When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.How is everyone doing? Did you fall a cliff? Ride into the sunset? Are you playing musical chairs or clanging your cup on your prison bars? My writing schedule has gotten a little lumpy. More here, less there. I’m going to try to go back to the thirty minutes because I achieved consistency and consistency is a golden medal with a striped ribbon of blue and green. It’s enough to know you’re alive. We have until the end of the year to write a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter.
What’s it going to be?
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Betsy Lerner 
I write a “holiday letter” to insert with Christmas cards. Not very literary, but the best I could manage. Plan to update my Excel spreadsheet of subs and pubs and the “Hell, No’s” and make a new 2022 plan. Regrouping, enjoying some good books, new and old and managing to drag myself to the gym or walking everyday. Thanks for your missives! Xo
Got chapter one down on paper. Started on chapter two. Put together a working outline, although I’m not an outline kind of person. All in all, I’m grateful for the push. It’s nice to be heading into the new year with a new project in the works! I find myself sneaking into my office here and there throughout the day to add another few minutes to the 30+ I did before breakfast. Then I’m getting another 30+ before I go to bed. The laundry will still be there when I’m ready to do it! 😉
Im here more or less and glad to have these posts. Hoping to make some headway on revision despite the “holiday,” which looms unnecessarily large in my little universe. That half hour mantra will get me to look at my pages so that in January I won’t be a sniveling, lost mass of protoplasm when I try to restart. Thank you Betsy!
I am here and still doing the dirty thirty, super-sized.
I’m a bit stuck, thanks to historical facts. 😑
I love them, all of them. The little muckers I have created are flesh and blood, knocking the remote outta my hand, whispering in my ear when my head hits the pillow, fucking up my workflow during “real work” time. Yesterday I asked my other half to drive so I could continue typing from the passenger seat. An hour from home I looked up and smiled. “I just wrote a great scene,” I said. “And now I’m so nauseous.” I never knew car sickness could be so satisfying.
I’ve been plodding along and am now reworking the ending of my novel. I feel semi-confident I’ll have a not-too-shitty ms to send off to a few beta readers within a couple months.
Did I just jinx myself by writing that?
Naw. I love to hear confidence. “From you mouth to my ears.”
Oh geez. “From youR mouth to my ears.”
“What’s it going to be?”
It’s going to be whatever the heck it is I’m cooking up. Dr. Frankenstein, call on line 1 — stat! It has sentences, it has blocks of text paragraphical in appearance, but it has no chapters — it has unnumbered and unnamed scenes, numbered acts, and numbered parts. Parts is parts. It’s a novel, yes, but it’s a novel novel — bad habit of mine, this making of novel novels — and if it could be called anything, other than unreadable or unpublishable (or both), I might think to call it The World’s Longest Readers’ Theater Script.
I hope to have a semi-coherent essay draft by the end of the year. Fighting despair is good practice.
The tempo is a bit abated, but I still produce a few blog paragraphs most days. New Years I will start another 30/30… maybe a 30/31.
C.Don
I’ll have a story done. That will be an accomplishment.