Author: Maria Johnson

The Day After

An Open Letter to My NaNoWriMo Friends,

Congratulations to all of the winners! Wow, you guys are amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed racing with you and doing word count sprints. That was a lot of fun.

But it was also a lot of work.

The most important lesson I learned in this year’s National Novel Writing Month is that relationships with other writers are important. It’s a lonely business to face the glow of the monitor, alone, but that’s how writing gets done. It’s the before and after that can make or break us. To have someone say, c’mon, let’s go tackle 300 words in 10 minutes inspired me. To see word counts pop up in the Twitterfeed added a nice element of friendly competition that was less about competing and more about accomplishing.

I loved that. We’re all producing different things, but we’re doing it in a community. Kind of like real life outside the anonymity of social media. We’re real people living real lives away from the glow of the monitor.

Imagine what we can accomplish if we encourage each other in those other pursuits.

And to the other Nanos, like me, that came in under the 50K, well, congratulations to you, too! It’s a crazy race to finish that goal in 30 days and sometimes life gets a little in the way of meeting the word count. Let’s keep at it.

Notice that I didn’t congratulate anyone for finishing the novel. I’m careful to say word count and not finished novel because I think there are more than a few unfinished novels that have a great beginning, don’t y’all think? I do.

And then there’s that other thing: revision.

I’m going to make a note of all my writing buddies and check back in with you guys in six months. We should be done by then. Right?

Right!!!

food fail

Evidently John and I have been living rather austerely in the food department. This was brought to my attention by the kids. According to them, there is no food in the house.

Right.

Perhaps, there is no food in the house that they want to eat. You know, like wings, and chips, and cookies. They sniffed at the tasty braunschweiger. 🙂

Evidently all of yesterday’s tastiness is behind us.

(teehee. they don’t know where I hid the Oreos).

that stretch of quiet

There’s always a moment on Thanksgiving Day when suddenly, it’s absolutely quiet. It’s my favorite part of the holiday, and the moment, I think, when my heart grows three sizes at once.

In our family, Thanksgiving tends to be a pretty noisy day. For the last 22 years, there’s been a constant stream of little voices yelling and little feet running around. As each kid has moved up to the big table, little ones have come along to fill the spots. Dogs bark. Music is played. And if you know anything about Cuban families, the conversations get louder, and more animated, until everyone is speaking at once.

And then. Randomly. Silence.

You have to pay attention to see it coming because it doesn’t strike at a particular moment — it strikes on its own.

This year our Thanksgiving was simple, but lovely. Vicky stayed in California, opting to come for Christmas. We stayed at home, had some friends over for an early meal, and then settled into the rest of the day. It’s just the four of us, but there was plenty of noise. The dog barked. Music was played. Everyone spoke at once.

And then. Randomly. Silence.

It struck as I was washing dishes. The music playlist played out, and in the quiet that followed I could pick out the sounds from across the house. My husband snoring softly on the recliner, my son watching a movie, my daughter playing the guitar in another room. When I finished and turned off the water, I realized that in those brief moments Christy put away the guitar and Jonathan must have muted the movie to take a nap, too. Even the dog was asleep, and all I heard was the steady breathing of my family around me.

In that silence I found contentment.

And I am grateful, so grateful.

hilarious or disturbing?

I didn’t know parrots like to dance. I’ve been trying to teach Suki to sing so we can autotune her, but she’s still suspicious of my guitar. Anyway, more stupid pet tricks to follow.

avoidance post # 3

I should be writing.

Well, this counts, right? Thought I’d take a break from writing…to do more writing. Yeah. I’m weird that way. I just thought I’d share what Ive done in the last few hours.

  • wrote a caption for a picture of…a sock
  • created a new Pandora station (try Beny More if you want some AWESOME Cuban music)
  • wrote 3K words towards my remaining 20K (now 17K woohoo!)
  • made a tasty dinner of palomilla and rice (with lots of onions!)
  • folded some clothes (and put them away!)
  • made some tea (Earl Grey, with a tea kettle, not a replicator)

And finally, what prompted me to write this in the first place, I discovered that I have a racing stripe of gray hair right in the middle of my head. I know, weird, right?

Okay, look, I’m really fine with the salt and pepper thing I have going on. Really. I quit dying my hair years ago, and it has been at least one less thing I have to keep up with, so…whatever. Sure, every once in a while the cashier at Publix asks if I want the senior discount, but other than that I’ve never really thought too much about it.

Except now.

I have a gray racing strip in the middle of my head.

It starts right at my crown and if I brush my hair forward I look like Pepe Le Pew. Of course, I entertained myself by combing it in other directions. Because, you know, I’ve got those 17K words waiting for me.

Thought I’d share. Back to my regularly scheduled writing.

“everything is everything”

I happened to catch a snippet of a conversation this afternoon that got me thinking about a number of things. No, I wasn’t eaves-dropping — I told you I feel creepy about doing that, but when people are speaking in their outside voices near me, well, I tend to be able to hear what they are saying, right? So this conversation went the usual route of generic greetings:

first woman: How’s everything with you?

second woman: Oh, you know, everything is everything.

Whoa. Everything is everything? Everything is everything. I love it. I don’t know what it means, but I love it. I could call my friend Jeff and use my cultural void card, but somehow, I don’t think this is an American idiom. Still, it stayed with me because there was something familiar about it. So of course, I used it as part of the poetry unit I’m currently teaching. The students have to put together a presentation, and I did a little search for some samples. I found it!

It’s a line in a Bruce Springsteen song, post 9/11, that speaks to the missing in the aftermath. It’s a pretty amazing song:

Well, here’s the exceptional part. The students loved the video, but pointed me in the direction of another song, this one by Lauryn Hill > Perhaps, dear reader, not your style here? Probably not, but I invite you to broaden your horizons a bit:

My favorite part of the whole exercise? They drew the following conclusion: “everything is everything” is the bridge, in the present, between the first video which mourns the past, and the second video, which is hopeful about the future.

How ’bout that?