un deux trois

numere uno, many thanks indeed and a hearty shout-out to christa for plugging my blastocyte of a blog. i suppose it really has been 10 years (holy crap) since i met christa while we were both working for visart video in chapel hill, nc. maybe 12? she was a great friend to me and though since i moved away (to virginia [asinine move, blue], and then to the pacific northwest [much better]) our communications have been somewhat scattered, in the last several weeks we have reestablished semiregular contact. i am better off for it. plus she's helped me a lot with technical aspect of blogging. thanks, christa; it's great having you in my life, even transcontinentally.

el numero dos, i thought i'd share the fact that in november 2005 i took part in national novel writing month's writing marathon, and completed a (draft of a) 50,000-word novel between november 1 and november 30. i wrote a story about a man in his late 20s who works the graveyard shift in a hospital's medical records department (which i actually used to do, though not in my late 20s) and who has a fascination with visiting corpses in the hospital morgue. hilarities ensue, as they are wont to do. it was quite an experience, writing this story. kara was tremendously supportive of my efforts.

i wrote a lot in high school & college, poems and short stories, but it's really been years (since before i met christa!) since i could with any honesty consider myself a writer. (the story christa links in her blog is one i wrote senior year of college.) a story here, a poem there, but nothing to speak of. so it was great to feel like i was back.

i gave a copy of the story to my parents for christmas, because mom sometimes nudges me gently about my writing. they read the story (it's called "nocturnal dyspnea") and they say they liked it! (mom seemed to like the fact that it went easy on the violence & kinky sex.) i got emails from them this morning. (they live on the east coast.) it pleased me more than i thought it would to hear such positive things from them about my writing. parents; you know how it is.

anyway. i wrote the thing so dang fast in november, without much looking back and reading what i had written, and i haven't read the thing soup to nuts yet. (kara is slowly working her way through it; she's reading three or so other books at the same time.) but now i'm thinking, because of their emails, i should pore through it and rework it and find a publisher!

that's a dream, of course. (or is it?) but since that month-long experience, i have set a 2006 goal for myself. i'm not calling it a resolution. but the goal is to write a short story a month every month this year except for december, and do the 50,000-word marathon again in november. then i'll have 10 short stories and a novella and that makes up a book.

and then i'll see where i am. so far, though, my january story has been a dud. yesterday i allowed myself to scratch what i had written and start anew, because it was painfully derivative of, of all things, "fight club" (i haven't read it but i've seen the film). so, i admit, not an auspicious start. but my hopes do remain high.

y numera tres, my supervisor at my job is retiring, as of tomorrow. she does the qa and the training and she's leaving. thus far she has not been replaced. it will probably be weeks before someone else sits in her desk. so when i go back to work monday it'll be just me and one other transcriptionist in the little room. how strange it will be.

(i'll go into the little room/big room issue of the transcription department at a later date, maybe. maybe i won't, though, and let you all wonder. it's not really critical information for you to have. not like the rest of this stuff i'm typing.)