Just Like Glass

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Maybe that’s enough.

I know I say this every year, but it’s been a busy summer. It’s been too busy, which is also something I say every year at this time, when the sun starts dipping behind the hill across the lake before we’ve finished supper, and we need a fire to take the chill off in the mornings, and I wake up in the middle of a windy night because acorns are landing on the metal roof and rattling all the way down.

This is when I realize that I haven’t gotten around to so many of the things that made summer summer when I was a child and free of responsibilities. I haven’t spent enough time on the deck, or on the screened porch, or in a canoe. I haven’t had even one afternoon of lying in the hammock for hours with a book, dozing between chapters, pulling lazily on a rope tied to a nearby tree to set myself rocking, but not too fast.

And it’s not just the hallmarks of a lazy summer that I regret not having gotten around to. There’s that list, titled “2024 Camp Projects” and optimistically jotted down in the spring—that magical time when the world seems new and the energy boundless and all things possible. As we’ve tidied up for company, it has moved from the table to the bookcase to the desk more times than I can count. Very few of the items on the list have even been started, and even fewer have been completed and crossed off—not “Trim bushes in boat beach,” nor “Weave new seats for canoe,” nor even “Figure out why pump runs so much—new pressure tank needed?”

Next spring, in my annual surge of optimism, I’ll draw a line through “2024,” retitle the list “2025 Camp Projects,” and add a few more tasks. One or two may even get done, although probably not that one about the pressure tank; that’s been on the list for a few summers already now.

I brought my new electric chainsaw from home to camp to trim the bushes. I ordered a roll of webbing to replace the canoe seats. I am a great beginner of projects, but not much of a finisher.

In my desk drawers and the files on my computer, I have what probably amounts to about a hundred unfinished writing projects, everything from notes scribbled down in a fit of inspiration to about 75 percent of a novel and maybe half of a short story collection. Every once in a while, I pull something out, reread it, and am pleasantly surprised to find that it’s not half bad, but that’s about as far as I usually get.

Sixteen years ago, in the early spring—season of perpetual optimism—I emailed my siblings:

“I’m working on a new writing project, and I’m going to need lots of help from all of you. I’ve started writing a kind of memoir, written in two voices, mine and Mom’s…”

There were several other email exchanges, in 2013, 2015, 2021, and, finally, on March 25, 2024:

“I’m on vacation this week! It’s the first time in five years that I’ve taken a whole week off at once, and I’m determined to use it to make some real progress on wrapping up the first draft of Just Like Glass. Twenty years since Mom died seems like long enough to get this thing done!”

It is to my siblings’ credit that, each time I emailed them with more questions and renewed enthusiasm for the project, they responded with thoughtful answers, rather than eye-rolls. None of them pointed out that they had heard that tired story before.

Maybe it was that week-long kick-start in March that did it. Maybe it was the 20-year anniversary of my mom’s death in April. Maybe it was remembering my sister-in-law Peggy’s admonition, only a few months before her own passing, that I really needed to get that book finished while they were all still here to read it.

Whatever the motivation was, it got me up early every morning to spend a couple of hours writing in a quiet house. By the time we moved to camp in late May, I was down to just two short chapters to finish.

I might have gotten stalled again. I might have opted for more time on the deck or the porch with a book, or in the hammock or the canoe. But much of early June was chilly and damp, and when I was fortunate enough to have an entire unscheduled weekend to myself at camp, I planted my butt in a chair and I got it done. Finished.

Sure, we’ve had some chilly nights, and the days are noticeably shorter, but summer isn’t quite over yet. We’ll put the hammock away before the next rain, and it may be too cool for the screened porch, but there will still be some afternoons when I’ll find a spot of sun on the deck and sit with my thoughts.

I’ll think about all the things I didn’t do enough of this summer, and vow to do more of them next year. I’ll hear the water pump cycle on and off and fret a bit about getting a new pressure tank. I’ll start to feel that old September, end-of-summer melancholy creeping in. Then I’ll remember that this summer I finished something I started more than sixteen years ago. Something that is really important to me: my first book. Maybe that’s enough.

Shameless self-promotion: Just Like Glass will be published on November 21 by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society, and is available to preorder now.

Click here to pre-order Just Like Glass.

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Writing is the only thing…

Sometime during the first year after my mom’s death in 2004, I conceived the idea for Just Like Glass, a book about what was undoubtedly the hardest, most momentous year of her life. Sixteen years ago, I actually started writing it.

In those sixteen years, I have written about my mom many times, in emails to my siblings, in essays and blog posts, and, when I could find the time and solitude and motivation, in Just Like Glass, which has grown, slowly, into a book-length, rewarding, but still unfinished project.

Over the years I have found a thousand reasons to put off completing it, from laziness, distractibility, and writer’s block, to a sudden overpowering (and unusual) urge to do laundry or clean the refrigerator.  

Yesterday was Gloria Steinem’s 90th birthday, and when I saw this quote from her, it hit me hard. I am taking this week off from work, with the intention of making real, measurable, satisfying progress on Just Like Glass. If it goes well, I plan to take another week later in the spring, or maybe two, and try to actually finish it.

Today I’m rerunning this piece, which I wrote and posted on my previous blog platform back in 2010. Full disclosure: The novel I was writing when I made this post fourteen years ago isn’t finished either. But when I ran across this essay and reread it this morning for the first time in a long time, it reminded me of how much I can get done, if only I make up my mind to do it.

And this week, I’m making up my mind to do it.  

March 1, 2010

50,000 words in 30 days

Over the past 30 days, I wrote a 50,000-word novel. I’m not saying it’s a good novel, or a finished novel. I’m not even saying that it’s the sort of novel that a year of rewriting, revising, and redeeming could whip into any sort of presentable shape.

But the point is, it’s a novel, it’s 50,000 words, and I wrote it. In 30 days.

Writing a novel in 30 days was not, of course, an idea that originated with me. There’s a guy named Chris Baty out in California who came up with it. Back in 1999, he got together with 20 friends who had each decided, for no very sane reason, that they would like to write a novel in a month. Since then, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, has spiraled out of control: in 2009, there were upwards of 200,000 participants, with about one in five actually completing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

February is not National Novel Writing Month. (It’s too short, for one thing, which is why I had to borrow two days from January to get started.) The official National Novel Writing Month is November. I briefly considered signing up last fall and trying to write my novel then, but November is not a good month for me–too much pre-holiday stress, and then there’s Thanksgiving to deal with at the end of the month. (Obviously, Chris Baty does not have the weighty responsibility of producing six kinds of pie to interfere with his November noveling.)

February, on the other hand, was looking pretty good. If you’re not a cold-weather person, February in Maine doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, and I’m usually perfectly happy to seek indoor pursuits in the winter anyway. Will was headed back to school at the end of January after five weeks at home, meaning that I would be sharing the house with only one person who might become resentful if I gave up cooking, grocery shopping, and speaking in full sentences for a month. And I had a week of vacation smack in the middle of February, and no plans for it.

So, with equal measures of excitement and trepidation, I decided to plunge in. By starting on January 30th and finishing on February 28th, I figured I would get ten weekend days, plus five vacation days, so I wouldn’t be working at my real job on half of my allotted 30 days. That made the whole thing sound surprisingly doable. If I could just write 3,000 words a day on each of those 15 days, I’d barely have to write at all on work days. Piece of cake, right?

It turns out that writing 3,000 words a day can be far easier than you’d think. On the other hand, writing 3,000 words a day can be far harder than you’d think. It all depends on the day. In the beginning, I actually thought I might “put words in the bank” by writing in the evening after working all day, or by writing more than 3,000 words on some days.

I did write in the evenings, and I did write about 4,000 words on one of my early weekend days, which turned out to be a really good thing when I started to slow down toward the end of the month. (Or maybe the only reason I started to slow down toward the end of the month was that I had those extra words in the bank. Hmmm.) But one of the many things I discovered during my month of nearly non-stop noveling is that 3,000 words in a single day is just about my personal limit. After that, I start looking for excuses to take breaks. Wrote a page? Check Facebook. Wrote 100 words? Check my email for the tenth time in an hour. Wrote a paragraph? Make some hot cocoa. Wrote a sentence (or a fragment thereof)? Get a snack. You can see where this is going.

However, I did write nearly half of my 50,000 words during the nine-day period that included my vacation and its two book-end weekends. Having that vacation occur during Week 3 of the process turned out to be nearly perfect timing, since by then the story was well enough developed to allow me to (occasionally) reach my peak rate of about 900 words an hour. Most of the time, though, I slogged along at a much slower pace, more like 400-500 words per hour.

In the end, I estimate that I spent about 100 hours writing during that 30-day period, not including frequent breaks for stretching, snacking, and maintaining my sanity. One hundred hours to produce 50,000 words seems like a surprisingly tidy figure, but that’s about how it worked out.

Although I didn’t watch much TV, do a lot of cooking, or clean the house much during February, I did manage to catch all I wanted to see of the Olympics. I made mostly passable meals on a fairly regular basis. (I even baked a couple of times.) The Board of Health did not declare my home a health hazard, and we usually had clean clothes for work. Perhaps most amazing, besides writing a novel during February, I also found time to read two 500-page novels (The Cider House Rules and The Grapes of Wrath) during the same period.

What that tells me is that, in all of the other months, when I’m not writing a 50,000-word novel, I’m obviously somehow spending 100 hours of free time doing something else. One hundred hours is being frittered away each and every month! This is a revelation for someone like me, who constantly feels pressured, runs perpetually behind schedule, and frequently bemoans the lack of sufficient time to clean the house, read a magazine, connect with friends, and, of course, read and write as much as I would like.

I’m going to have to do some serious thinking about how to harness the wealth of free time I’ve obviously had all along, and put it to Really Good Use…right after I check Facebook, and email, and maybe fix a snack.