Chris Delyani

In his 90-Day Novel book Alan Watt advises not to revise anything, just write and write and write and worry about the editing later.  But that’s not something I’ve ever done.  I’m used to turning on the computer, looking at what I’ve written, and fiddling with the last few lines I’ve written before daring to venture into the uncharted territory of new words.

How to recognize the inherent slowness of the craft with the breakneck pace of writing a first draft?  How not to look back at the sentence I’ve written and hit the delete key and start all over again, wasting precious seconds?  Using a blank screen every morning, which I talked about last week, is one solution.  Another is something I call Fontmania.  Instead of typing out the draft in boring old Times New Roman I’ve taken with experimenting with all the crazy fonts Microsoft Word has given me.  In three weeks of hardcore writing I’ve used fonts as varied as Sybil Green, Ligurino, Blue Highway, Mufferaw, Baveuse, Amienne, Vijaya, and my favorite-sounding font, Boopee.  These fonts have two advantages; not only do they look snappy, but they are virtually unreadable.  (Trust me, you wouldn’t want to read a novel, or even the page of a novel, written in any of these fonts.)  But for my purposes, the less readable, the better.  After all, if I can’t read what I’ve written down, then how can I correct it?  But even then it’s hard not to hit the delete key to correct a misspelled word or throw in a comma.  The book advises not to stop to correct even the smallest errors; alas, some bad habits die hard.

Once I’m done I’ll convert everything to Times New Roman.  I’m looking forward to taking the time to read what I’ve written.  At the pace I’m going, I can barely remember what I wrote three days ago.

Over 20,000 words written as of this morning.  Thanks for tuning in!

This past week marked the first week in which I started writing the new novel proper.  (I’d been writing only notes during the first four weeks.)  One of the advantages of writing a novel this fast, under deadline, is that the so-called scary blank screen doesn’t seem so scary anymore.  Since I have to write something down, anything down, I start writing even if I don’t really know what I want to say at first.  I just let it rip instead.

When I wrote my first two novels, I found myself wasting lots of time looking over what I’d written before writing new material.  (I started “The Love Thing” in 2000 and didn’t publish it until 2009.)  Now I’m beginning to suspect that’s not only procrastination, but procrastination of the worst kind:  the kind that makes you think like you’re actually achieving something.  If I play Angry Birds, I know I’m wasting my time; but if I constantly re-edit the last paragraph I wrote, not so much.  So for this draft I’ve been writing all my material on one file, then cutting it and pasting it to a second file.  Every morning I face nothing but a blank screen.

Yet the screen isn’t blank for me.  Instead, I see the faces of the anti-gay marriage crowd, who will collect $100 of my hard-earned money if I don’t finish this draft by April 25.  When I picture their faces, trust me:  the words flow as if from a fire hose.

And how am I doing?  As of this morning, over 11,000 words written.  And with time to spare to write a blog post!  Thanks much for tuning in.

“On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.”  So begins a wonderful Valentine’s Day book and one of my favorite romances, Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs.

I remember when I first bought “Foreign Affairs,” more than twenty years ago now, at a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.  The bookstore kept a shelf of recent Pulitzer Prize winners, and since I was young and dreamed of one day winning a Pulitzer Prize, I bought it.  What I didn’t expect was how profound an effect “Foreign Affairs” would have on my life—indeed, how it taught me that no career, no matter how glamorous, can compare to the joy that real love brings.

The story revolves around a college professor named Virginia Miner—“fifty-four years old, small, plain, and unmarried, the sort of woman no one ever notices”—as she boards that plane to London.  Her career as a children’s literature professor has just taken a sudden and unexpected hit, in the form of a disparaging magazine reference to her life’s work; and she opens the novel feeling ready to pronounce her life a failure.  (The “invisible dog” is Vinnie’s visualization of her own self-pity.)  Yet on that lonely, miserable flight she finds herself seated next to a man named Chuck Mumpson, a hulky Oklahoman in tacky Western clothing, who draws her in despite her unrealistic visions of her perfect mate.   By the end of the book she grasps how little her career really means to her:  only love matters.

After reading that book, I made a resolution:  I didn’t want to wait until I was fifty-four to learn what love felt like.  I didn’t want to make Vinnie’s mistake of wasting my life dreaming of some perfect, imaginary ‘other,’ overlooking a good guy because he didn’t happen to meet my own “silly standards,” as a character so aptly puts it in “Foreign Affairs.”  In the twenty-plus years since I first read “Foreign Affairs,” I haven’t won a single Pulitzer Prize.  And thanks to the experience of reading “Foreign Affairs,” I couldn’t care less.

As if I needed any more reason not to see my book-wager money to fall into the hands of the anti-gay marriage crowd, I now learn that the forces of evil have vowed to undo the work of the Washington State legislators who bravely voted this week to extend full marriage rights to all its residents.

And I’m sad to think the hate crowd might succeed.  Four years ago I collected signatures and stood on street corners holding up my “No On 8” sign, hoping against hope that the people of California would do the right thing and let us keep our rights.  I can’t tell you how sickened, how hollowed-out, I felt in my guts when I woke up the next morning to hear on the radio that our rights had been snatched away.  I thought of the “Yes on 8” people I’d seen during those weeks leading up to the vote — the crazies, the bullies, the car that slowed down in front of me so that a woman could roll down her window and confidently call out to me, “I’m voting YES …” — and realized that those people won.

I also remember standing on a cold and rainy Saturday in front of Oakland’s fabulous Grand Lake Theater, about a week before the 2008 election, and thinking to myself:  why do I even have to do this?  Why am I getting soaked to the skin fighting to protect a right that no bigot should be able to take away from me?  Straight people have never had to fight for their right to be married; why should I?

So to the gays and lesbians of Washington, my sympathies are with you.  I’m guessing you’ve got better things to do with your time in 2012 than to fight for a right that should belong to you without a struggle, but sadly, it’s looking like you might have no choice.  And to the nice straight people of Washington — the ones who support gay marriage rights — you might consider standing on a corner with a sign.  Please don’t let California’s shame become your own.  And if you succeed, your state might just go down in history as the first to affirm marriage rights at the ballot box.

But don’t worry, you good people of Washington:  you can be sure the anti-marriage crowd won’t be getting any of my money.  After 26 days, I’ve written over 130 pages of notes — and the page number is mounting.

Want to contribute to the cause?  Visit Equal Rights Washington.

So about this challenge I’m in:

The StickK website has my credit card information.  On April 25 they’ll e-mail me a certificate asking me if I’ve honored the resolution I launched a couple weeks ago, i.e., whether I wrote the first draft of a new novel in 100 days.  If I report to them no, they’ll deduct $100 from my credit card and donate it to a national anti-gay marriage organization (anonymously, thank God).  If I report to them yes, they’ll deduct nothing.

Note that I said “report to them.”  In other words, I could fail to complete the novel by April 25 and still report to them that I succeeded, and StickK would leave my credit card alone without their ever knowing I lied to them.

So how do I prove to my family, my friends, and my fans whether or not I’m telling the truth?  The truth is, I can’t.  All I can tell you is I’d sooner give money to the anti-marriage crowd than lie to you about this.  And I’d sooner write a novel draft in 100 days — hell, I’d sooner jump into a vat of boiling oil — than give money to those people.

And this week’s controversy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, whose decades-in-the-making reputation appears to be suffering, perhaps fatally, due to a single act of dishonesty, has given me an idea about the $100 dollars the anti-marriage crowd won’t be getting once I complete my draft.  I hereby declare that if I finish my first draft by April 25, I’ll donate my $100 to Planned Parenthood.  And this is something I think I can prove to you.  If I get some sort of written acknowledgment from them regarding the donation, I’ll post it here.

Enjoy your weekend, everybody!  Go Pats!

I’m now two weeks into writing my new novel from scratch.  I still haven’t come up with names for the characters — they’re still just letters of the alphabet.  This is probably a good thing because writing their names out longhand would probably consume too much time.

The book recommends writing the first notes in longhand.  I agree with them.  But God help me when the time comes for me to go back and try to decipher my own handwriting.

It’s amazing how the thought of donating a hundred dollars to a charity I detest has motivated me.  For the past few days I’ve been waking up on my own without the need of the alarm clock.  (That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually get out of bed before the alarm goes off.)  In two weeks I have nearly a hundred pages of notes written; several characters drawn; and even a halfway-decent plot structure built.  At this rate I might have two or three books written by the time the country finally gets around to legalizing gay marriage.  In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away.

Procrastination remains an enemy.  But what can I do?  My wrist gets sore and needs a break.  I find myself playing computer games, checking the latest presidential polls, and, oh, writing blog posts.  Thanks for tuning in.

I’m now a week into the challenge of writing the first draft of a new novel.  If I don’t have it written by April 25, I’ve pledged to fork over $100 to an institution devoted to denying gays and lesbians the right to marry.  Needless to say, putting money on the line like this has really got me motivated.

To help me, I’m using the daily writing exercises in Alan Watt’s book The 90-Day Novel: Unlocking The Story Within.  Right now I’m in the brainstorming phase; apparently, I don’t start writing the real draft until Day 29.  By rights I should have made the challenge for 90 days instead of 100, but I figured I might take a day off here and there over the course of the winter.)

It’s been a week since I started.  How am I doing?  For starters, I’m tired.  Instead of getting up at 5:20 a.m. to write—my usual rising hour when working on my first two books—I’m now getting up at 4:45. My right wrist is sore from filling up my pink Goth notebook with page after page of increasingly illegible handwriting.  (The book recommends brainstorming in longhand.)  And the result?  I have the skeleton of a plot and a few major characters, whose names, for now, are called A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Take that, anti-gay marriage crowd.  You’ll never get my money!

If my new novel gets off the ground, I’ll owe part of the success to the generosity of so many Bay Area writers who have provided me with an open forum in which I can read drafts of my work aloud and edit out what doesn’t work.

One of these writers is one of my Oakland neighbors, the poet and teacher Clive Matson, who invites writers of all stripes to his home on the second Friday of every month to read a piece they’re working on, or simply to read a favorite poem.  Last night I had the privilege of hearing not only original poems and novels-in-progress, but also Richard Brautigan and Elizabeth Bishop.  As someone aptly put it at last night’s reading:  “You can do anything with a poem.

So I’d like to offer this post in tribute to Clive, whose poems and whose writing instruction book, Let The Crazy Child Write, is available on Amazon.  He also offers writing retreats to the California mountains and to Costa Rica, which you can check out on his website.  (He reports he has a few open slots for next month’s trip to Costa Rica.)  Thanks to him, a lot of Bay Area writers, including myself, a writing at least a little bit better.  Thanks, Clive!

Since I’ve started adding posts to this blog I’m now getting inundated with spam — over 200 just yesterday.  It feels like such a waste to throw it all out.  Luckily, my friend Dan Cohen, a.k.a. The Sixty-Second Gourmet, has published a helpful, 90-second video on how to convert spam from your e-mail to spam you can eat.  I’m not sure if I want to feed it to guests, though.

Sixty-Second Gourmet – How To Make Spam