Tag: home stretch

An excerpt — and the home stretch.

I am in the home stretch with 4000 words left. I might hit the goal today; I might not. I will keep writing till at least the end of the month; it’s possible if I keep this rate up I’ll be close to the end of the book. I doubt I will, however — I’m traveling for a writers’ retreat over (American) Thanksgiving.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday (really rough). Our protagonist, Annie Smith,  has accepted an invitation to the intentional community Hearts are Mountains, built in northern Nevada in the Owyhee Desert, for fuel and water. There are a few mysteries that Annie doesn’t quite register:

I realized, as we went down another circular stairwell, that the underground building was a cylinder longer than it was wide. This being the central cylinder, the rooms appeared to be for collective use. Doors led to, I presumed, the other cylinders below the greenhouses. The layer below the great room served as a craft production room, and below that a root cellar and food storage area, with a full quarter of the area used for — 

“Water reclamation?” I asked, spying the tall cylindrical powered unit.

“Got it in one,” Daniel nodded. “We run the unit on skinky — generated outside, of course — supplemented with jatropha, which we grow in one of the domes, and castor, which we grow on the opposite side of the animals so they don’t eat the beans and die.” He indicated the large unit again. “One of the biggest hazards of living in underground units is the humidity level — too much humidity, believe it or not, makes underground living very unpleasant.”

“This is a pretty sophisticated setup,” I remarked, looking at concrete and metal. “Pardon me for asking, but doesn’t this setup require a lot of money?”

Daniel paused for a long moment. I wondered if I had broken a taboo among these people by mentioning money. “I’m sorry — “ I blurted out.

“No, really, it’s fine. It’s hard to explain our funding for this, however. We built this with seed money and sweat equity. Although the cement habitats are prefab, we installed them ourselves. This one goes about seventy feet into the ground, while the others — living spaces — go down about sixty. As you can tell, almost all our living spaces are underground; we had to do some deep digging, and I don’t know if the site has fully recovered after twenty years.”

We walked up three flights of circular stairs past the root cellar and the peaceful crafts room, where a man sat, spinning fiber — 

“Derek,” Daniel called out, “say hi to Annie. She’s having dinner with us.”

Derek, a pale man with incredibly long, pale hair, gave us a puzzled look and then smiled. “Hi, Annie,” he said and turned back to his work.

“Is he Kirsten’s brother?”

“Twins. They’re extremely rare among …” he let his voice trail off, and I wondered how the sentence would have ended.

“You don’t get visitors here often, do you?” I queried in what I suspected was a grave understatement.

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“Not too many people are into rock climbing these days,” Daniel shrugged.

Melancholy, foggy morning haiku —

A melancholy, foggy morning haiku —

I stepped into fog —
Perfect leaf laid on my porch,
memory of flame.

IF the above had happened, it would be a mystery — the verb should be “lay”, as in “the leaf sat there”, yet the verb I use here is “laid”, as in “someone put this on my porch”. I meant to do that, to go with the word “perfect”, to indicate that there’s a puzzle here. Why do I think the leaf was placed there? Who — or what — would have laid a leaf on my porch? Why? Does the poem hint at a mystical creature? Will I be disappointed if I figure out the the wind blew the leaf from three houses away and landed it, somehow perfectly, on my porch?

What is the significance of the perfect leaf? What flame is it a memory of? Does this influence who or what I think laid the leaf?

Haiku makes us want to feel, to ride along with the words, rather than think. Thinking is for later.

*************
Today, I start the home stretch of NaNo. I’m way ahead of the game, because I’m a little compulsive about numerical goals, and because gosh, this book has spent thirty years in my mind. I have 10,000 words left to win NaNo — but approximately 60,000 words left to finish the book. And one book half-done (Voyageurs), one three-chapter chunk I’m learning from editing (Voyageurs), and who knows what I can do with the others, knowing what I’ve learned lately.

And then I have searching for editors again.