"This doctrine can provide a non-biological parent to be given the legal rights and responsibilities of a biological parent if they have held themselves out as the parent."
More than ten years ago I knew I would write this novella. Today all the books are wrapped and ready for my grand-children, in hopes that they will not wait as long as I did to tell their stories. Thanks to NaNo for making this dream come true.
Haley has saved Morgan and captured the kidnapper. Her robot mom defeated the botnet attack and turned the Ukrainian criminal mastermind over to the NSA. Haley revealed her secret to Morgan and they kissed. At 9am 11/6/2012, I typed "THE END".
With the 8700 words I wrote before NaNo began and the 16,000 words written in six days this month, I have written a novella-length story of 25,000 words!
Time to open the outline for EVEN MORE LOCO PARENTIS, the second book in the trilogy, in which everyone reproduces and we meet their progeny.
With more than 20 others, I began the November National Novel Writing Month at a midnight kickoff at Portland Airport.
First, I do not normally write "with abandon." I write with consideration, refinement, intent, and determination, but never with abandon. My inner editor is co-author with my writer and the editor does not countenance the stream of consciousness style of writing that NaNo encourages.
I spoke with one writer who has participated in eleven NaNo events. She said that while she easily wrote 50,000 words in November in the past, she spent eleven months re-writing what she had written to get to the final version. My inner editor was appalled. "If she had taken the trouble to write the original with more consideration, such a re-write would not have been necessary," scoffed the editor.
Nevertheless, I began to see some value in the NaNo code. I have allowed myself to play video games for hours a day instead writing. Now I have a goal of 1,667 words a day to attain and there will be no video games until those words are written. While I may not be writing with abandon, I am writing with accountability and purpose, and I am writing again!
Secondly, I am used to writing on my desktop at home and in the cloud. With my tablet and Bluetooth keyboard, I thought I was prepared to continue doing so at the airport. I was wrong. Authoring in Google Docs is not yet supported on the iPad, I learned. I could see my chapters but not add to them. So I switched to iA Writer, an acclaimed authoring app. iA Writer claims to save your writing to iCloud, but I could not discover the Save button. I did find the Send to Email button, so I saved every few minutes to my email account.
[Update] On Nov. 2, Google released the Google Drive app for iOS, two years after releasing it for Droid. I can now edit Google Docs on my iPad. Yay!
All of this time spent fretting with new technology was time not spent writing. I left the airport with a mere 683 words written, while many participants reached their 1,667 word goal in two hours or less.
Back home at 3 am, I copied the emailed text to the cloud and gratefully returned to Google Docs. By 6 am, I had written 1,400 words with no abandon whatsoever and went to bed.
With 29 days to go, I see benefit in having a community of support and encouragement and a structure to measure my progress and commitment. I am glad to be writing again, if not with abandon, then with purpose and determination.
[Edit: Nov. 3] With 5,485 words written, I find I have gone from writing slowly with consideration to writing smoothly with abandon. So grateful for this paradigm shift, NaNoWriMo!
Experimenting with Lumi Inkodye that lets me print with light, these are my first pieces. The spiral began with a negative transparency then added direct Inkodye. You can also see traditional batik and tie-dye resists.
Our critique group infiltrated by best-selling author
I joined Genre Writers of Portlandia, a meetup group offering to critique each other's writing. Their feedback was generally positive and encouraging, so I redoubled my efforts to finish the novel.
Then, on Aug. 26, we were infiltrated by New York Times Best-Selling Author Laurie Notaro, who then wrote Word to the Wolves and sold it to the Willamette Weekly.
Brooklyn-born Laurie, who used the under-cover name of Laurie Upton, did not come to offer her advice as a best-selling author to us. Her purpose was to deride our efforts in her snarky article. She offered no constructive criticism. Her most frequent comment was "Oh," but obviously she was staying in her cloak-and-dagger role.
When WWeekly published her article, ten commenters agreed that the article was "conceited, pointless drivel" or worse.
"This author obviously has no idea the number of groups she has insulted (writer's groups, Harry Potter fans, the millions of people who write fanfiction), and has shown zero cultural sensitivity here," wrote Tasha.
Then we learned that freelance writer for the Portland Mercury Ben Coleman wants to tell our side of the story. He has asked for our writing samples, bios, and blogs so he can present a more balanced account. He even offered to let us critique "one of my (terrible) short stories" in return.
At least in Ben's article I will appear with my name instead of being labeled as the "Man With Glasses" by Laurie Upton Notaro.
Searching for the cover artist for #TeamHuman, I discovered http://bookcovers.creativindie.com/. Problem solved!
Derek Murphy worked tirelessly to bring my characters to life for the cover of my book. He is a first-rate graphic artist and a willing collaborator who does not charge enough for what he delivers. Behold:
More than ten years ago, the voices in my head told me I was going to write about a 15-year-old girl with a mom who is a computer and a dad who is a dog.
Her birth parents were professors who died in a plane crash. Her mom, who was a computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics PhD, sent a text message to her home computer giving it a prime directive: raise Haley and do not let anyone know that we have died. Keep her out of the orphanage.
Her dad, who was a bio-engineer PhD specializing in super-intelligent dogs, sent a similar message to his favorite dog: Haley is your pack daughter now. Love her and don't let her be sent to the adoption agency.
I thought that sounded like a fun story, but I never got around to writing it.
Writing all my life
I have been a writer all my life. In high school, I was the only boy in the typing class. Boys were supposed to take shop and girls took typing. I didn't care. I knew I was going to need typing skills all my life.
I have a B.A. in Mass Communication. I have been a reporter, photographer, and news desk editor for several newspapers, including The Miami Herald.
I was a typographer for an advertising firm. I bought one of the first PCs and used it to typeset recipe books. I wrote and taught desktop publishing classes.
I wrote some of the first courses on the World Wide Web and taught them to corporate clients. I dyed my hair purple and hung out at the Speakeasy cyber cafe in Seattle, creating websites for companies that needed a corporate presence.
In the 1990's, I worked at Microsoft as a technical editor and writer. I edited a 3,000-page manuscript with blue pencils because they didn't trust Word to handle files that big. I wrote the Windows 95 Small Business Pack as an application that ran inside WinHelp.
Recently, I have become an instructional designer, writing software tutorials using Adobe Captivate. I wrote a tutorial for Nike's corporate communication and task management portal and created natural language versions for North America, Europe, China, Japan, and Korea.
Writing research
So I started with what I knew I could do: research.
I needed to learn about artificial intelligence, robotics, the Turing test, genetics, bio-engineering, recombinant DNA, English Mastiffs, animals who can understand and speak to humans, botnets, UAVs, and the Grand Canyon Railroad. Many of these were topics I had followed for some time, while others were completely new to me.
I wrote in all down with hyperlinks so I could refresh my memory later.
Writing in the cloud
Many years earlier, I had written a brief book outline in Word and saved it to my computer. When that computer was stolen, I lost the outline.
Now, for the outline and novel, I use Google Docs. Every word is saved the second I write it. I can continue from any other computer with an Internet connection. I can write on my iPad on the way to work and then copy it to the Google Docs version.
Google Docs also has a built-in research tool. Highlight any word and click Tools > Research. A sidebar opens with links to the term. Find what you need and paste it into the story. Library research was never so easy!
Writing for the grandchildren
I attained 65 years of age this year and wrote my will. I realized that I had no material goods to leave my two sons and six grandchildren. That is when I realized that I could write this story to leave them. I could bequeath them my imagination and my love of a good science fiction tale.
Besides, Haley needed a paternal grandfather, to help out after her parents were gone. So I wrote myself into the outline.
Now I was fired up! I had a reason to write and a deadline (morbid pun not intended). For the first time, I thought I can do this.
I wrote "Chapter One" and sat there staring. Nothing happened. If this was a technical topic, I would be typing a page every 15 minutes.
Researching writing
I realized that I had researched all the topics that were going to be in the novel, but I had not researched writing.
I Googled. I borrowed books on writing from the library. That may have been a mistake. I read that writing was indeed hard and that most books that get finished never get published.
I learned that not only did I have to write the book, but that I should expect to rewrite it many times. As a journalist and technical writer, I had been trained to get it right the first time. There would be a quick edit or review, some easy fixes, and then it would be done.
Then I read How I Wrote My First Book by Lida E. Quillen, in which 20 published authors told how they wrote their first book, and I stopped complaining. Many of these authors had never written professionally before starting their first book. Many of them had taken decades to write one book. All had faced rejection, dejection, and fear. All had persevered and published.
Writing is easy
Write about what you know, they say. I returned to Chapter One. I knew that Haley played a fictional MMO game called Sword Song, modeled on the many, many MMOs that I had played.
So I told myself that I wasn't writing a novel, I was transcribing a chat log from the game. I was on comfortable ground. I knew what they would say and how they would say it in the game. I let them talk while I listened and typed.
After that, they logged out of the game, but I was still listening. Several hours later, Chapter One was done. I wrote notes to myself about what would happen in Chapter Two and went to bed.
The next morning I read what I had wrote and fixed some typos. I thought it read well. On to Chapter Two!
Now it seems as though my characters are telling their story and I am their scribe. Since they have not bothered to read the outline, several times they have taken a different path than I thought they would take, and I gladly let them.
Chapter Four is done. In Chapter Five, the antagonist enters the game and the fun begins.
How I wrote my first book
In Loco Parentis is the working title of my book and this blog. I am writing here so that when the novel is published, I can point Lida E. Quillen to my account here. I am also a journalist, and so I wanted to document this quest. Maybe one day the grandchildren will read the book and find this blog and think "I can do this, too!"
Because writing is easy. Thinking about maybe beginning to write is hard.
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