"Sit, be still, let yourself become quiet, and follow your breath. Read a paragraph from something you study and let yourself steep in it."

"One way to sneak the Soul in past the Ego is through compassion."

~ from Baba Ram Dass (BabaRamDass @twitter)

Body impermanent like spring mist;
Mind insubstantial like empty sky;
Thoughts unestablished like breezes in space.
Think about these three points over and over.

~Godrakpa (1170-1249)

from Daily Zen

You should begin to build up confidence
and joy in your own richness.
That richness is the essence of generosity.
It is the sense of resourcefulness,
that you can deal with whatever is
around you and not feel poverty-stricken.

~Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987)

Because this journal is about inspiration, I feel it's appropriate to give myself a few short words of encouragement. November is marching forward, and reach 50k words is looking less and less likely, and certainly less enjoyable. I hate myself each moment that I'm not writing, and I dread each moment that I sit down to try again, feeling like I'm getting nowhere.

But just now, I asked myself, as many of the naysayers have done: why am I doing this if I hate it so much?

The answer is that I'm doing it because I have something I want to say, something inside me that can't be expressed any other way. And like any other birth, it's painful, but hopefully worthwhile in the end. I don't always hate it. I hate it when it's going poorly, but that's all a matter of perspective.

That being said, when I reach a place where I'm stuck, where the story so far seems to be nothing but a pile of rotting garbage, I should ask myself what it was that I wanted to say. Take a deep breath, or two, or five. Ignore all the places where I strayed from my path. Say something kind to myself. And then try again with fresh eyes.

first frost -
the willow cries
dead leaves

~A. Caouette

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, "Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines." Then the phantasm goes away.
You're back in the room.
I don't want to make any one fearful.
Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There's the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.

~Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”

~Jim Morrison

"We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life."
--William Osler

Moby was playing at the coffee shop (the one where I don't buy coffee, just my bagel, because I can get coffee for free at work). There was a cute coffee boy, and he smiled at me. While I waited for my order, I bobbed my head to the music, mouthing the words silently. Then the cute coffeegirl laughed at me and cute coffeeboy, who was also apparently singing along silently. "You're both singing along, that's great! I love this song!"

I laughed, took my bagel and left. I cooed "Aww, puppy!" at the cute dog looking at me from the window of a red hatchback.

Then, as I was leaving, I passed a teenage boy in a black, flowing trenchcoat and a black fedora, listening to an iPod. On a skateboard. Too cool. I think that he needs a hoverboard more than I do. Although I definitely need a hoverboard.

Tonight: Dirty Dancing marathon with a friend. Tomorrow: dinner with new friends, followed by Amanda Palmer with friends new and old. NaNoWriMo should be renamed "National Holy-Gods-My-Social-Life-is-Booming-Just-When-I'm-Supposed-to-be-Writing-a-Novel Month". Even though I'm doing my best to avoid my social life. Somehow that's just making more room for new things to come along. While this is almost definitely a good thing, I'm going to cry if I don't make my 50k by the end of November because I was too busy being a butterfly.

 "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
~Plutarch

"Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise."
~ Novalis

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstacy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create, so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating."
~ Pearl Buck

"My task I am trying to achieve is - by the power of the written word - to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more. And it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand - and perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
~Joseph Conrad

I'm behind on my word count already, but unlike past years, I'm not worried. After last year's miraculous accumulation of over 10,000 words in the last two days of writing (and still managing to finish a day ahead of schedule, if I remember correctly), I know that I am capable of wondrous things.

I also had a breakthrough last night. Up until now, I've been thinking of novels as more or less linear entities. I think this is because my main experience with novels is through reading them, and reading is a linear activity. You start at the beginning, you read through to the end, and then you stop. I knew at some level that writing doesn't need to be done linearly even if the end product is linear - you can write scenes as they come to you and rearrange them into the proper order later.

What I realized - fully grokked - last night is that at the draft stage, there doesn't even need to *be* a "proper order." I realized that I have complete freedom to write scenes that may not even be relevant to the story at hand if they reveal something to me about the characters or the setting or the plot that I can then later use when I revise or rewrite. I can write scenes in whatever order I like because the draft isn't a place for setting the timeline of the story. It's the place to play. It's the place where I can play. If I'm having trouble with the scene where the character is stranded in the middle of a backcountry road on a dreary day, I can skip back to her past and write about a fight she had with her lover, even if it doesn't make for good narrative flow.  And it doesn't make the novel BAD. It makes it exactly what it is: a draft.

This opens up so many possibilities for my writing that never quite clicked before. Now hopefully I'll be able to apply my newfound discovery as I attempt to catch up to the target word count of 13,336 by the end of the weekend. Ouch.

"[W]riters are at their least pretty, perhaps, when they are actually writing. Eyes redden, caffeine levels rise like geysers, fingernails go missing without trace. Given the amount of hair-tearing that goes on, it should be statistically provable that 85 percent of poets, say, are completely bald and that a formal meeting of the creative writing faculty at any major university should be indistinguishable from a box of free-range eggs. Yet poets are, and always have been, irretrievably hairy, a mystery that only Darwin could solve; it may be that they have evolved to the point of waking every morning with a full thatch, which is then ripped out in frustration over the course of the day, the last strands vanishing in the early evening, during a fruitless hunt for a word that rhymes with 'tulip' or 'Kalashnikov.'"

~ Anthony Lane

"There is a myth at large in the general population, easily quashable yet somehow allowed to persist, that writing comes smoothly, like gas from a pump, or at least unbidden, like tears. This is bull. No decent prose is ever dashed off, especially that which appears to be effortlessly dashing. Just as Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks had to rehearse their leaps and pratfalls, so grace on the page has to be earned with infinite sweat."

~ Anthony Lane, firm critic for the New Yorker

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I've posted the first excerpt from my novel-in-progress. You can read it at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/64698 (click on the "Novel Info" tab). I'll probably post more short sections there as the month progresses, so keep an eye on that space (I'll also announce any updates here, assuming I remember).

In honor of NaNoWriMo, Day 3 (current word count: 3883):

"There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."  ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."  ~Anaïs Nin

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."  ~Anton Chekhov

"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it."  ~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895

"Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."  ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

"Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."
~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one."  ~Baltasar Gracián