44,000 words to go....

At a word count of 6032, three days into Nanowrimo, I'm a little ahead of the daily goal. So far, it hasn't been hard to churn out 2k words a day. I haven't had to resort to any of the tricks posted on the forums, like eliminating contractions, piling on the adverbs and foregoing pronouns. Even so, I'm strictly following the no editing rule and letting anything and everything pour out, including details in direct contradiction to something I wrote a few hundred words back. I'm also enjoying the vast expanse of real estate available in a novel--we'll call it the Montana of fiction forms, unlike my usual realm, the short story, which feels more like a New York City Studio apartment. I think the general idea of nanowrimo is true; there will be bits worth keeping in December, even though it will be a lot of work to revise.

This may change, but I'm setting the novel in the past, in the era of my own childhood, which has me plumbing random memories and finding strange bonding opportunities. My father and I discussed what might have happened to his Uncle Johnny's finger after it was chopped off by the machinery at the Chevy plant, a memory that probably came into my head after reading the wonderful scene from Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex set in the Ford plant in 20's Detroit:

Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft....

This phrase is repeated, more than once in the scene, creating a poetic effect and giving the reader a sense of the monotony and the pressure auto workers faced. My grandfather and his brother worked at Chevy, not Ford, a couple of Great Lakes to the east, and a couple of decades later, but I'm sure it was just like that for them. How sad, my father said, that they're gone, so many people are gone. I wish I'd gotten to know my grandfather and his brother as people. My grandfather was always teasing us, occasionally scolding us, but there was something superficial about our relationship. My grandmother talked more, and not just because my grandfather had a laryngectomy and couldn't talk much after that. He would cover his trach with his finger and squeak out a few words when he had to. We didn't see Uncle Johnny often; to me he was little more than a kindly old man with a stump finger that was both fascinating and disgusting at the same time. He used to pretend his missing finger got stuck in my brother's nose, like he was picking it, or maybe it was his own nose. If he did it to me, I don't remember.

I also don't remember my first day of high school, not even a flash. I remember odd things; South's confederate flag (we were North). There was an East, a modern (at the time) building comprised of classrooms without walls. I think they may have had sliding doors, but I've never been inside. OJ Simpson's house was around the corner from East High--that was before Rockingham. I do remember driving past it, in the car with my family. I also remember looking for Carl Sagan's house in college, walking around with friends on the suspension bridge. I could never tell which house it was, since it was always dark out when we did this. Carl Sagan is now gone too...I wish I'd gotten to know him better as well.

Learning about nature, another random memory. The boy next door caught a frog, or possibly a toad, and put it in a cool whip container with grass to eat. We all went swimming, and when we got out of the pool, the amphibian was dead, dried up. We laughed hysterically, without a hint of sympathy or remorse. The thing looked so rubbery, so flat and black. I'm sure you had to be there to get the joke, and you had to be there at the age ten or so (kids, don't try this at home). One of the moms on our street predicted that this boy would end up in jail (not because of the frog). With novelistic irony, he, a cop now in our suburb, got the call after she hung herself last year.

Here's hoping my novel is more interesting than my blog...I plan to plod--and plot, groan--on