I wrote seven thousand words on my novel today.

Seven thousand!

I feel great.

Apart from the slight ringing in my ears.

(Is it possible to break your brain?)

More importantly I learned a lot. But I’m going to have to get away from the computer, so you’ll have to wait to hear about my great epiphanies.

OK, only 5,500 words to go tomorrow, and I can call myself a NaNoWriMo winner two years in a row.

Quite a feat considering that, four days ago, my word count was only 34,000 and I couldn’t see any way to get to 50,000 in that amount of time. Pah. Just goes to show. What goes for running also goes for writing. We are often limited only by what we think is possible.

Yesterday, by the way, writing anything was impossible. Hope that doesn’t happen tomorrow!

So I voted this morning.

I’ve only done that twice in my life before, and the last time was at some point in the early 1990s when I was still a student ¹.

With all the hoopla over recent elections in the US (hanging chads, anyone?) I was under the impression that everyone had these fancy voting machines, and I was a bit nervous about pressing the wrong button or pulling the wrong lever or not knowing what to do. I was also nervous about forgetting my ID and being turned away, so I carefully punched out the Certificate of Voter Registration that had been sent to me (ironically, while I was in Scotland), and made sure my photo-bearing driver’s license was in my wallet and that my wallet was in my pocket.

We dropped the kids off at school and then drove to the First Methodist Church, to cast our first votes as US citizens. I patted my pocket to make sure my wallet and all my documents were still there. I wondered if I should have brought the little flag I had been issued during the naturalization ceremony.

A forest of lawn-signs in reds and blues and whites festooned the sides of a curving path, showing us which door to use. Two party volunteers flanked the path, one clutching sample ballots and a Kindle ². We took a sample ballot each and discovered they had been put together by the Republicans and only showed the names of Republican candidates. Which was pretty useful, in the event…

Once inside, we discovered a scene that looked very familiar from the couple of elections I voted in before: three little old ladies with perms and tailored jackets sitting behind a table, ready to give out ballot papers. K announced his name and the first little old lady looked him up on a print-out that lay on the long folding table in front of them. We could see the whole page of names, so he pointed out my name as well – and had a look at all the other people on the ‘d’ page too, no doubt.

The first little old lady copied our names in flawless copperplate into a little lined journal and jotted then numbers “016″ and “017″ next to them. The middle little old lady, called out our names to the third little old lady, who carefully hand-printed them and our newly-issued numbers onto a pre-printed page. We shuffled along the folding table and signed a piece of paper where ever she pointed, and were handed a ballot paper stuffed into a manilla folder. This was all starting out much less high-tech than I had expected.

At the end of the room, in front of a wall of windows, someone had erected a rickety standing desk, with three yellow, metal partitions. A fellow citizen was already at the right-most box. K took the one furthest away, and I slipped behind the stranger to take the middle one. As I passed, I considered taking a peek over his shoulder, just to see if I could, but was suddenly distracted by the huge cross standing on the window sill. Despite the fact that we were in a church building, I was still a bit surprised that they were allowed to keep such a flagrant display of religiosity in a room being used for the pursuit of democracy! Separation of church and state, people!  I’m afraid I have to allow that I may have been unduly influenced by that thing to remember all my Christian principles and that might have affected my opinion on social issues and that, in turn, may have affected how I voted. Oh, the shame!

So anyway, around the other side of the box I discovered that our local voting place uses the extraordinary voting technology of: a piece of paper with blank dots on it, paired with a pen on a string.

I have to tell you, I was pretty happy about that :D I stood at the creaky, rickety desk, happily finishing up my colouring-in while K went off to hand in his ballot.

Instead of folding my ballot paper and stuffing it through the slot on a locked metal box, I handed my folder to the election official (and older man, this time) standing beside what looked like a big, upright photocopier. He held the folder gingerly, with my ballot paper poking out, ripped off a perforated stub from the bottom of the paper and then asked me to pull it out of the folder and slide it into a slot on the top of the machine. I’m guessing there are very strict rules about who is allowed to touch what, and when. When the automatic sheet-feeder thingy refused my ballot at its first attempt, he could only coach me to pull it out and try again, all the while keeping his distance. His hands may have been behind his back.

Which strikes me as pretty hilarious considering no-one ever, not once, asked for any proof that I was who I said I was.

As I was finishing up, one of my neighbors came in. He jovially asked the coven whether or not they ever asked for ID.

“Oh no,” the first little old lady said. “We don’t get too many shady characters around here.”

The neighbor and I looked at each other and laughed, but now that I’m home I do wonder what would count, in that little old lady’s mind, as a ‘shady character’ and whether or not I should have laughed at all. I also have a much clearer idea of why there are so many people out there crying foul about election fraud.

But hey. That was the big excitement today. K took a picture of me, as I left the polling station, we said good morning and an insincere ‘good luck’ to the Republicans outside, and walked together through sunshine and autumn leaves to get on with our day.

So I’m sitting here listening to people on the radio rant about Class Warfare In America.

Uh-huh.

I know about class. I may carry a US passport, but they didn’t take away my British one, and that’s where I grew up. Class is not about income. Class is about hierarchy and exclusion. If you’re not perceived as being from the same class as someone else (upper, lower or middle) you are never trusted by the groups you don’t belong to, and you are looked down upon if you try to get out of that group (to be fair, the UK culture is such that you’re mocked pretty much constantly for anything you do, but it’s all ‘just a joke’ so you’re not supposed to get upset about any of it, but that’s a different rant…)

In the US there are social strata tied to income, no doubt, but if you can claw enough money out of the economy to buy the big house and pay the country club fees, you’ll be accepted on your merits and your behaviour and that’s all there is to that. If you fall to the bottom of the heap, there is a prevailing mood that, hey, we might not like you but it will be because of what you do, not where you come from (until we tip into issues of immigration and race. But that’s not about class either.).

Of course, these are wild generalizations and it’s never that clear cut, but whatever the Occupy movement is talking about, it’s not Class Warfare.

Call it Income Equality, call it Socialism if you must, but it’s not class warfare.

No-one in the US is talking about redistribution of wealth to the point where everyone lives in a state-run apartment complex and receives equal wages for an equal number of hours worked. That would be Communism and I think we’ve all realised that that’s not a perfect system anywhere. It’s ridiculous to even worry about something like that in a country of rampant consumers (where people are, to my frugal horror, actually told to go and Buy More Things when money is scarce. Eh?!).

Some Truths About Income Equality

1. It is harder to live on not-very-much money than it is to live on slightly-less-than-you-used-to-get-excess-wealth.

In a time when people are jobless and hopeless, it’s hard to look at people with ridiculous excesses of money and not feel like maybe things are a bit unfair. Especially when the system is set up to make it easier to save and accumulate money if you have pots of the stuff to begin with, and don’t mind pretending you have less money than you have, so that the government can’t take away more of it for things like libraries and medical care for the poor – things that might help your family claw their way out of poverty.

2. The tax system is kinder to the rich than to the poor.

When our family’s joint income was half of what it is now, we couldn’t afford a house, we had no investments or savings of any kind, and we often made up the short-fall in our income by carrying a credit card balance, complete with outrageous interest accumulation. We paid the standard tax rate for our income bracket, no deductions, no discounts: every penny in our possession (however briefly) was subject to federal, state and local tax.

Now that we are much, much more comfortable (complete with house and children we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t had a generous medical benefits package thanks to the husband’s good job), we get to take a chunk of that extra income that we no longer need just to feed and clothe ourselves, and — before our tax rate is calculated — we get to hide some of that money in a pre-tax investment scheme. (Sure, we’ll pay tax on it when we withdraw it, when we’re older, but the whole system is set up to let us cheat: don’t pay tax now, when you’d be in a higher tax rate. Pay it when you’re older and have no income, and avoid paying as much tax on it. Nice for us. Not so nice for the social schemes that might have used the money to help everyone in society.)

So we do, because we can. And by hiding that money, we can, potentially, stay out of a higher tax bracket.

We get to deduct our mortgage interest from our taxable income figure too (although that might have gone away, but we did get that benefit for ten years). We also get deductions because we have children. We also, because we can afford to sock away some money at the start of the year, get to put money, tax-free, into a medical spending plan, which means any prescriptions and our vast expenditure on eyewear decreases our taxable income figure. This would not have been the case fifteen years ago when we really could have used the help.

If you’re rich enough to be on the borderline of going into a higher tax bracket, you can bung some money to a charity, and claim a deduction on your taxable income there, too. Who cares if the charity is actually doing any good? As long as they meet certain accounting criteria, you get your deduction. Hooray!

This how people like us, who aren’t living off investment income like Warren Buffet, still pay less as a percentage of total take-home pay, than we did when we were living off credit cards (the interest on which is never tax-deductable).

It’s Not That I WANT To Pay More

I’m just saying that taxes represent something totally different to a rich person and an, ahem, less rich person. 25% of a $50,000 paycheck is very much different from 33% of $370,000, especially when that $370K is probably fiddled down so that they’re only really paying 33% on , say $200K. You can live on $310,000 and still feed your family. It gets substantially harder when that figure is $37,000.

Calling this a bit unfair, is not a call for class warfare.

(And if you have never lived on overdrafts and credit card debt, then you would have to have super-human insight and empathy to be able to understand what a huge, grinding difference it makes to your life. I know, because I’ve been there, and I still forget.)

What The Solution Isn’t

I don’t know what the solution is. But I know what it isn’t: pretending that people who question the reasons for the income gap are waging a class war. That’s not a solution. That’s obfuscation. It’s insulting and it’s harmful because it precludes reasonable discourse on the issues.

The real issues are:

• Poverty vs. wealth and whether or not we live in a society that is OK with leaving the poor to flounder and the rich to dispense charity (or not) as the mood takes them.
• Whether we want to offer a safety net and who pays for it.
• Whether or not we’re happy with society in which the tax code institutionalizes the idea that it’s OK to cheat as long as everyone else (that matters) is doing it.

If that’s class warfare then put me in the class that says it’s not all right to cheat; that it is desirable to share with people who don’t have as much as you; where it’s great to succeed but it’s no sin to fail; where we help each other up when we fall down; and where, when one person is sad, everybody cries.

Oh yes. That would be Kindergarten.

Wow, winter has come quickly.

I mean, it’s November and we’ve had snow already, and its not that I’m surprised at having to scrape frost off my windscreen at 7:55AM, it’s just that that it’s so sudden. October spent a good part of its time this year pretending to be August (or at least early September) and then it turned around and dumped three inches of snow on our unmowed grass and previously-thriving tender annuals. I was still growing cucumbers — cucumbers! ¹

So, November is here and I’m participating in NaNoWriMo again. I must have heard of NaNoWriMo for the first time just a couple of years after it started, thanks to Debbie (who, by the way, has a book coming out, of which she is the illustrator. She is a multi-talented thing, that Debbie and if she wasn’t so adorable, and hadn’t fed my neices and nephew candy at Halloween all those years ago, we’d have to travel to Toronto with a sack full of squirrels who had been carefully briefed.), but I didn’t ever pluck up the courage to try it until last year, after I had spent the previous May writing a story a day. At some point during the year it occurred to me that writing a little bit each day on the SAME story might actually be possible – and maybe easier than having to come up with a different one every day.

So I tried it.

I did write – fairly coherently – on the same story every day last year and what was more, I enjoyed it. It was the most fun part of my day, even when it was hard. It made me happy for the rest of the day, even when I was fretting about which words when in which order and how to get my characters from here to there at the right time so that they could bump into that character – who didn’t want to be bumped into.

I had planned out my characters and the major events in the story, so I was was pretty confidence of reaching the end. I did reach the end: the end of November, that is, with my 50,000 words and my “winner” certificate. And I felt great.

What I didn’t feel so great about, however, was the shape my story was in. I could tell it wasn’t quite working and that made it hard for me to push on, when November was over, and make it to the end of the actual novel. I couldn’t quite tell what I was doign wrong. I knew it needed a massive revision, but I didn’t know where to start.

I put it aside and spent the past year listening to other authors talk about their writing process in podcasts and lectures. I read about writing. I read books. I hosted StoryADay May again, and even ran a contest. I got lots of heart-warming feedback from other writers who enjoyed StoryADay. I failed to take part in the wonderful Write1Sub1 challenge, although I consider myself a charter cheerleader.

Lots of writerly information was swirling around in my head looking for a catalyst to start some kind of reaction ².

I think I found it in Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering³

Happily for me I found it right at the start of October and have spent all of that month ignoring the crazy weather and instead sketching out the bones of my next novel. I had to fight hard to stop myself jumping back in time and revising last year’s NaNo novel which I really loved, but which was ugly and in need of a fix.

So this year I’m writing a simpler novel, with the idea of trying out Larry’s techniques. They’re based on screenwriting formulae. I’ve watched (and loved) enough TV shows and movies for the idea of a formula to seem normal and natural to me ⁴. This book has given me insights into what I was doing wrong last year and what I might do right this year.

My plan is to write, write, write and keep writing past the end of November, to get to a proper novel length (50,000 words is a little short).

I’ve started out with a plan, a knowledge of my characters, notes on what scenes have to happen when. On Oct 28 I was super confident. On Oct 29 I was still working on the outline. On Oct 30, well I think I spent that day going “huh?” as we got snowed on. On Oct 31 I was busy and on November 1 I was nervous.

Yesterday, Nov 2, I remembered that, even with all the planning in the world, writing stories is actually quite hard. Much time was spent staring at my screen, trying to wrangle the first 800 words of that day’s quota into shape.  Then I remembered that the first 800 words are always the hardest, every day ⁵. Which is why I’m rambling here.  Even though they’re not novel-related, I’m hoping these words will serve as my warm-up. Tomorrow I’ll write something that’s not about writing⁶.

T-5 minutes to the last ever shuttle launch.

Thirty years ago, the first home computers came out. The best had 16k of internal memory.

To watch the last launch, I picked up my iPad (64gb internal storage), fired up the NASA app, pressed a button and sent the live video from Florida to my 42″ Flatscreen TV across the room.

Safe travels, Atlantis…

Today’s post is a private one on my boys’ blog. You probably won’t be able to read it, unless you’re me.

(You’re not, are you?)

My neighbors are going through hell. They haven’t been home since May. Tonight they’re back.

I’m sitting here typing, listening to some of my crazy neighbor girls chasing fireflies and screaming. My goodness it has been too quiet around here…

Welcome home, girls!

1. Woke up surprised that I wasn’t hungover given the amount of booze I consumed yesterday to celebrate becoming an American citizen. Realized it was 9:45 and both of us were still asleep while the boys played in the basement and helped themselves to salt&vinegar crisps for breakfast. Parents of the Year!
2. Walked to Dunkin Donuts to buy breakfast for everyone but me. I wasn’t hungover, I just wasn’t hungry.
3. Ate candy and popcorn and drank a bucket of diet coke while watching Cars II, because my stomach wasn’t at all sure where it was. Probably because of those tacos I ate yesterday. Yes.(Cars II, by the way, was awesome by the way. Perfect: great visuals, good story, all-around family entertainment. Rare and wonderful.)
4. Had a little wine at lunch because someone swore it would be a good idea.
5. Was left alone in Target, in charge of a Platinum card, and came out empty handed. Clearly something was wrong with me.
6. Came home and rested in my armchair while the boys built Lego sets.
7. Moved upstairs and investigated the merits of horizontal resting.
8. Came back downstairs and watched 15 hours of Phineas and Ferb with the boys while they ate pizza and played with cars.
9. Started work on a new cardigan.

So glad I wasn’t hungover.