Community.

This word acts like smelling salts on me. Possibly I am scarred by too much time in Quaker environments, but whenever people start talking about Community, or about The (Something) Community, I feel sure that a lot of sentimentality, censoriousness, and identity politics is headed my way.

But I can’t seem to find a better word to describe what I was hauled into over the last couple of weeks.

I’m sure readers of this blog all read The Spanking Writers, the only daily non-pro spanking blog on the internet (to my knowledge). So you will all have read in March about the anthology of spanking stories they are putting together. I was flattered last winter to be asked to contribute. I was less enthused last week as the deadline approached.

Why did I agree to this project? I wondered gloomily. I almost passed on it in the first place, because I am busy, because my desire to write about kink has basically shriveled up and died, because I have begun to feel I just write the same thing over and over, and who wants to hear it anymore? But then I had a chat with myself. Self, I said, you are a writer and you propose to turn down publication because you feel ambivalent about kink and because you are busy? Writers don’t do that, self. Get real! So in the end I said yes to Abel and Haron and promised to have a story to them by the deadline, June 30.

Over the last few weeks, the subject of SW stories began to turn up in my twitter timeline. Other people were working on them, too. Other people were chasing this deadline. Other people thought their stories sucked. I wasn’t alone.

Add to this the fact that my story had been inspired by my visit to the Trinity College Library with Emma Jane in January. Add also the fact that Serenity offered to trade edits with me, and with her comments gave my story the structural sorting-out it so desperately needed. Add the excitement trickling into the Twitter feed as people got previews of each other’s pieces. Finally it dawned on me: this was a community activity, and I was having fun.

I know, alert the media.

So when I say I was hauled into the c-word, I mean that Haron and Abel, with their project, initiated the best of community building. They set people a task and let people get on with it. And even I—the girl who loves the sidelines, who has lost interest in blogging, who feels the deepest ambivalence about spanking, tgi, kink, and life itself—even I found myself engaged, boosted, enjoying trading stories, agonizing about deadlines, moaning about process, and knowing that Abel and Haron were reading our pieces and putting them all together almost as if we were part of a class, or a team, or a…

The word still sticks in my craw, but the thing itself is a blessing. So thanks to Abel and Haron, and to everyone else taking part. Sometimes you just need hauling into things.

I told the story to get a grip. Stories were just that, short prose compositions to be read in a single sitting with a beginning, middle and end. The story listened patiently, but then gave me that look–the look that said But I really really long to be a novel. It is my heart’s desire. I am passionate about my novel-hood and long only to develop myself over a hundred thousand words. Anything less will stifle my glorious potential.

Even though the story was looking at me in cliches, I realized I had a rebellion on my hands. Fear gripped me.

I consulted the twittisphere and received wise counsel from the likes of Adele Haze, who advised me to force it into a short form and then lie to it and say it might grow up to be a novel one day. I tried this. My story pretended cooperation, but I think it saw through my ruse and decided to persist secretly in its ambition. And so we contended, this story and I, on an off over the months between The Promise and now.

Procrastination and incomplete projects weigh heavily on my conscience. They inspire me to hate myself, and they suck my energy like vampires. I’m old enough to realize that the to-do list will never be empty, but I am nevertheless trying to clear the decks for NaNoWriMo, which begins Monday. Yes, I am doing it again. Yes, once again I propose to be a NaNo Rebel (don’t faint from surprise). I’m planning to continue and try to finish my current novel, roughly from the point I left it after last year’s NaNo. If you check back in a few days, hopefully the Nano widgets will be working and you’ll be able to monitor my progress.

All of which is a long way of arriving at this confession: I am not currently capable of making Mija’s story into a proper story. So instead of hang on to it indefinitely, I have decided to give it in its current fragmentary form. Naturally, this feels awful, but TL says it is salutary to submit to human limitations, and good preparation for a month of daily humiliation in pursuit of 50,000 crappy words.

Right, navel gazing over. National Novel Writing ahead. Non-novel below. Mija, sorry it isn’t quite as promised.

Georgie/George

© Casey Morgan 2010

The Baron poured out the brandy for himself and his visitor, drawing his own chair closer to the fire against the bitter winter evening.

“I suppose,” the visitor said after tasting the brandy with approval, “this is when we ought to discuss what we have so assiduously avoided discussing.”

A tension left the Baron, one only palpable in its departure. Delahay had not changed after all. “You’ve always been ruthless in the face of delicacy,” the Baron said.

“And you’ve always appreciated it,” Delahay replied. “Well, almost always.”

They shared a smile over the memory of their encounters, many years before, at school. The Baron (then known simply as Merlingham, or Basil to his intimates) had first encountered Paul Delahay at their Public School in Hampshire. Delahay was some five years the junior, and their relationship had its roots in that of prefect and “difficult” junior. Many years had passed since then, many experiences on both sides. Delahay’s physique displayed those years less plainly than the Baron’s. His ash-blond hair showed no signs of the gray which streaked through the Baron’s. Both men were fit, but Delahay’s figure cut the sportsman. While fate had been kinder to Delahay in looks, it had smiled more warmly on the Baron in fortune. Delahay’s ascendancy at university had not been followed by material success. He now found himself nearly forty, childless, widowed, and between appointments as a tutor. It had taken little to persuade him to accept an invitation to the Baron’s chateau in Switzerland to offer consultation on what the Baron termed “an awkward project,” no further explanation forthcoming.

“You remember my sister, Miranda?” the Baron essayed.

“How could I forget the delicious harpy?” Delahay revealed a smirk at the reference to one summer holiday spent at Merlingham Hall. The Baron had only been present for a week of it, but he was fairly confident Delahay had seduced Miranda (a year Delahay’s senior) as well as their brother, Tom (two years Delahay’s junior and his close associate at school).

Over three brandies, the Baron recounted Tom’s death on the autobahn; Miranda’s marriage, estrangement from the family, and disappearance at the hands of South American dictators; and, finally, the existence of a niece, whose sole relation the Baron had proved to be. This niece was in fact the awkward project. Orphaned for all intents and purposes, mis-educated, difficult, thirteen years of age.

Delahay’s eyes betrayed curiosity . “Mis-educated how?”

The Baron summarized the month since his niece had arrived. She was the product of ludicrous parents. They had carted her around the globe on a feverish career of Jellybyism, educating her (if indeed their methods merited the term, which he doubted) in a way that made the Baron want to fall upon them with fisticuffs, if they had been within thrashing distance. She spouted a disconnected jumble of history, politics, and folklore; she read voraciously and uncritically; she knew little of mathematics, something of modern languages, nothing of Latin or Greek, and while she cut a figure in verbal debate, her skills with pen and paper could most generously be described as primitive.

“She can’t write?”

“Not that one can decipher.”

Delahay’s face assumed the expression of a professional who knew his work: “In short, she is intelligent but undisciplined.”

“Quite.”

Delahay’s gaze drifted to the fire. “It does sound a desperate case,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am a tutor of boys.”

“Exclusively?”

Delahay hesitated. “She’s thirteen, you say?” The Baron nodded. “Girls that age belong with other girls, with schoolmistresses, or at least governesses. Not with tutors who specialize in preparing boys for Public School.”

“That’s the thing of it,” the Baron said. “The child has had a most unconventional upbringing. Conventional strategies are, I fear, useless.”

“Nevertheless,” Delahay began, but the Baron interrupted him in the blunt manner he once employed in the face of Delahay’s thirteen-year-old cheek:

“Do you imagine I haven’t tried all that?” the Baron demanded. He went on to narrate the disaster of his niece’s two-day attendance at the nearby school for young ladies, as well as the rapid departures of the governesses he had subsequently engaged. In the Baron’s untutored opinion, his niece was yet too uncivilized for female society. It was as much as he could do to keep her in a frock. He had come to the conclusion that nature ought not to be fought as much as engaged. And it was his fervent hope—his only hope—that Delahay might accept that engagement.

Delahay finished his brandy in silence, contemplating the Baron’s account. “My methods,” he said at last.

“Are quite traditional,” the Baron rejoined, “as my correspondents attest.”

“Correspondents?”

“You don’t imagine I’d attempt to engage a tutor I hadn’t thoroughly researched?”

“Ah.”

“I’d have thought, Delahay, that you would recall my thoroughness, if nothing else.”

Delahay had the grace to blush at the memory.

“I grant you a free hand,” the Baron continued. “If you’ve any qualms dealing directly with my niece, perhaps you will feel freer addressing yourself to my nephew.”

Delahay blinked, and continued to blush. “There’s a nephew as well?”

The Baron rang for a servant, who quickly appeared. “Bring Georgie here, please.” The servant bobbed and departed. The Baron refreshed their drinks. He said nothing further, but shortly the library door banged open, admitting a child flushed from the outdoors. The child looked to Delahay in the neighborhood of eleven. It wore wool trousers, layers of wool jumper, wet boots, as well as muffler, cap, and mittens covered in snow.

“Gracious, child, what do you call—”

“Rose said you wanted me at once,” the child interrupted.

“Have you only just returned?” the Baron asked, concerned. “I thought I made it clear you weren’t to be skiing in the dark.”

“It’s only just got dark,” the child retorted.

This was not quite true, but the Baron declined to pursue the matter. Instead he drew the dripping child over to the fire. “Say good evening, please, to Mr. Delahay.”

The child removed a snow-caked mitten and extended a cold, pink hand. “How do you do?” it inquired, with almost repugnant self-confidence.

“Quite well—”

“Delahay,” the Baron interrupted, “please meet my niece, Georgiana.”

read the rest of the story

casey in her boater hat this summer

As this blog has ground nearly to a halt, it probably has no lurkers left. But in case you are new or not-new and still lurking–a warm hello. Maybe today will be the day you leave a comment and delurk? While you’re thinking about that, here are some pictures of casey in some of her hats for you:

When I started this blog, in a half-blind urge to speak of the part of my lost marriage I couldn’t speak about with everyday people, I thought no one would want to read a blog with a subtitle like “whacking, bereavement, God.” Who besides me would want to read about all of those things, what’s more at the same time? Apparently, there are people who do, and many of those people have become real friends. Without those friends and this blog, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of this shrouded part of my character and my experience. To those friends–giant hugs.

If you’re a return or regular reader, you will no doubt be thinking: why doesn’t Casey blog more?! I’m not entirely sure, beyond the normal excuses of life getting in the way. But if I were to be really honest–and what are blogs for if not that kind of risk?–I suppose I could guess a couple of other reasons:

1. Bereavement. It continues. How many times can I write the same thing? I am wary of losing friends by turning into Casey-one-note. So increasingly I keep it to myself.
2. 

   winter uniform hat

   Ambivalence about The Scene. As you might have gathered, I’ve gone to a few parties in the last two years. I haven’t yet played with anyone else. I haven’t had a romantic date. I haven’t kissed anyone. As time goes by I wonder, increasingly, whether I ever will do any of those things. Many of my friends write about their play dates or parties, but I don’t want to write about these things. First, I think it would be churlish to write posts about liking but not liking a certain party. Ditto with writing about being depressed by prospects. If the Scene depresses me, it isn’t because there’s anything wrong with the parties or people at them, it’s because of a mismatch between what I need and what’s on offer. So, I don’t see how it’s productive to complain.

3. Anxiety about outing. Because I work in a sensitive sector, and because of the integral role church plays in my life, the prospect of being outed scares me. I’m quite cautious in my face-to-face encounters, and I try to be careful about what I write, but sometimes fear grips me, especially when I read about other people being outed by vindictive former friends/partners. This has made me self-conscious about some of the fiction I write because it strikes me as the most vulnerable part of this blog. I have no inherent qualms about the stories I write or the kinds of experiences that attract me, and I find them all fully compatible with professional integrity and with my fairly orthodox religious beliefs. My worry is that my interests are so open to misunderstanding. I mean, I live in a cosmopolitan city. If my employers or fellow parishioners were to read that I got up to a bit of kinky adult sex in my marriage, so what? But there is a lot in my writing that could be misinterpreted. So I worry.


casey's peruvian hat

4. Real world writing. I do write fiction in my regular life, and that has been waking up from bereaved coma and taking more of my time and attention over the last year. When I started this blog, I thought of it as a kind of CPR. The CPR has more or less worked, and while I do not feel like a whole or healthy person, I can’t say I have not been resuscitated.

In other news, I fell off my bike and broke my elbow last month. I’ve acquired a roommate/free lodger in my sister’s boyfriend, who fell victim to some shady real-estate maneuvers and found himself evicted with 4 hours’ notice last week. Before he moved in, I had visitors staying for six of the last ten weeks. Besides that, my garden has been very busy and demanding (until elbow broke), the various channels of work are very busy, and the current novel is moving itself to the front burner. So there you have it. Nothing too thrilling.

I think, on this day of appreciating friends known and unknown, I’ll leave you with a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It’s from the end of “Friendship”. I do like what he is saying about Christian friendship, but I also think it applies to all true friendship.

Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “you have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Back in the dark ages (1990′s), I had a website. Quite my-first-html, it contained stories Mark and I had written and was a front for the conceit of Home School (a small domestic boarding school RP and TL started together in “Ireland” after M moved here to Gotham to live with me). After a while, I let the site lapse, and eventually took it down. M and I weren’t part of any public scene, and while we had a few online friends, we knew even fewer of them in real life. So, eventually, to me at least, the site felt like a kind of exhibitionism that I no longer wanted to maintain. So it went away. Now, when I think about some of the things on that site, I cringe so much I could poke out my own eyeballs.

Fast forward to 2008/9 when personal websites had been supplanted largely by blogs. I knew this and had visited the occasional tgi blog, but the blogosphere can be overwhelming. Just contemplating the extent of it made me feel I might hyperventilate. Also, people I knew who blogged (non-kinky) seemed to be entirely consumed by it. Since, in my regular life, I also write, I was protective of my creative energy. I had for several years been trying to pare back hobbies so that I could actually complete large creative projects. I didn’t have time for blogging. If I started up with that, when would I have time to do my real writing?

Eight months after becoming a widow, however, my real writing wasn’t happening. It, like so much in me, felt dead. So in that sense, I had nothing to lose starting a blog. It might, I reasoned, even serve as a kind of CPR. I was done being a taskmaster to myself. I was done with Should’s. I was done berating myself for not Accomplishing enough. If writing a few tgi blog posts distracted me briefly from the crushing desolation of a widowed January, then hallelujah. If it kept my creative heart from stopping, even barely, then Thanks be to God.

And this is what it did. Sometime last spring, the flash fiction began. Several months of that was the key factor, I think, in enabling me to return to my regular writing last November during NaNoWriMo. In that way, and in so many others, my resuscitation commenced. It is far from complete–far from it–but I think it is safe to say it is under way.

And besides regularly and sincerely thanking God for this (atheist friends, avert your eyes), I also feel a profound gratitude to all of you, and to the other friends I have made, online and off, over the course of this year. You have read my gushy outpourings. You have borne witness, sometimes silently, sometimes not, but always palpably, to the love and to the suffering. You have patiently offered hugs and encouragement, over and over. You have not criticized.

To all of you, to each of you: thanks.

You will have noticed by now that, in violation of convention, I do not have a blog-roll. Blog-rolls are great. They are how people find like-minded friends in the dizzying blogosphere. They help drive traffic to other sites you like. However, they have always stressed me out, and because of this, I have avoided adding one. The stress comes from two sides: when I see myself on someone else’s blog-roll I feel: Yay! They like me! and I feel part of an In crowd. When I am not on someone’s blog-roll I feel the opposite: they don’t like me! Or, they don’t know about me! I am a pariah. Neither of these attitudes is edifying. So, to try to detach from them, and to avoid the stress of worrying about whom to include on mine, and whom I would be offending by excluding, I have worked with a different rubric, which is to link to people within posts, when I’m responding to something they have written, or when they join in a writing game with me. Anyone who writes with me gets a link, and I always comment on the stories that come out of challenges I’ve posted (so long as I’m aware of them).

However, today is a day for celebration, not of me and my superhuman brilliance at having blogged for a year, lol, but of the friends who have made this year worth living. Therefore, in lieu of a blog-roll, here is a page written in partial appreciation for all of the wonderful bloggers I feel so lucky to know. You can also find it via the friends tab in the header.

Again–to friends known and unknown–thank you.

The challenge: write 250-500 words (fiction or non-fiction, who will know?) about a secret. Maybe your piece will reveal the secret. Maybe it won’t. Click on one of the three cards below to get your wildcard, which will be a person, place or thing for you to include in your story. You only get one pick, though, so you’ve got to take what you get.

Stories due before bedtime Sunday. Post your link in comments here or on Twitter @caseydamnmorgan. Have fun!

Write 250-500 words (fiction or non-fiction, who will know?) about a secret. Maybe your piece will reveal the secret. Maybe it won’t. Pick one of the three cards below (click on it) to get your wildcard, which will be a person, place or thing for you to include in your story. You only get one pick, though, so you’ve got to take what you get. Peeking at the other cards is cheating, kids, and we all know what that gets you. (Hint: whack-whack-whack)

Stories due before bedtime Sunday. Post your link in comments here or on Twitter @caseydamnmorgan. Have fun!

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

long winter, long path

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.

In this dream I was playing Harry Potter (looking like Dan Radcliffe in move #2). Ron, Hermione, and I were leaving a grocery store by way of a maze the staff had created for us. At the exit/checkout they told me/Harry that I needed a bag–they held up a plastic grocery bag and indicated that it needed to contain a pile of shit, like dog shit, but presumably my shit. Unable to exit, the three of us returned to the center of the maze to see Snape (calm down, girls). The idea was that I had ducked out on a caning from him, but if I took the caning, he would apply some magic purple goo to the cane marks afterwards and this would produce the shit I needed to exit the maze. Snape would Win the encounter because he would get to cane me, which he considered I richly deserved, but I would accept it because then I’d be able to get out of the maze.

We approached him in the dim place at the center of the maze. He was high above us on a dias. The darkness was  illuminated by a big, hot stage spotlight, which someone was adjusting to focus on me. I uttered a humble submission, but he couldn’t hear me (or pretended not to) up there. I mumbled something else. Same problem. Finally I said: Sir, I’m willing to accept the whack now. He came down and proceeded to deal with me, surprisingly not acting scornful or gloating or condescending or sneering, but formal and perhaps underneath it–through his ceremony and care–a bit respectful. He touched my robe and indicated that I should remove it. I handed it to Ron and Hermione. Now I was wearing a red tartan skirt, jumper, and knee-socks (and at this point the character sort of mixed with casey).

Snape gestured for me to bend over so that my friends and the spotlight were behind me. I bent over, nervous now, and suddenly shy of exposing myself. Sir, I said meekly, does Hermione have to…? He ignored my modesty and lifted up my skirt, embarrassing me further that Hermione would see my pants. I was bent over, hands on knees/toes, scared, very scared. I collected myself and practiced the detachment necessary, even recalling to myself advice some of my characters had given each other. I heard the swish and inhaled.

It hurt, and shocked me. I tried not to clench. The second one came shortly, and to my surprise didn’t hurt as much. The third, less still. What was he playing at? This was supposed to be an epic, revenge whacking and take me to my absolute limit or beyond. Strokes 4, 5, and 6 came all together, like light taps. But then the kicker: through Snape’s magic, they began to burn intensely.

Ah, this was where the suffering would begin! He had only been lulling me into a false sense of security. He might even begin to narrate the rest of the whacking with his loathing, ironic voice: You see, Potter, your confidence has been misplaced. It is false, in this and everything. You do not control the pain allocated to you, and your mental machinations are nothing but vanity–whack–vanity.

This didn’t happen, however. After the six, he let me up, not even especially sore. He treated me with that restrained, unspoken affection, that deep and powerful if unexpressed love that a teacher can have for a student, the gentleness beneath the severity, the paternal longing, the ultimate benevolence beneath the temporary sternness, the loving father beneath the stern God of Israel.

A few points of reflection: 1) the blending of me with Harry Potter; 2) the logic of the dream, that to be allowed out of the maze, you need a bag of your own shit, to be produced by the process of taking the cane; 3) Snape’s multifaceted personality, ranging from hostile authority to benevolent mentor; 4) the mildness of the whacking itself.

On an immediate level, this dream appeared to be about writing, though I suppose you could extrapolate beyond that. What is required to escape the maze? Shit. Your own shit. And entwined with this is the act of submitting to a hostile authority, one you had escaped previously by your own wits. Now, though, you must return to the dark center of the maze and voluntarily submit to that which you had evaded. Submit to an enemy. Submit, perhaps, to boredom, bad writing, meaningless, even death itself. You have to let Snape do what he will with you, even if your clever friends can see your underpants. All this in the service not of something beautiful, but in a bag of excrement, which is the only exit fee accepted here.

This dream also suggests that the hostile authority is only hostile because of my arrogance and evasion, and when I at last submit to him, confessing that I deserve his chastisement, he doesn’t hurt me so very much. In fact, he radiates a secret and unspoken love for me.

Finally, in this dream I am playing not myself or casey or even Hermione, with whom I generally identify, but Harry, the hero, the one who winds up doing great things even though he is very flawed and very human.

I guess we are all the main actors of our own stories. Excrement and suffering are certainly needed to exit the maze of a creative venture. And Snape, I know for a fact that I am not alone in saying I would submit to his hostile authority any day. Any day! If only writing were as simple as all that.

The short answer to what Casey has been up to is NaNoWriMo. Don’t run away just yet. Rest assured this is not one of those posts that will go on at length about how Stressful, how Angst-ridden, how Amazing-Super-Awesome, how Challenging this Incredible-Amazing-Super-Awesome-Herculean-Insane-Really-Insane month was. No offense to any NaNo pals, but even when I feel that way myself, reading about it from other people makes me secretly want to slap them. So, I won’t whitter on with the breathless, flushed, nauseatingly healthy glow of the physically fit after a bracing run. Screw those people (again, no offense to the fit amongst you).

As you might have gathered from the NaNo widgets, I did in fact “win”. That’s right, kids, I am a Winner. Please remind me of that when I feel like a Loser, which is pretty much all the time. When M and I used to play, often we would have to time-slip a scene. For instance, maybe the board said Marky was to report to TL at 7.30 pm for a Report, but then when 7.30 came around, M wasn’t in the right headspace, and since I wasn’t willing to have TL take the rap for screwing around with kids’ Reports, we just time-slipped the scene, i.e. did it another time, but said it was the original time. When you’ve got a constant fluid narrative going on—some of it actually acted out, some of it just discussed with each other—the time slip is an indispensable tool for keeping play and life in balance.  So (this was not actually a non-sequitur) if the actual completion of the 50,000 words was every so slightly time-slipped by a few hours (but less than 12), because we found it shockingly difficult to pull the kind of late hours we used to pull, well, then, the Office of Letters and Light* neither knew nor minded. Anyway, since we were officially NaNo rebels, writing the 50K on a pre-existing project, the little time-slip fit right in. And the point is that we wrote that many words, new words, and more importantly, we finished the key plot arc in the book. Win. *rotates finger ironically*

Depression, anyone? I was talking to my spiritual director about the annoying neutrality that has ensued. I ought to feel at the very least grateful because I wrote more on my real writing in November than I wrote since M died. I wrote a piece of narrative I’ve been thinking and wondering about for more than ten years. I’ve been praying for help getting that writing started again, injecting some life there, if possible. And, look, it happened. So why does it feel like it’s nothing?

My spiritual director is wont to draw upon literature for illustration (whether he does this always or just with me, I don’t know), and his view was that a) feelings at the end of things were unpredictable, and b) not being able to value the valuable was, simply put, a maneuver of evil upon us when we are vulnerable. He recalled The Screwtape Letters, which I adore. In them Lewis so dramatically and comprehensibly helps us imagine the way evil works upon us. I love Lewis’s imagining of Satan as a kind of drab, far-removed civil servant jeffe, Screwtape. The hapless Wormwood is coached on his almost medical mission viz. his Patient (i.e. the person he is attempting to corrupt). Screwtape and Wormwood are not inspiring murder, rape, fornication, theft, genocide, destruction, or anything particularly dramatic, but instead they work upon the Patient by gently suggesting things to him that lead him by hairs away from what is true and ultimately good.

by Moro Rogers http://kambodiahotel.blogspot.com/

So here am I, 50K later, and do I feel satisfaction at good work? Do I even feel gratitude? No, I don’t, because the Wormwoods of this world are whispering in my brain: It’s not that big of a deal. You’ve done that before, so big whoop. 50,000 horrible words are nothing to be proud of. You may have written all that, but it’s not a book, and since you remain entirely confused, will probably never become one, especially as the one person you could rely upon for good advice is dead. And anyway, even if you did finish it, it will just go the way of the last one—nowhere.

Recognizing this as a form of evil helps, I think. Self-doubts, perhaps, ought to be analyzed, disputed, argued around. Evil, however, must simply be turned from. And so I turn. It hasn’t brought an onrushing of joy. I’m not sure I’m capable, yet, of such an emotion. But it has allowed me to start rereading the drek that was so unbelievably bad it felt that my fingers should fall off from typing it. And, you guessed it, the drek is not as bad as it seemed at the time. In fact, it’s good in places. I say this not to brag, but to encourage those of you who wrote some or all of the 50K, but are so embarrassed by your efforts that you can’t bear to go back and read it. Something happens to work written that fast. It may not be brilliant, and large swaths of it may call for laughter, but when you go back to it, the writing will contain things you have no memory of putting there. So, if you don’t reread, you can’t enjoy them. Message: man up and read the shit. If you are thinking to yourself, Well, it’s fine for Casey to say that, she’s a good writer, but I’m not, I have one word for you: Screwtape.

Those of you who aren’t into all this writing business, normal service will resume… at least I hope it will.

* The HQ of NaNoWriMo

• allegiance
  
• minor bump
  
• dock-leaf
  

Spread the word, and have fun!

p.s. As previously discussed, I may not be able to write for 3f this week myself, due to NaNoWriMo, but if I don’t, I’ll link to other 3F writers here by the end of Saturday. Write on, kids!