It’s snowing in Seattle (well, it was when I originally wrote this; it took some time to finish, thanks to a bout of post-Marathon writing blues, but modern sewcrates.com technology allows me to pre-date entries, and in that small way, rewrite history as I would prefer it happened). It feels strange saying that in my own voice. But there it is. The Marathon is officially over as of yesterday. As I said before it started, it’s not hard to write 50,000 words—well, let me correct that, it is hard in that the process is at times painful, but it is not difficult to complete. Anyone with a small amount of fortitude and decent typing skills can finish it. Telling a story (I’ll even leave off the “good” part), is a different matter.

I won’t dwell too much on this year’s still unnamed work. I think parts of it were good, and most of it, not surprisingly, was bad, particularly “the writing” and “the story,” neither of which seemed important during the Marathon. The best thing was I fell upon a decent writing process. Using my trusty Moleskine, I managed to take a few notes while writing about my plans for the story and even some ideas for the rewrite. This turned out to be rather effective, more so than the type-random-words-and-hope-something-happens strategy I employed last year.

I’m unsure what will happen with this year’s entry. As I was writing, I had thoughts of rewriting it after November (and, of course, the book tours and large money sacks that would result). I won’t know if I’ll return to Varis until I reread the mess probably sometime next month.