A lo que viene el mundo

Today is Day 6. I ended up writing three whole words on Sunday. I wrote only a couple hundred yesterday. Right now I am sitting in a coffeehouse, drinking gen mai cha, and typing. I just reached 6002 words, which puts me exactly 4000 words behind for today. I still haven't figured out how to make the link to Neil Gaiman's widget work correctly.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/nanowrimo/index.php?type=badge&uid=212164&offset=-8&style=regular&ignore=1&logo=&goal=50000&wordcount=&day=

I also haven't figured out how to turn off my internal editor. Rather too much of my wordcount has come from my going back to edit a section I already wrote, adding words and clarifying. Sometimes that serves a good purpose: I wrote myself out of a corner yesterday just by going back a few pages and changing a few words. More often it is just wasting time. 

 A lot of the technical writing I do for work is actually just editing other people's writing. I can see a spelling error or an awkward construction just by glancing at a page. Sometimes I fear I might not really be a writer at all, but a copy editor instead. Then I suppress that thought and get busy writing.

Today I ran a 5K race, then I went to watch my daughters dance liturgically at the nearby church, then I took them out to lunch, and in the late afternoon I took them to their youth group meeting. In between all that, I had time to write, but I didn't. I read news, and took out the trash, and sorted laundry, and said nice things to my wife, and took her out to dinner, and wrote this blog entry, but I just could not get going on the writing.

I opened my novel file and corrected a spelling error, but that's all. I've kept up to date the last three days, and I felt a sense of accomplishment, but today's lack of productivity will put me a full day behind.

I also tried, with no success, to get Neil Gaiman's NaNo Widget to work on my Tabulas stickied post. I will have to ask Rurounibug how he does it.

We didn't go out of town this weekend after all. We decided that it would not be right to enjoy a fun vacation in Oceanside while the city was full of people evacuated from the fire areas and seeking shelter.

The fire is now within three miles of my house. Some of my daughters' friends live on the west side of the 261, and the burn zone is now all along the east side. We are not in the voluntary evacuation zone, but we will be if the winds shift again like they did last night.

 This fire appears to be arson, unlike the one in 1996 which was caused by fallen electrical wires. Three houses on my street were damaged that time, one of those burnt almost to the ground, and an entire block of ten houses on an adjacent was completely lost. They are all rebuilt now, this time with composite roofs.  We had a shake roof in 1996, but we replaced it  right away. One of the neighbor kids stayed home from school that day to spray water on his own roof and my roof and one of the other neighbors. Normally I am not in favor of staying home from school, but this time I was glad.

During the week of the 1996 fire, my wife was in New Orleans at a business meeting. I had a ten-month-old child. I packed the car to evacuate, but ended up not having to. We have not thought of packing yet today. My wife's boss, who lives near the area that burned last night, did pack his car.  

 I can smell smoke when I go outside right now, at 10:05, even though the fire is the the east of me and the winds are blowing southward. I hop the winds stay southerly, or even southeasterly, so that if the fire spreads it will do so onto the abandoned Marine base instead of into homes.

I got over the first element of dread for NaNoWriMo. I have taken advantage of the time I spend at my daughters' activities, waiting for them to finish ballet and tennis, to sketch out a plot and write background for six characters. I feel much better, and all ready to start the second element of dread, which is to produce the actual fifty thousand words.

The local kick-off parties are all next weekend, but I will be out of town with my family.

My fiancée and I moved to Tustin in 1993, the same year that the Mrs Gooch supermarket store on Holt Avenue became part of the Whole Foods chain. We've shopped there two or three times a month since then.

Just recently, the store closed down and moved to the District, a new shopping center on the far side of town, built on the ruins of the former Marine Corps Air Station. The District is surrounded on two sides by the uninhabited Marine base, and on the other two sides by industrial parks and apartment complexes in the City of Irvine. It's not very convenient to the residential areas of Tustin any more, so doubtless nearly all the new store's customers are from Irvine.

When the store was in its old location, near a couple of Tustin's sketchier neighborhoods, it never had security guards, and the few cameras it had were unobtrusive. The new store has security cameras over every cash register, every door, and every food service station. It also has a uniformed security guard who stands outside the front door.  

Irvine is the safest city in the US, according to the OC Register and the city's own website. Presumably what makes a city the safest is the behavior of its residents. I thought it odd that security is much tighter at the Irvine store than it was in Tustin proper. I found out, though, that the management is right to be  suspicious. The new store seems to attract a certain element. The first weekend they were open, I visited the store. I saw a man build himself a huge salad at the salad bar, using only the priciest ingredients. Instead of taking his box of salad to the cash register to pay before eating it (the salad bar is $8.49 per ounce), he wandered around the store shoveling it into his mouth. I didn't see him finish, but I wouldn't be surprised if he ate the entire thing, dropped the box in an aisle somewhere, and never paid a penny.

Today we stopped in at the local Vons supermarket. In the front of the store, in full view of the manager's desk and all the cashiers, observed by cameras in the ceiling, are the four locked cases in which the store keeps the items most often stolen. There is one case for expensive liquor, one for cartons of cigarettes, one for recently-released moves on DVD, and one for baby formula. Babies are apparently now considered to be a vice.

I thought I had a good idea for my NaNoWriMo novel. It had a protagonist and a problem. I have notes on particular real-life events that I've witnessed or that have happened to me, which events would serve as incidents of repeated conflict that escalate tension.

When I got to the ending, though, the only satisfactory conclusion I can come up with is too much like the film Falling Down. The theme is increasing despair and great loss and the triumph of evil. I don't want to write a novel that ends that way. I'd much rather the evil be defeated.

Now I must start over, or else think of a good way to conclude the existing idea. If only the evil were concentrated in a single entity, but alas! it is not an evil that one person can defeat.