What I’ve Learned this November

So Monday night I typed until my fingertips were sore and the little word counter on my writing application said “50,011″ and raced over to paste the text of my novel-shaped item into the official NaNoWriMo meter, whereupon it cheerily congratulated me on having written 49,850 words. I don’t know if that means I used a lot of hyphenated words that my counter counted as two and theirs as one, but… even though it was just after 1 a.m. and I had parent teacher conferences scheduled for 8:30 Tuesday morning, I figured I could punch out 150 more words, and ten bleary minutes later I was retrieving my proud little NaNoWriMo badge for my blog. I announced my count on Twitter, and went to bed, and I was grateful to wake up Tuesday to lots of 140...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 26, 2008 | 6 comments

Distortion

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened. (Amy Bloom) via the unreliable narrator I go to leave a comment and it mushrooms, explodes, this is all wrong, memory, I was going to claim, was the story we tell ourselves. Or maybe that is only what memory becomes, having had a moment when it was experienced like a replay and then encased it in words, words which bear the same resemblance to the experience that a tiny green square on a map does to a landscape filled with cows and a piling up of clouds on the horizon and buzzing and ticking insects and the smell of cut grass and the squelch of mud around boots and gathering heat so you feel a dribble of sweat trace down your...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 15, 2008 | 3 comments

Not forgotten

Dear blog, No, I haven’t forgotten you. I thought of trying to explain to you why I wept as I did Tuesday night and decided that it was like trying to explain to my kids why I was crying. I was grateful they didn’t have to understand. I mean, they got that it was historical and all, but I couldn’t explain to them that regardless of what our new president does or is able to do, I was crying because we live in a country where enough people believed in him and believed in a hopefulness I had held myself back from feeling to vote so overwhelmingly for him, I cried because he was able to stand up and give an almost-Bartlett-worthy speech and call for things like humility and service and sacrifice and I’m grateful to think that maybe such...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 6, 2008 | 4 comments