faced Lenny. She looked older today than yesterday. The skin on her face drooped further, her wrinkled neck skin reaching almost to her chest and swaying gently. Her eyes, usually as blue as the deep ocean in the Pacific, were filmy and gray. Lenny found it hard to imagine his aunt as young. In the past, he never would have had a problem with it, but something changed in her, something that went beyond her loss of memories.

“Please go on, kiddo. What became of Yeanda and her father?” his aunt said. Her voice was soft and Lenny was not sure if she would listen if he answered.

“There’s not much more to the story. Yeanda grew up and moved from village to village offering her services as a wise woman. Her father returned to his village and died a few years later. Yeanda warned him that it would happen, that he could stay with her and live a long time, but he could not bear leaving his wife alone any longer. It was not love—what his wife did to Yeanda he could never forgive—but he felt an obligation to her and the village,” Lenny said.

“The preacher—he died early, didn’t he?” his aunt said.

“Yes. You remember. That makes me very happy, aunt. The preacher died before Yeanda’s father returned to the village. He was burned alive in a fire intended for some of the woman in the village. And Yeanda must have known about it, but still did not want to return to her village. There were too many other things for her to do. It feels funny to tell you this story after you told it to me so many times,” Lenny said.

His aunt did not answer and he watched as her eyes closed. He studied her chest for a moment, ensuring that it rose and fell with her breathing, and then stood up quietly. He motioned for Todd to follow him to the door, and Todd put down his book and met Lenny at the front door. He held the door open as Lenny left.

“You’ll take care of her,” Lenny said.

“That’s why I’m here,” Todd said.

“I know you, Todd, or whatever your name is, but I feel that, for whatever reason, you have my aunt’s health as a concern. Before you get any ideas, I don’t know that, I just believe it—there’s a difference there that you would probably not understand. But trust me on this, there’s nothing more for you to worry about, whether you saw to that or it happened naturally, my aunt and me are not who we were before. I just want to know that you’ll take care of her,” Lenny said.

Todd tipped his glasses down his nose. His eyes sparkled in the late-day sun, a brilliant tan color speckled with black that seemed to go on forever. He pushed his sunglasses back up and nodded. “She’ll be safe with me, Lenny. And I wasn’t worried about you. I know what you had and I know you don’t want it back. We’re safe now,” the man said.

Lenny nodded and walked down the pathway that led away from his aunt’s house. He was glad that Todd had been honest. Ever since Lenny woke up, he knew what had happened and what he had had access to. Now that it was gone he was not sad, just disillusioned about what happened.

Lenny met Samantha at the library. She was spending many hours but did not tell Lenny what she was researching. He brought her coffee and sat down with her at the large wooden table near the back of the library. Opened books of different hefts covered the table. Lenny glanced at the titles but could not find any correlation between them. There were books on art, books on history, books on science. Samantha scribbled on a yellow legal pad, leaving notes in the opened pages of each book. She did not notice him sit down at the table and Lenny remained quiet, watching her read and write notes. Her red hair flopped in front of her eyes as she hunched over the books, and she tried to blow it away from her eyes. The hair would swing back and forth until it settled in same position and she would send another puff of air toward her hair. Lenny resisted leaning across the table and pushing her wisp of hair behind her hair.

She finished writing the notes in her current book, a book about the etymology of colors, and stood up to fetch another book. She noticed Lenny sitting there.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you come in,” Samantha said.

“I brought you some coffee,” Lenny said, pushing the cup across the table.

“Thanks,” Samantha said.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about? I’m all better now. Nothing you will say is going to shock me,” Lenny said.

“Have you spoken to your aunt today,” Samantha said.

“Yes. I just left her house a little while ago. She’s looking better,” Lenny said.

“You were always a terrible liar,” Samantha said.

Lenny grinned impishly. “You’re right. She’s not looking good. We talked about Yeanda again,” Lenny said.

“Did she tell you anything new?” Samantha said.

“Just that Yeanda is probably still alive,” Lenny said.

Samantha nodded. “I thought as much.”

“Well?” Lenny said.

“You know what I’m researching,” Samantha said.

“Have you found anything? Is there anything you can tell me about it, the pink sweater, that is. I shouldn’t be afraid to say its name anymore,” Lenny said.

“It was never about the sweater, Lenny. The sweater was just the vessel. It was always about the wielder, the user of the great powers,” Samantha said.

“So you know more about it? You know what it was, what I was supposed to do with it?” Lenny said.

“No, Lenny. So far I know very little. I know about the council, the men that were trying to keep it from you, keep it from your aunt. They were afraid of what you would do with it. In your case, they probably shouldn’t have been so afraid, but they don’t trust anyone with it,” Samantha said.

“And Yeanda?” Lenny said.

“It all comes back to Yeanda, Lenny. It was her power that was passed down through the generations. That’s what the council never understood. The power was passed down by blood, but would not stay with someone who was not worthy. But I’ve said too much. You know what it was but you don’t know what it could have done, Lenny. In the end, that was a good thing,” Samantha said.

“We used to talk, you know. You used to tell me what was going on, and not in these cryptic ways. There was a time—a time before any of this happened—when you would give me the play-by-play, blow-by-blow update each night about the minutiae of your day,” Lenny said.

“I remember, Lenny. That time has passed, you know. There are many things that I have to do—things I have to learn that have nothing to do with you, at least nothing to do with you anymore. I know you feel left out but—” Samantha said.

“But my aunt explained everything to you, and now can’t tell me what it is,” Lenny said

“Only partly, Lenny. She tried to tell you, she tried to show you, but you didn’t listen. You didn’t understand and you took advantage of what she was offering. That’s partly what happened to her,” Samantha said.

Lenny felt the anger bubbling up again inside of him. He still did not understand what his aunt expected of him, but he knew that whatever it was, he failed her. And now he was failing Samantha. “I know, Sam. I know. Is there anything I can do to help you? I don’t want what I lost—I never wanted it. But I do want to give back, to help you find whatever it is you’re looking for,” Lenny said.

“I’m just looking for old stories, Lenny, old stories in old books. All I need from you is your understanding. Coffee wouldn’t hurt either, Samantha said and picked up the cardboard cup. She smiled and went to the bookshelves. Lenny resisted following her. He sipped from his own coffee cup and studied the walls around the library. Children had decorated them with construction paper drawings. There did not appear a constant theme amongst them, just various stories that were waiting to be told, stories about fires and dinosaurs and families. He squinted at the pictures, trying to imagine who drew them and what they were like, but nothing came to him.

He looked at one particular picture drawn in crayon showing a young girl with orange hair with two lines coming out of her head, looking, if Lenny concentrated enough, like pigtails. The girl was small in the picture, the background was colored in white crayon, a difficult color to draw with because it was hard to see against the paper. The artist must have spent a lot of time coloring in the white background. The little girl wore a pink sweater that was too big for her. The pink was bright, brighter than anything else in the picture, almost fluorescent. She held her hand up and a finger pointed out toward the border of the picture. There was nothing there but the white background.

Lenny stood up to get a closer look at the picture. In the bottom-right corner was the girl’s name in capital letters. It took him a bit to figure out what she had written, since the artist was very young and was probably still learning to control the muscles in her hands that would enable her to write. The artist’s name was Yeanda.

Word count: 2,054

Words left: 0 (50,049)

Caffeination: tall mocha

Feeling: Happy and sad. I now feel that there was a story in there to be told. It would take a lot of work to go back and tell it, but I think I’ve left enough kernels in there to maybe find it one day. I’m excited to start working on a new project. I’ll hopefully post a musing soon to describe how I feel and what this has meant to me.

On to musing:

When it rains in Seattle, the ordinary driver loses his mind—and I’m not talking about a good craziness, I’m talking about tens of thousands of drivers who refuse to go over a self-imposed ten mile per hour speed limit, turning what would normally be a happy twenty-minute commute home into a torturous hour and forty-minute commute. Now, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, self—because that’s probably what most of you call yourself when you talk to yourself, or, at least, that’s what I call myself when I talk to myself in writing (I don’t actually talk to myself otherwise; I’m sane that way)—I thought it always rained in Seattle? That is a very astute thought—something I would expect of my reading public—but, regrettably, not a valid one. Just like Eskimos have more than a hundred words for snow, people in Seattle have more than a hundred words for rain. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Seattlians (I made up that word but I like how it sounds if not how it’s spelled) don’t actually have more than one word for rain. When they say rain they really mean a light drizzle that lasts for four months. When I, as a New Yorker, think of rain, I think of sheets of sideways water falling from the sky—what we called “buckets of rain” when I was a kid. You see, Seattlians don’t understand the notion of buckets of rain, and when it comes, as it did today, they get confused and begin driving all willy-nilly crazy-like, resulting in the aforementioned crazy Seattlian drivers.

Hi. I’m not sure if we’ve met. My name is David. It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these things, what I like to call a “musing,” mostly because I muse about different ideas I had during my day. Other times, I muse about story ideas or write actual stories. That’s where I’ve been for the month of November (up through today, that is). I’ve been participating in an event known as NaNoWriMo—and, no, I didn’t make up the capitalization or the horrible acronym (it is an acronym because you’re supposed to pronounce it: nano-rye-moe). The theory behind this was to write a novel-length story in the space of a month. I spoke about this before I started. What you’ve seen posted for the past twenty-three days (including this one, if you scroll up to the top—and, yes, I realize that my sad Blog technology does not allow me to post two entries in one day, which would have made this much easier to read. I had hopes of fixing that when I changed my scripting language, but I haven’t changed my scripting language or touched my server in months) was my 2,000-word entries that made up my 50,000 word story. Oh, I think I left that part out. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words. That’s right: 50,000 words. For those of you who don’t write much, it might not seem a lot. But I’ll put it like this: most essays in school were around 2,000 words (I’m making this example up—I don’t remember any assignments or, now that I think about it, just about anything from school, but I figured I’d throw out a number). Think of writing an assignment for school every day for 25 days. Of course, I could have written 1,667 words a day over the course of the entire month, but such an uneven number offends my delicate psyche.

As I was saying, NaNoWriMo—which, I forgot to tell you, stands for National November Writing Month—is a time when aspiring writers write and write and write in the hopes of claiming that they wrote a novel. Nobody says the novel has to be good or even tell a story. There are whole forums dedicated to how to cheat—perhaps cheat is too strong a word, we’ll say manipulate, since that is one of my favorite words and better describes their unethical actions—your way to 50,000 words. There have been suggestions, for example, that people transcribe parts of the Bible or plagiarize other’s work to meet the goal. NaNoWriMo is more about the process than the goal. That didn’t sound right. NaNoWriMo is more about the goal than the process. There, that sounded better. You set out at the beginning of November as a non-novel writing person, and by the last day of November (or thereabouts, depending on how fast you type or how much you write) you become a “novel writer,” or “one who has written a novel,” or simply “novel artist” (which is similar to a Subway sandwich artist without the unflattering green golf shirt). So, after completing my 50,000th word today, I join the ranks of novel artist, one who has completed a novel-length writing. Technically, 50,000 words only qualify as a novella, but I’m not too picky.

As I write this, I find it hard to resist pressing Alt-C, which reports on my word count. You see, most of my writing days consisted of pounding out words and then pressing Alt-C with the hopes of seeing the number grow. My mentality was simple: when I started writing each day, I was excited to see my word count climb slowly from 40 to 50 to around 250 words. That’s the beginning section. After 250, the output slowed considerably. I would fight for the next 100 or so words, and by the time I arrived at 500, I was ready to throw in the towel, give up my dreams, make a run for the border, eat Taco Bell—I’m sure you get the idea. Getting to a 1,000 was a big deal for me. Remember, my goal for each day was a minimum of 2,000 words. Now, when I talk numbers, I don’t want you to think that I was sacrificing the telling of a story to make my goal. The reason I don’t want you to think that is because thinking it is not sufficient. You have to know it deep down in your marrow. That’s the only way you can truly understand where I’m coming from. What this month was all about was writing words, the story came second to the words. But I’ll get to that in a bit. Once I hit 1,000 words during the day, I knew I was about halfway. I would write a couple of hundred more words and usually call it an afternoon. Most days, I broke up my writing, writing half at the end of work, and the other half after dinner when I got home. There were exceptions to this rule, the most notable one being when I was sick. There were three or so days when I felt the ice pick driving into my brain. On those headachy days I waited until evening to start writing. I never missed my goal, knock on wood—wait, I’m confused and need a ruling on this. If it already happened, i.e., I never missing my goal, do I have to knock on wood to assure it won’t happen in the past? This is a very confusing aspect of the old wives’ tale, better known as my Jewish mother’s evil influence on my fragile little mind.

I’m starting a new paragraph because that last one was becoming too long. I can’t resist putting in one of the things that I learned in the process of writing The Pink Sweater (that is the official name I came up for the story—if you read the story, you would see the incredible humor in the name. Okay, I made that part up as well. You would be sick of me typing the word sweater in any and all contexts). I was originally going to wait until I got past the mundane aspects of explaining what exactly I was doing and how I did it before I dived into the lessons learned from this experience, but since I spent too many sentences explaining that I was originally going to wait but now I’m going to tell you something, I figure it’s too late to back down now. The thing is (and there might always be a thing) the foremost lesson I learned during November is how to write as verbose as possible and say as little as possible. I would spend whole sections (we’re talking 2,000 word sections) repeating myself in every way possible in the hopes of meeting my goal for the day. This has enabled me to open my fingers up to the possibility of typing diarrhea, something I am not proud of but a skill that I hope will take me far in the world.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I had finished my first 1,200 words and I’m now home—properly fed, and sitting in my living room waiting to start writing again. My tradition, which I started a week into November, was to light the fire in my fireplace. This enabled me to stare at the pretty embers and listen to the crackles of the woods when my inspiration grew slim and I needed something distracting. The problem with writing in the dark with only the LCD screen to illuminate the room is that when I have nothing to say, there’s not much for me to look at to find distractions. The last eight hundred or so words would either come out in a blinding flash of inspiration, or I would drag out, kicking and screaming. By the time I arrived at 1,600 words, I knew the end was in sight and no matter what I wrote or how long it took, the last 300-400 words would be the easiest. There were some days when I had no idea where the story was going that I would actually read through what I had a written (a horrible faux pa—that pa sounds awfully wrong) and start increasing the girth of the writing by adding asides and descriptions and repetitions that furthered the goal in the sections I had already written earlier—remember, the goal was not the telling of a good story, but the padding of the word count. There were some days, especially in the beginning when I thought (silly me) that I had a real story to tell that people might enjoy reading, that I would write more than my allotted 2,000 words. This explains how I finished on the 23rd of November and not the 25th of November, which, if you were as much a math whiz as I am—that’s a 640 on my SAT math, in case you wanted to compare penis sizes—would be the date that a person who was on a strictly 2,000-words a day diet would finish.

That brings me to the story. If you can remember far back enough, you might remember a time when I spoke about my story—the revelations of the twists and turns, the pencil character drafts, the changes in narrator, the alteration from a story about a little girl and her disagreements with her mother to the beautiful, if poorly planned, story of a man with, yes, you guessed, it a pink sweater, the, well, the everything I thought I knew about my story before I started writing it. I thought I had a good synopsis. Then the first day came around. I wish to quote something I wrote in ink (that’s ink on my TabletPC, not ink on paper, which I haven’t used since abandoning my beloved but seriously flawed Moleskine—the flaw, since I don’t want to leave everyone hanging, is that it took way too much effort for me to transpose my words on that beautiful small book to electronic bits), (and before you ask, I’m not adding these quoted words because I’m trying to grow my word count—I finished my 50,000 words, and this has nothing to do with word count, even though by adding this aside I get to my 2,000 word goal, assuming I had such a goal, actually, my 1,991 word goal without editing, but who’s counting?):

.

After that beautiful introduction, I realized that I had erased the inked notes. Damn it. Those were good. Before I even started writing, actually, the day I was supposed to start writing, I freaked out. I stared at the empty page and thought about my story and began having second thoughts. I thought and scribbled notes about trying to write something completely unrelated to the story. I thought the whole idea of a magical pink sweater was, well, ridiculous (which was a thought that I continued to have over the next three weeks and a few days, much to my horribly powerful chagrin). I thought about going in an entirely new direction with new characters and new magic and new everything. After practicing some breathing exercises, I calmed myself down and decided to stick with what I knew: the beautifully synopsized and outlined The Pink Sweater. Of course, as it turns out, the joke was on me.

I spent NaNoWriMo learning important lessons. There are some authors who talk about how their characters tell their story. How, once they create a character and let it start “living” on the page, it takes over. Those characters take control of the story and take it in directions that the author never expected or would have thought of. Stephen King was my model for this type of author. In his wonderful book, On Writing, he spoke about the joy of watching his characters develop the story almost without his help (sometimes while he was in a drunken daze, after which he didn’t remember writing the story). I wanted some of that magic. I wanted to sit back and experience the movie that is my novel. I wanted more than anything else to enjoy the experience and revel in the plot twists and chaotic events that would define my story. What I came to realize, however, was that my mind didn’t work like that—or, at least, it didn’t work like that with what the planning I had done. I spend a lot of time thinking and talking (well, not many musings, but it’s an underlying theme) about original thought, a painful but important part of being an intelligent person. I discovered through this process that I must engage in a lot of this original thought before I attempt to put down a story. My characters may go in directions I did not plan, but I unless I set up the characters, give them a plot and a setting, and push them off in an original direction, they’ll meander around the outskirts of a poorly thought-out world and—well—do nothing.

That’s what I felt like during November. I realized that I had not spent the time planning and developing my character and plot enough to just write. Too much of my time I wasted on getting out words that in no way moved the plot forward or developed the characters. That’s not to say that it was all bad. There are a few days where I enjoyed writing and thought that I was indeed a writer, but those days were too few and far between. For my next magic trick, I will plan out my writing before I dive in. Now, I’m not talking about meta-writing, an exercise that, once Chuck identified it, I recognized was a waste of effort and words. What I need to do is synopsize my story in such a way I can describe it, talk it through. Once I have that and some character thumbnails, then, and only then, should I dive in.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to attempt to do this over the next few weeks and months and years as I continue to write. Oh, yes. That’s something I haven’t talked about yet. Another lesson I learned from NaNoWriMo was the importance of writing every single day. That’s three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for those that are counting. I haven’t decided how much writing I’m going to do, whether it will be 2,000 words a day, less, or more, but what I have decided is that if I want to write—and I do want to write, I really, really want to write even with this horrible experience behind me—then I have to start writing a lot. Tamer’s girlfriend (a professional writer—okay, a television/movie writer, but still someone who gets paid for writing) told him that she tries to write at least 5,000 words a day. I don’t think I’m ready for that, particularly with this whole “day job” thing that I still have to do, viz., don’t quit it, but I am ready for serious writing. Some of that writing will be editing, which is something that is discouraged during the month of November (if you’re not adding new words to the paper, then you’re not moving closer to your goal.) Obviously, to write well involves more than just puking words onto the page—I know, I know, how can I say that when that’s all I’ve been doing during November and, much worse, during the writing of this musing. That means that I’m going to write and write and write.

Finally, since this is becoming much longer than I had planned, I wanted to spend a few words thanking my mother, Doolies and Chuck for their support. My mother actually read all the words I wrote, and it was nice to know that there were people out there reading what I wrote. Thanks Mom!

Chuck is an easy one. After twisting his arm to convince him to join me in the Marathon, he became a willing and, at times, brilliant participant. He kicked my ass on every day (but three, I believe) in the daily word-count battles, but, more importantly, he wrote a really great story. I don’t give compliments unless I mean them, but Chuck’s story (which you can read here if you have the patience—it’s worth it) is really good. We sent many e-mails and messages to our respective websites during this month to give encouragement, bait, and progress reports. While it became apparent rather early that we were both going to succeed in our goal of 50,000 words, having him there to support me helped get me through many, many tough days. Thanks Chuck!

Now, on to Doolies: Doolies, like she does way too often, kept me sane during the whole writing process. There were many, many (yes, I’m allowed to use that phrase because I successfully graduated from the NaNoWriMo school of increase-your-word-count-by-any-means-necessary) days when I lost all hope and wanted to quit. She pushed me forward, egging me on, and telling me to find new voices and new storylines to keep it interesting enough for me to finish. She reminded me countless times the theme behind NaNoWriMo: it’s not about the quality, it’s about the quantity, stupid. She also stopped me from getting too down on myself. That’s another lesson I took away from this. My humor (if you can call it that) is mostly self-deprecating, i.e., I like making fun of myself. What I learned through this process and because of Doolies was that it’s important to keep a better attitude about my writing. I, regrettably, didn’t learn this until today, but I now realize that I should stop feeling bad about my writing, and just enjoy the process. If what I create is good, then that’s great. If not, then that’s great as well. It’s the journey (or road, if you will) that’s important. Doolies’s great—really, really great for me. Thanks Doolies!

Well, that wraps up this short synopsis of my time during November. I’m sure there are tons of things I didn’t say that I will say over the next few weeks and months as the whole Marathon ordeal sinks in and I see what came out of it, but that’s about all I can fit in today. I won’t promise you a part two because of my poor record. I’ll read through this and try to edit it, but it’s becoming late and I can’t promise much. What I will promise is new fiction or new edits every day. I’ll live with my audience of three and be happy that I have at least that.