“Remoted” Workday 172 / Day 259 (Monday)

Write 50k words, get a winner badge.

This morning, at 7:20, after a month of writing, the 50,000 words target was reached in National Novel Writing Month, held each November. It could have been completed yesterday, but the last 500 words were saved for this morning to hit the full 30 days of writing. There were badges involved, including the “write for 30 days” badge, and I got them all except for the one for “hitting par” each day. Instead of a steady 1,667 words daily, my counts varied from 700 to 2,800.  The accomplishment of the feat was celebrated by ordering a commemorative coffee mug and a poster which will likely compound the "too much wall art stuffed in drawers" problem.

Usually, NaNoWriMo is on the periphery of my awareness for months. I participated in 2008 and one other time many computers and hard drives ago. There were several years where I did Blog Posting Month in November instead, but this year neither one was even a glimmer in my awareness. It was late October when a reference to NaNoWriMo popped up in my newsfeed in a post from a Facebook friend. Without allowing time to overthink it, the registration process was done.

Many writers arrive to November armed with a plan. Research has been done, and there is an idea of plot points and characters and a story arc. I was not one of these writers. I don’t even write fiction because I don’t have the kind of imagination to create worlds and develop characters and then come up with things up for them to say and do. The idea of writing dialogue is terrifying.

I love stats and charts!

By NaNoWriMo day one on November 1, there was already a groove going with 229 days of “Remoted” blog posts. That first day, the not-much-of-a-plan was to continue the daily blog and call it a grouping of short stories. After a few days it felt weird.

On the fourth day of the monthlong novel writing adventure, an ad for a two-week free trial of Ancestry.com popped into my feed and a new idea began to form. With the general idea of “Finding Minnie,” it seemed it would be fun to learn about my great-grandmother who came to America from Finland in 1893 and hopefully confirm some of the family tales Mummu told me about her family. Unfortunately, Mummu passed away in 2005 and can’t retell or correct the stories I wish I remembered better. There is only the vaguest recollection of a fragment of a detail remaining from many of Mummu’s stories. In other cases, much of what I thought I “knew” and remembered has been called into question or directly contradicted by recently acquired family ephemera and online government records.

The new plan meant researching the family tree from one to three hours after work and then writing “Remoted.” On weekday mornings, writing for NaNoWriMo took place from 6:45 to 8:00, but on non-work days the writing time had fewer limitations. Sometimes the evening research resulted in a head start on the morning writing. It’s been a great way to spend the dark early mornings and dark nights.

Finding dry facts, figures, addresses, and occupations of a person’s life is greatly facilitated by search engines and digitized records, but filling in the gaps with an actual life story is more difficult. Except for the occasional newspaper story, the day to day life of my family was not recorded. Mom and I have very few old family photos, and there are no journals or scrapbooks for reference. For decades, the only known photo of my great-grandmother Minnie was the one taken the day she became an American citizen in her 70s. Mom and I were surprised to learn her age in the photo, because she looks much older.

Now the task is to organize the big word dump. More research is needed to fill in the gaps. Editing is needed to clean things up and develop more focus. The easy part was in November. Now even more work needs to happen. Or, it could end up like the last couple times, sitting abandoned in a document file.