November Nanowrimo

I love the fact that I made a huge post about being BACK on blogger and then subsequently fell off the face of the earth. Oops?

So the past 6 or so months have been fairly full of writing. I wrote about 78k total in June and July for June nanowrimo. I'm looking at picking that project up again in the new year to finish the draft (A friend will be reading what I have so far over Holiday Break and I'm waiting to see what her thoughts on it are before I dive back in).

I started classes Evergreen, they have been going quite well. I was able to use November Nanowrimo as my sustained writing piece of a class this quarter. I did not finish nano unfortunately. I hit 36k, got sick the second to last day of november and decided it wasn't worth killing myself over. So my goal for December is to write 1000/day to finish the first draft (give or take a week). This story may be familiar to people who have been followers of this blog in the past, it's a reboot of Red Inside (which, sorry, is no longer available for public reading). And when I say reboot, I do mean reboot. The structure has been completely and radically revamped. The narrative is 3rd person though it vacillates between omniscient and limited, jumps forwards and backwards in time, loops back on itself and generally feels like something radically different than anything else I've written.

Because I have been writing it in conjunction with my class, I've also incorporated outside materials in a way I've never felt compelled to before. Chapters have epigraphs and scenes have quotes from my peer group work and from readings in class. I've also been incorporating "responses" if you will to Thalia Field's Experimental Theatre (link) as narrative excursions. It's been an interesting trip and I'm pretty far from being finished with it. For those interested, keep reading for an

Excerpt, from Red Inside (da) by K Rumsey (do not copy, reproduce, use without permission etc)

If you’ve never been shot, be thankful. If you’ve never been stabbed, be grateful. Depending where it penetrates, the worst part about being shot is the shock of the experience. You spend so long thinking it’s happening to someone else, it’s a surprise more than anything to realize, it’s just happening to you.

A knife hurts you quickly. A man can kill you with a knife more easily than a gun. They forget to tell you this. We are anesthetized to bullets and muzzle flash by modern warfare, guerilla gunfire and the spray of .9mm FMJ’s on the television screen. It’s like the whole human race has forgotten we were just as good, or better, at killing each other before the invention of gunpowder. 

A knife cuts into flesh, severing muscle and bone, snipping blood vessels and veins with no cauterizing heat. 

A shiv between your ribs from the tweaker on 73rd Street will kill you just as dead or deader. 

A sharpened and defamed Kīla run transverse across your body, anointed in your own blood and hellweed, cut through almost to the spine will kill you just as dead. 

The average adult human male has between four and five litres of blood. You can bleed to death from an injured femoral artery in less than a minute.  

Death by loss of blood is called exsanguination from the Latin ex + sanguis; meaning literally “out of blood.”