Looks like I didn't post a single entry in December. I managed to, while writing a full 50,000 word novel in November.

December is different. It's like one month that lives in a different space than all the others. Christmas looms, foreshadowing and shaping the entire month, providing it with drive, build-up, climax, and those strange days where Christmas is over, but a new year hasn't yet begun.

And, of course, December is high season for professional home makers. All the family support activities that belong in our job descriptions move into high gear. Laundry and dusting take on new urgency, knowing you may need to travel or accept guests at any moment. Shopping reaches Olympic levels, avoiding or fighting crowds. We make extra efforts to think of our families, writing to them, buying gifts for them, making extra calls and planning visits. We prepare special, higher labor foods. We get out the good clothes, give them the extra attention they need, and wear them to parties. We may even host parties.

So January comes as a lull. The very first edge of it may hold a party. Then we coccoon, as the bad weather we ignored in pursuit of Christmas continues, without any such lively reason to forge out into it.

I look forward to doing some writing in January. 'Til then, may the new year bring all the wishes of your heart.

I won! I won! I won! I won!

Taking a break from the Nanowrimo novel. It has been absorbing most of my writing impulses this month. It's coming along well at the moment, only a few days left.

Last weekend, I went to Orycon, an annual science fiction convention in the Portland area. I've been attending it fairly regularly for more than 10 years. I know a lot of people there to talk to, and recognize more faces. It makes me very happy to be there, among the writers and costumes and filk musicians.

I took advantage of the internet lounge this year. A hard working fan named Christopher was running it, long hours for three days. He immediately recognized what I was talking about when I asked if he could set a computer to Dvorak for me. And he did it, no fuss. Then I discovered he had a Japanese language Tomoko Fuse origami box book with him, for folding purposes. He taught me his original stand for the Kawasaki Rose, too.

That's three hits on three of my personal quirks -- Dvorak keyboard layout, favorite origami author, and science fiction fan. What are the odds?

The community is one of the pleasures of Orycon. It's a real pleasure to be in the company of people who share my interests -- the only tribe I'd want would be organized by such interests -- and I'd scarcely expect children born there to grow up to share them. Some, perhaps, but not all.

Away from fandom, we build community out of courtesy and shared experiences as we go along. The bonds of family, with shared history and helping each other out, are often made in spite of differences of opinion rather than because of shared interests. Family is important and real. It's also often more work than fandom.

So, when recently I ran into these lyrics:

I love those dear hearts and gentle people
Who live in my home town
Because those dear hearts and gentle people
Will never, ever let you down
I feel so welcome, each time that I return
That my happy heart keeps laughing like a clown

(recorded by Dinah Shore)

They fit oddly on my memories of the town I grew up in.
It's true, we had a real community. People helped each other out, and they still do. With a population floating around 300, they find volunteers for fire and EMT work, and put on an annual festival. They build community buildings. And I find more people to talk about my interests with in a single weekend of Orycon than I did in an entire childhood there.

It's fandom that makes me feel welcome, and where my heart laughs just to be there. So, when Dinah sings,

I have a dream house I'll build there one day

I'm not dreaming of her "picket fence and rambling rose". I'm thinking of an apartment in a city with a good population of science fiction fans.

Just returned from a week's vacation. Spent several peaceful days in Arnold, in the mountains above Angel's Camp, California. Spent an evening and two exciting days in Las Vegas. Doug's parents were with us, their first exposure to megacasinos. We had a great time showing them around.

Spent more time than in either place on the road. There was ten hours driving from here to Angel's Camp and ten hours from there to Las Vegas, more or less.

Made some experiments with writing while someone else drove the car. It's workable when my health is otherwise good. Too little sleep, or poor quality food, and writing in a moving car threatens me with motion sickness.

And Las Vegas is very distracting. So I find myself several days behind on my Nanowrimo goals. For the first time, I need to better the 1750 words per day I set as my original goal in order to finish on time. I feel able to do it.

And that, in itself, is a huge benefit to this project.

Something else worth noting -- the two days I didn't write in Las Vegas, I developed story arcs for my characters Mary and Richard. They now have problems and resolutions within the overall problem of loss of human fertility. Even if none of the other characters develop arcs, this may be enough to give the book a novel like shape. And it means I now know what follows the scenes I had so far. At one point, I had written all the scenes I had ideas for, and had to push to the edge of my hazy preplanning. It's nice to have more vision ahead again, and this may be enough to carry me to 50,000 words.

I don't want to draw the conclusion that days of not-writing are good for story generation. I think that would be simplistic. I think I will instead draw the conclusions that:
A. Days of intensive writing prime my Muse
B. I can have faith that I will continue to come up with story.

I wish you all creativity.

Most of my writing energy is going into my NaNoWriMo novel. I'm over a quarter to the 50,000 word goal, and less than a quarter through the month.

It's working pretty well. Yesterday, I had two one hour appointments, lunch with Doug, and a three hour meeting. It was the first day I didn't meet my self-imposed goal of 1750 words per day. (All right, I also had one 1749 word day. Is it worth the quibble?)

I found myself rather frustrated, but when the evening meeting was over, I just couldn't push out another page. Nonetheless, I managed 1520 words, and though I went to bed tired and grumpy, I'm fairly happy about it now.

I may very well pass all other writers whose city includes "Bend" today.

So, time to stop blogging and get on with it!

Spent much of the day adding to my website. New areas of possible interest include an origami gallery and a quick page with a little info on National Novel Writing Month.

I enjoyed that work. It seems a bit of a push to go back to housework after all that brain sweat. May very likely put off vacuuming, dishes, and making cat food another day.

(Considers daily goals from list.) Hmm... I could still quite easily slip in some reading and yoga. That sounds like a plan. Yesterday, I took Grandma for a long drive to have lunch with Dad, so I'm good on that. Laundry, yes, I could do laundry, too. Aha, a plan!

All right, off to work then!

Still thinking about I. Asimov.

Asimov was my hero. My first favorite author, until I discovered Zelazny. I found many particles of my philosophy in him. I may very well owe him my concern about overpopulation, my reticence with swear words, and my feeling that humans of different nations have more in common than separates them. He was a great proponent of rational thought, and of equality for all. He was an optimist. And he was a very engaging writer.

I've had other heroes -- many of them writers. I admired Leslie Fish's strength and Heather Alexander's passion. I envied Kristi Yamaguchi's good-humored grace. I was floored by Tomoko Fuse's spatial brilliance, and Neil Gaiman seems superhumanly generous to his fans. To create, to create, to create -- and to have a virtue informing that creation -- that draws me.

I suspect these heroes all hold mirrors to parts of myself I feel lacking. I hope, looking back on my life, I will wish, as Asimov did, not to be someone else, but to be myself.

And to that end, I must continue creating myself as I would wish to be.

Is the novel dead?

Walking into any bookstore makes the question seem absurd. I was incredulous when Harold Bloom asserted it -- but then, I couldn't agree with much of his book The Western Canon. But now I've run into a very curious fact, and I'll have to give the whole question a rethinking.

I just finished I. Asimov. The man who produced over 450 books had trouble with novels! Towards the end of his life, he dreaded them. He wrote long history books in preference.

I have also had trouble with novels, but I thought it was personal. Someday, I hope, people will all treat each other with respect. I want humans to work together on wonderful projects like feeding everyone and building amazing bridges and exploring space and creating art and music. Oh, the things we could do if we weren't wasting our time fighting each other!

Ok, when someone is stealing others' abilities to live and create, stopping that someone is necessary. But I hope for a future when the human predators will be contained with only a small portion of human activity.

So, I dream of peace. A balance of tolerance and freedom that will allow each person the most choices and creativity consistent with allowing every other person the most choices and creativity as well.

Peace. But every novel has to have a conflict. How do you reconcile creating conflict, out of your pure imagination, and living with it for the year or more it takes to finish a novel, with working toward peace?

My other, lesser problem with novels is that they must end satisfyingly. Life doesn't do that. In some ways, it's part of the same problem. A novel's pattern includes conflict and resolution. Filling that pattern with a story, setting, and characters is artificial. And that shouldn't surprise me. The enterprise is fiction, after all -- art, creation, lies. No more ridiculous than crosswords requiring small numbered boxes or office buildings needing spaces people can walk through, really. It's what a novel is.

(Some have tried fiction without this structure. I haven't seen any yet that I like. So I wouldn't try to write that kind, and its existence has no relevance to my own concern about novels.)

The most useful perspective on the problem of writing about conflict while hoping for peace came from a study on how much stimulation people were comfortable with. It's a spectrum -- as I would have realized if I'd ever thought about whether people needed or wanted excitement. Some people need lots, some prefer very little.

So while we need excitement, let us work towards having novels, instead of wars.

I have signed up with National Novel Writing Month. It looks like fun. I'll keep you posted on my progress. I also added a page to my website for it. See that . I'm getting some practice on my weblink spelling, too.

Life is good today. I think I have avoided a cold that was slowing me down the last few days. I've completed a few tasks that had been hanging too long. And I have the prospect of adventures next month.

I like looking forward. In fact, my second likeliest personal motto (after In Paradox Truth) is The Future is My Country.

Have you tried the timeline exercises in Change Your Mind and Keep the Change by Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas? I recommend them. If you have tried them, you'll understand that my time line usually makes an extended s-curve with the future leading out to the right, the present running right to left back from it, and the past running back and left over my shoulder. Having gleaming pictures out there in the future cue really brightens my day. It takes eyes in the back of my head to see the gleaming pictures in the past. Of course, imaginatively I do have eyes in the back of my head.

So, the cheery and humorous web site of National Novel Writing Month put some attractive visions in my future cue. They make writing at least seven pages a day (based on my usual format of 250 words a page) for thirty days sound like fun. It would also jumpstart me back into fiction -- something that has lapsed since the car accident -- and many other valuable effects. So, I sent them the requested donation, and I've started considering possible scenarios for the novel. Wish me luck!

Just looking through my archives. Several of the links have gone bad. I was fairly happy with the remaining entries. Guess I'll have to start keeping copies.

I'm not devastated by the loss of my words. I kept a copy of my A Disciplined Life list, telling what I'd do daily and weekly if I did all the things I think I should and how long it would probably take me. I'm glad to have it. But there are words a plenty in the world, and the loss of a few of mine will likely make no difference to any significant number of people.

I ran into a woman who was my neighbor when I was growing up last night. It's a little strange to feel perspectives on me telescoping across the years. I was an extremely promising child, especially for the very small pond in which I grew up. I think I was the only National Merit Scholar ever from our high school. I won the county spelling contest several years running. At one point, I was the only student in the Talented and Gifted program.

Now, there's not much to make me stand out. People ask about my work. I don't, I say. Kids? No. I may go on to say I finished writing a novel last year. But it's not published. Largely, I'm an ordinary homemaker, (and not an excellent one at that).

Maybe my 15 minutes of fame are already over. Maybe I chose the quiet rewards of home rather than the public rewards of work. Maybe I'm still rebelling against the dozens of people who came up to me in that high potential childhood and suggested some job they thought I should do. Maybe my intellect just couldn't overcome the flaw of my lack of ambition. Maybe I'm still in the cocoon waiting to emerge as some glorious creature whose work will be known far and wide. Maybe it takes time to be something new or think new thoughts

Maybe I'm just too comfortable being ordinary.

Who knows? This morning I'm glad to exist in the eyes of a few friends and family, and not too concerned about possible disappearance in the view of the world.

But I will start keeping copies of this blog.

Now that was a bit of an adventure!

Heard a strange hissing and went to investigate. Not coming from the garage. Not coming from outside. Great Oa! It's the fridge!

Took a cautious sniff. No unpleasant smell. Then I stepped further into the kitchen. There was water streaming out from under the fridge! It was already a quarter inch deep on the kitchen floor, and starting to leak beneath the threshhold strip.

At the back left between the fridge and a cupboard, the line that feeds the icemaker was spraying out a snarling cone. I pulled the excess hose out -- no luck, the leak was only a few inches from the valve. I can't reach it. I know there's a shut off behind the fridge. I try to pull the fridge out. Shoes slipping in water, I can't budge the fridge. I grab both the kitchen towels and throw them to try and block the flood leaving the kitchen. They're barely a sop to it, so I run to the bathroom, and return with three full size towels, and manage to build a dam in a crescent extending into the dining room.

Now I have a moment's spare time. I call Doug. Voice mail. I call my mom's cell phone. Voice mail. I call her husband's office. Pleasant exchange with Julia, but he's not in. I call his cell phone. Larry answers on the fourth ring. I say I have a small emergency, the ice cube feeder line is leaking, and I can't move the fridge to stop it. He says he'll be right over. Good man.

I still have a bit before the towels overflow. I run to the garage -- no obvious turn off for the water there. Looks like all those valves feed the watering system.

I run to the curb, and lift the metal cover to look at the water meter. Meter, spiderwebs, live spider -- no visible valve. I run back to the kitchen.

The water has made it past my dam. I get another kitchen towel from the drawer, toss it on the floor, lift it to the sink, and squeeze it out. Again. Too slow, I'm losing ground. I take my largest bowl out of the cupboard, and start squeezing the towel into the bowl. It holds about two gallons. I fill it once, run to the sink, and empty it.

As I squat and sop and squeeze to fill the second bowl, I think about Loki and his wife and his snake from Sandman, and then I think about the little dutch boy and the dike. Empty that one. I think I'm gaining on the water a little.

Near the end of the fourth bowl, Larry arrives. I left the door ajar after running to the curb. He rings the bell, and I shout for him to come in. We pull out the fridge. A simple twist of the wrist, and the water stops.

We laugh.

He can't stay. I lean on the porch railing, a little breathless, and watch him go.

Then I go back upstairs and mop two more bowls of water off the floor. I wring out all the towels. The floor is pretty clean now.

Then I go blog.

I love paper.

I buy notebooks on impulse more often than candy bars. I've been known to spend hours swooning over online washi catalogs. I have a supply of greeting cards and stationery to cover all occasions. I keep two dozen different rolls of wrapping paper.

I have paper accessories, too. I have a guillotine cutter and a rolling cutter, and exacto knives, and scissors of course. I have two sizes of self-healing mat. I have templates and I know how to sew a simple book. I have two dozen pens on my desk alone, four dozen in the supplies cabinet, and another three dozen in useful locations around the house.

I even do things with paper. I have three dozen origami books, and I fold boxes and flowers and animals. I write on it. I divided my underwear drawer with paper. I occasionally paint or draw on it, and many of my favorite games have paper cards. I covered cans with it to make pen holders, and lined shelves with it. No wall paper though -- my husband used to live in Belgium, and he developed an allergy.

Really, I have a deep and satisfying relationship with paper. So beautiful, so versatile, so abundant.

You can look for me at the stationer's. I'll be wearing my papercuts as badges of honor.

What do you want the future to look like?

Not too long ago, I heard a radio interviewer ask a medical guest if science was developing a lot of devices that look like the ones we have seen in the movies and on television. The guest replied that many scientists follow science fiction, so even if the new devices don't do what the fictional ones do, they like to make them look like them.

I think it goes farther than that.

Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowlege." Certainly there are accidental discoveries. But most often, first a researcher or inventor imagines something they would like to do, and then works to find a way to do it. So, if there are already images of future devices in the scientist's head, he or she is that much more likely to try to make devices that look and act like them. So we find current developments reflecting the art design and imagination of the past. Thus, artists have a strong effect on the future.

Gene Roddenberry made a conscious effort to imagine and show the kind of future he would like to have. It is a future I would be glad to live in. I want to see humanity grow up, and I want life to be exciting without us fighting one another.

So if you haven't thought about what you want the future to be, you might consider Star Trek. And if you don't want that future, you'd better develop your own vision of the future!

Because our best chance for a good future, is to have images of good futures before us.

Listened for a while today to the OPB coverage of the US Senate debate about authorizing military force against Iraq. I found them more eloquent and polite than I expected. And both sides presented arguments that showed they held a perspective that made their choice the right one within their world view.

Strangely, I was reassured. The thought of people killing each other always makes me a little queasy. No matter if it's a national and declared war or a little street shooting or capital punishment, I'd like to think we could come up with better ways to resolve our differences.

But at least our representatives are debating. They are offering both sides of the issue, and trying to decide in a reasonably rational manner.

And, humanly, we haven't yet come up with a better way to run a nation.

At last I have repaired my template. Definitely slowed my interest in writing when I couldn't publish. Shouldn't have put it off so long.

Remember the car accident back in May? Yesterday I spent my first day without back pain since then. I felt like bouncing around like a Brownian molecule. It's great to be feeling better and getting more done.

It's so amazing that you can reach out your hand and change the world. I reorganized the fridge and freezer with plastic trays. It's pleasing to look inside and see order, and reach anything at the back easily. I'm enjoying the more intense color an extra two coats of paint created on our front door.

When you look around, most of what you see was shaped by humans. Plants grow, but people place them and tend them. Buildings rise in the thrilling slow dance of construction. Roads stretch, and packages travel along them.

Much as I love wild places, and know we will always need them, I love excellently furnished architecture more.

Gibbous is the most Lovecraftian phase of moon. It reminds one of gibbering gibbons and babboons, and other inhuman parodies of mankind. Unlike new, and crescent, and quarter, and half, and full, it seems incomplete and sinister, more defined by what it lacks than what it has.

And there is the gibbous moon in the morning sky, pale and corpse-like, brooding over the hazy in town in which I awoke from a nightmare.

Every so often, I consider getting myself A Disciplined Life.

These are the things I'd do every day, and some estimates of how long they'd take:

*Brush teeth twice, floss once (10 minutes, total, OK, I already do this.)
*Exercise -- yoga or walking or t'ai chi (30 minutes to an hour)
*Shower, dress, and other hygiene (40 minutes)
*Cook two meals (45 minutes to 2 hours)
*Eat (45 minutes to one and a half hours)
*Blog (20 minutes)
*Sleep (8 hours)
*Read (1 hour)
*Hobby or craft of the moment (30 minutes to an hour)
*Write fiction (1 to 2 hours)
*Wash dishes (30 minutes)
*Straighten the house (20 minutes)
*Deal with physical mail (20 minutes)
*Deal with email (15 minutes)
*Feed cats twice daily and clean litter once (15 minutes)

These are things that need to be done weekly:

*Laundry (two hours hands on work spread across 5 hours)
*Mow lawn and weed (one and a half hours)
*Visit Grandma (one and a half hours)
*Visit or write to other friends and family (one to two hours)
*Spend quality time with Doug (eight hours)
*Put out trash and recycling (half hour)
*Make cat food (forty-five minutes)
*Shop (three to four hours)
*Pay bills (four to six hours twice monthly, call it two hours weekly)

Possibly I'm forgetting things. On the short end, I add that up to 15 hours and 20 minutes daily, or 7 hours 20 minutes plus sleep. Another 20 hours and 15 minutes of weekly activities, divided by seven days, adds almost three hours per day, nearly 10 hours 15 minutes outside of sleep that I'd need to spend to get all these things done. And those were the short estimates!

I think I see why I'm not doing this.

Why do we follow celebrity romances?

The pictures and articles papering the checkout stands wouldn't be there if they didn't entice buyers. What makes the pairings and severings of people we've never met so interesting to so many?

Strangely enough, this is another question I've been considering for a while.

My earliest theory was that famous faces replaced the community gossip we would have known if we spent our lives in small stable communities. If the human mind is adapted to knowing a tribe well, following the relationships of neighbors throughout their lives, and using them as guides to forming their own relationships, perhaps as we began to live in large, frequently remixing communities, we sought other models to follow. Celebrities provided lives visible from wherever we might be living. The intensity of their images, shown larger than life and in the situations of heightened meaning and drama of their performances, replaced the more frequent but less interesting spectacle of having life long neighbors. Because they were in stories that compress time and images composed to have a greater impact, we gained the illusion of knowing them better than we do. And thus they felt like our neighbors. And thus they offered the relationship models we no longer had neighbors close enough and long enough to observe.

As evidence, I can only offer the dream I once had of being invited to a backyard barbecue with Tom and Nicole. I let myself in the garden gate. Nicole dished out the potato salad, and Tom tended the grill, while the kids dashed about within the picket fence. My mind had encoded Tom and Nicole as my neighbors.

My more recent theory is that we hunger for passion. The movies feed this hunger, with images of overwhelming, life transforming love. If we took a census of movie characters and compared it with a census of the United States, we would find that people in the movies are in vast disproportion more often young and in love -- especially the characters that matter, as evidenced by being more often onscreen and central to the stories. Our own lives feature youth and new love much less often. Our friends and acquaintances lead lives generally more calm than passionate. So we look to actors, these known faces who express emotion for a living, to see that someone, somewhere, is living the passion the movies have led us to expect.

Does the work of acting, inhabiting and letting show characters' thoughts and feelings, make one's own emotions more volatile and likely to be expressed? Or does the way we learn about celebrities' lives exaggerate their intensity? Or are our acquaintances veiling their passions?

I expect I'll have another theory another day. I feel one struggling to coalesce.

And both these theories are true. For some part of me, some part of the time, and so, I hope, for some of you.

My best wishes to all,
Anna Paradox

I've been reading other blogs today. Here is the Emerald City WorldCon Report. Also quite impressed with Wil Wheaton Dot Net. And of course, Neil Gaiman's journal at www.neilgaiman.com was my entry into the whole web journal world.

It's remarkable that people are pouring their vision onto the web. The easy words of the current moment have an authenticity even memory reshaped autobiography cannot have. Word by word, reality delivered from behind someone else's eyes. Other viewpoint's voices offering the experience of another world. The distinct islands that are individual personalities framing and overlaying my own universe. Generous, these pourings of self in words onto the web, making bridges in language.

My thanks to the other bloggers. Your truths are gifts.

The other day, just kidding around, someone asked me, "What is the meaning of life?"

Didn't get a chance to answer.

Surprisingly enough, I know.

The question is a little misleading. There is no one meaning of life for everyone. Making meaning is one of the things people do, and people make meaning out of different things: raising a family, loving and being loved, teaching children, singing songs, getting revenge, gaining freedom or equality or a decent standard of living, building bridges, serving your God, easing pain, winning races, buying a yacht, ending hunger, exploring space, healing minds, killing enemies, outdoing the Joneses, saving the redwoods, saving the whales, studying DNA, policing the streets, being famous, doing a good day's work, helping others, finally getting that promotion, reaching the top of the charts, getting high, making sexual conquests, dying bravely. People have made meaning out of all this and more.

Not that all these goals are equal.

Whatever other differences there may be, notice this. Some of these goals, if one person achieves them, no one else can. Some of these goals improve the lives of many, some only for a few, some for only the one who holds them and perhaps not even that one. Some can be achieved once and for all (and then what?), some always lead you farther on. Some leave a legacy, and some are evanescent.

So, if you find your life meaningless, find a goal and give it meaning. (I won't say choose a goal -- the heart has inclinations about what it can give meaning, and your effort will be much harder if you go against them.) Better it be one that is non-exclusive, improves more lives than your own, and leaves a legacy.

After all, isn't that the meaning of good works?