Two 922s

Oops. I seem to have posted two 922s. I wrote while on the road, that’s my excuse. So tomorrow I will post 939. I may renumber the posts. I also note that I ended a recent post with a “the” only to begin the next day’s post with a “the”, thus if one were to read the posts in proper sequence one would read “blah blah blah the the blah blah”. Tsk. It’s been ages since I asked anyone if they had any thoughts they wanted to share. Readers? Two months until the final words. Should we have a wrap party?

Halfway

Just wanted to say, if you’ve been following “Thousand” for five hundred days, you have just that many more to look forward to.

Thousand in thirds?

I’m thinking about trying out a print on demand service and using a section from Thousand to see if I’m any good at design.

I’m leaning toward Amazon.com’s CreateSpace, mostly because my friend Mel C. Thompson is pleased with the books he’s done through it. Mel says the process is pretty easy and doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t cost anything if you make very basic choices, it seems. There are always options you can pay for.

Thousand has a long way to go, being as we’re not even halfway. But I thought it would be nice to have the first quarter or the first third in a hard copy book. I like to fiddle with pages as I read. Reading Thousand off the blog takes practice; you have to get used to reading in a leapfrog fashion, from the bottom to the top. I also recently noticed it’s not easy to find the first Thousand post. It appeared on May 4, 2010, if you’re curious.

I don’t know if anybody has read all of Thousand. I doubt it. As a story it’s probably more frustrating than rewarding. I’ve enjoyed writers like John Yau and Clark Coolidge who write things that seem to be fiction sometimes, but the words refuse loyalty to any single narrative. The reading is fun for the sounds and the surprises and the wit rather than the what-happened-next of a plot.

Searching for Thousand

I title each “Thousand” post its number in the sequence. Today’s was “Thousand: Two Hundred Eighty-Six,” right? “Thousand” is the title; today’s is the 286th 100-word piece of “Thousand.”

Titles of posts, it seems, rate pretty high in search engine results, more than the main text of the post, at any rate. In the last year most of the titles of LuvSet posts have been numbers. The numbers tell you virtually nothing about what you are going to be reading in the posts themselves. Many of the Google searches that lead people to the blog lately have been searches for numbers, “two hundred fifteen thousand thirty,” being one of the searches that resulted in a visitor two days ago. The visitor stuck around one minute and thirteen seconds, according to my stats service. What could they have been searching for?

It does seem odd that LuvSet turns up in the first page of Google results when one plugs in that (written out) number. Do any of you numbers-searching visitors find what you’re looking for?

Talking about Thousand

25% of the way through this thing. 26%, actually. It takes ten days to achieve a single percentage point.

The transcendental butler first showed up in segment 185, which means he’s been around for about 30% of the … story … or whatever it is. He got a name in segment 195.

Without doing any other analysis than trying to remember I calculate that his is the longest stretch of anything approaching a narrative. Good for you, Samuel!

I’ve gotten some encouraging comments along the way – thanks, Elisabeth, Dave King, and the others of you who have left a few words. Although, as I’ve said in previous “Thousand process” posts, this project is a practice as much as a result, it’s still heartening when I’m told I’m not totally wasting your time, dear readers. I would like “Thousand” to be some kind of fun.

There are things we have to do every day. Eat. Piss. Wake up and get out of bed. Basic stuff. There are things we do every day because we have decided it’s important to do them. Brush teeth. Wash hands frequently. There are things we don’t do every day but keep on a semi-regular schedule. Vacuuming. Scrubbing the toilet.

“Thousand” is an every day activity. Despite various resolutions over the years I’m thinking “Thousand” has now surpassed any other creative assignment in terms of keeping to a schedule. I’ve missed two, maybe three days, since I started, just over 260 days ago. Almost 9 months of 100-word-a-day additions. Is that discipline? Am I driving myself nuts?

Kent is undergoing his final chemo treatment this week. He’s still hooked up to the chemical so won’t feel the full effects until it’s completely dumped into his system. Then he’ll feel lousy. The tenth of ten treatments in his prescribed regimen. After this treatment he gets to heal from the treatment. All heal! Kent’s ordeal was a major reason for my choosing to do “Thousand.” I can foresee a time I will skip doing “Thousand” for a few days because we are on vacation …

Thousand explained some more

So far I have three tags for this blog, two of them are related to the ongoing “Thousand” project: thousand and thousand process

Thousand Process is the tag for posts like the very one you’re reading.

I just reread the process posts for myself. Not much has changed, even though I wrote the last more than two months ago. Writing 100 words a day is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. It’s been at its most difficult when my husband Kent has been in the hospital or just home. That’s when I was so tired I could barely concentrate.

I began “Thousand” after Kent was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. “Thousand” was to give me a practice demanding attention that had nothing to do with household tasks or medical procedures. I needed a distraction, a distraction that was also art, a distraction that would be an ambition – a 100,00 word prose work. Call it a novel? An improvisation?

My stepmother Jan was diagnosed with cancer this spring also. We went from accepting her sympathy over Kent’s diagnosis to expressing concern over hers. Jan’s disease was frighteningly far advanced, we learned. An obituary for Jan was published in the Anchorage Daily News this week. Two others I know faced cancer diagnoses this year. 2010 has been a year.

“Thousand” has been a helpful chore. I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s going somewhere with me. Having the sense that one is moving forward is a good sense. Even if the progress is on something as weird as a plotless hunk of prose and the progress consists of slapping a bit more prose on it.

When my brother David was here for a visit and I sat down to write my “Thousand” piece for the day he was surprised to see me stop writing and erase every word I’d written past one hundred. The work that appears on the blog is not written ahead of time. I write it. I post it immediately after writing it. This is not to say the posts go up completely first draft. I write, read the work over, revise (occasionally extensively), reread until it works for me, then post. But I do not write ahead.

David said he knew other people who were doing long projects but they produce a lot during short periods then parcel the work out over time on their blogs. I can’t work that way. Not to say Never. But the point of “Thousand” is the process. A product is created, yes, and that’s not incidental, but the work is not the result but the living it.

party?

“Thousand” has just exceeded 10,000 words. Seems like that should call for a party. Anybody want to set up a surprise party for me?

which continues

I got two batches of haiku off by email this week. Just making the reading period for one magazine, smack in the middle of the reading period for another. I said to Kent, “OK. I’ve set myself up for disappointment.”

I don’t think I’m a great haiku poet. I think I’m better with wild, twisting sentences that gulp at the world and battle with their insides. But haiku has been good for me as a practice this spring/summer. Whenever I have trouble writing one I remind myself that it’s only about the present moment, the here & now. If my brain won’t break into blossom, I just have to look out at the world’s existing blossoms, even if they happen merely to be a pile of socks or the cracks in paint. I put down a few words. A few words is all a haiku can consist of. They’re never terrible. At worst, they’re just blah. Just a note about my environs, maybe my emotion of the moment, maybe the writing.

“Thousand” is a practice. The haiku and “Thousand” help keep me steady, I think, help distract me from difficult things that are going on right now. Maybe they help me deal with them. I’m not sure. I think they do. When I consider not doing them, it makes me nervous. They’ve become a structure for me, and, of course, I end up with something, a created thing, art, which continues.

Thousand explained, 4

Damn. I was so tired last night when I wrote 87 that instead of posting it I reposted 86, which, evidently, was still on the computer clipboard. I saved 86 twice in my master document, it turns out. And I erased the 87 I wrote last night. So just now I heaved a couple sobs for my lost hundred words.

Rather than try to recreate them I incorporated the loss into the narrative, as you can quickly divine if you read 87, which is the new 87, not the repeat 86 that I posted last night.

"Thousand" is a real struggle sometimes. If I'd assigned myself more than a hundred words each day, even 200 words, I bet I'd not still be doing this. The years it will take to get to the goal -- 100,000 words -- seem daunting? Yes and no. I mean, yes, it hits me that I've been banging away at this project for about three months and I'm not even 10% of the way through it. But hard as the hundred words has been at times, it's still just one hundred words. It doesn't take long to write one hundred words. If it's painful, I push ahead, and that's about all it takes -- a push or two. Maybe I'll write a few words, then play a computer game or poke around the internet; when I get back the hundred word goal is in reach. And it's over for the day.

This little rumination, knocked out to relieve some stress, clocks in at 260 words.

Thousand explained, 3

4.6% of the way to the goal. I've just read the thing through. The word "octopus" has appeared three times. That may or may not be a clue. Does anybody have any questions?

Thousand explained, 2

“Thousand” has passed its second thousand words. Only 98 to go.

It’s really quite easy to write 100 words. It takes 5 to 10 minutes, time which isn’t difficult to find in a day. As the passage usually ends mid-sentence, my mind goes on busily, finishing that sentence off the page, and typically runs on with the story, spinning it toward future turns. When next I sit down I tend not to remember most of the ideas I’ve had for what will happen next. That’s perfectly fine. I have to focus on the 100 words, and 100 words don’t present much opportunity for advancing a plot, unless the writer is very patient and willing to take baby baby steps toward a long term goal. I’m not that patient. Nor do I have enough faith in any plot I might dream up. I wouldn’t expect it to play out well over 100,000 words. I think it’s better that I have little more idea of what is going to happen next than anybody reading along.

There being no plot, each 100 word piece has to stand on its own to a greater extent. There has to be something interesting going on in every passage; merely advancing the plot is not an available excuse for dull prose.

Thousand explained

I'm starting a new long piece. It is called "Thousand." The plan is to write one hundred words at a sitting, stopping as soon as I've hit 100 -- with Microsoft Word doing the counting for me. That means stopping in the middle of a sentence, like as not.

The plan is to write one thousand of these 100-word pieces. Each takes off from where the other left off? I guess so. We'll see. A thousand pieces sounds like a lot. If I write one per day "Thousand" will take less than three years. But let's just say three years, it will take three years. And end up being 100,000 words. That also sounds like a lot. It sounds like a good deal more than a thousand.

There is, so far, no plot. A plot of some sort may begin to accrue. I suspect it will. In my writing I tend to pull all the parts together, even if I am also trying to push them apart.