Month: December 2021

2021 In Review

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper, asleep on my lap

Oh, 2021 was a hell of a year. I don’t think there’s any argument there. It was certainly one of the most stressful and uncertain years in my life. The successive waves of COVID variants spreading through the world, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA, and millions more in the rest of the world, made it difficult to concentrate on anything beyond getting from one day to the next. It wasn’t just that the news (as well as the “news”) was distracting; it was that in the context of a global pandemic, everything else seemed a little (or a lot) less important.

Relationship

The high point of 2021, no doubt about it, was my relationship with my partner Zyra, who I have been with for a little over four years, and with whom I have been cohabiting for a little over two. We continue to find comfort and joy in each others’ presence, and are good at working through moments of stress and friction and coming out the other side, closer and stronger.

In April, Zyra officially started her business Gallafe (pronounced “GALA-fey”), making Filipino food and selling it at the Fulton Street and Holland Farmer’s Markets. She also began holding popup dinner specials on alternating Fridays, as well as the occasional Sunday brunch offering and a regular delivery to the South East Market. She has made amazing progress in a short amount of time, and this in the second year of an ongoing pandemic. I have been assisting her where I can, primarily with massages and running errands. And as of the last day of the year, she can be found on DoorDash, if you are in Grand Rapids and search for Asian food or simply “Gallafe.”

Last Christmas we picked up a new cat, Pepper, from the same Upper Peninsula farm where we adopted Poe the year before. Being from the same colony as Poe, they are related in at least one way. They are certainly cousins, though Poe might also be Pepper’s aunt, at no more that two steps removed.

As Zyra recently pointed out, Pepper is Poe’s emotional support animal. The cats have been an absolute joy, providing Zyra and I with endless entertainment and affection, and offering a release valve of sorts for our relationship, giving us other living creatures to focus our attentions on, which was vital for the long days of us having no other human interaction than with each other. Having lived with cats for two years now, I can’t imagine ever going back to a pet-free household.

Martial Arts

Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung continued to meet throughout this past year, online from January through the middle of March, and outside at Wilcox Park in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids through the end of October. We are now holding hybrid classes, in person at From the Heart Yoga and Tai Chi Center, the studio senior instructor Rick Powell runs with his wife Behnje Masson. We have a camera set up so students who are not comfortable practicing in person can participate remotely.

I and our other assistant instructor Tracy also hold informal “office hours” over Zoom to assist students in the time between classes, which has been a big help for the remote-only students, as well as a morale booster for me, because it provides a little more human interaction, which has been sorely restricted for the past two years.

We are able to practice about 75% of our pre-COVID curriculum. Out of an abundance of caution we are forgoing most drills and exercises which involve more than incidental personal contact. We hope that this will change as we move into the new year, but with new COVID variants spreading through the country we are trying to be patient. Better to have to re-learn a few skills in a year than to be the vector for one of our students becoming seriously ill.

Reading

2021 was a good year for reading. I started the year with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I have tried but failed to complete several times of the past three decades, but this time I made it through to the end. And I ended the year with Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as it seemed appropriate to book-end the year with classic Russian literature. In between I was all over the place, reading genre and literary fiction, a wide variety of nonfiction, and many books of poetry. The grand total for the year was 57 books and over 120 short stories read.

Writing

Much to my surprise, considering how 2020 sputtered and ground to a halt at the beginning of November, 2021 was an excellent year for writing. I completed drafts of two short stories and over 30 poems, and am over halfway done with the pre-first draft of my NaNoWriMo book Racing the Flood Down to the Sea.

Friends and Family

This is where 2021 was the worst. I lost four friends this year, and in early September my mother, Sharon Prine, passed away just after her 84th birthday. Surprisingly, none of them died of COVID, which shows that even in the middle of this pandemic, the mundane world is still taking its toll.

So I will go into 2022 with holes in my life in the shape of Simon, Bill, Caroline, Beth, and Mom.

Work

I am still employed at the same company, and plan to remain here until I either retire or am made redundant. For most of the year I have been on one project, which in other years would become boring and unsatisfying, but for this year, predictability and stability are very much a good thing. And I am learning many new skills.

To Sum Up

I am glad that 2021 is over. Though I had some small personal triumphs and accomplishments, overall it was a year full of hellish stress, and though I am resigned to the fact that whatever is going on now is likely the New Normal, I am tired of reacting to the slings and arrows, or waiting for them to find another target. If I have a  goal or resolution for the new year it is to begin digging myself out of the deep funky hole I have been in for most of the past two years.

One More Week

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper, asleep in bed

One more week to go in 2021, and though I don’t expect 2022 to start out any differently than 2021 ended, it will be good, in terms of the zeitgeist, to put this year behind me.

Christmas was quiet this year. I avoided all of the extended-family gatherings and only went to a Christmas Eve dinner with my partner, my brother and his wife and daughters, and our recently-widowed stepfather. It went well, quiet and full of good food and good company.

No new books arrived in the Christmas week, so here is a photo of our little orange maniacs, taking a break from being maniacs (but not from being orange).

In reading news, I expect to finish both Debt and The Eternal Husband this week, and maybe start one of the books I hope to get signed at ConFusion next month, assuming the Omicron variant doesn’t cause it to be cancelled at the last minute.

In writing news, there is, at the moment, no writing news. Maybe next week. Rinse, repeat.

Two More Weeks

John Winkelman

New reading material for the week of December 12, 2021

Brief update. Too tired and burned out to throw a lot of detail into this week’s post.

one book and one magazine arrived in the past week.

First up is Vital: The Future of Healthcare, an anthology of speculative stories about what health care might look like in the coming months, years and decades. This was another of the delayed Kickstarter rewards I have written about previously, and once again, no harm and no foul, here in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.

Next is issue 1 of Inque Magazine, from another Kickstarter campaign. Yes, that is a literary journal. And yes, it is that big.

In reading news, I read Jim Harrison’s collection of food writing The Raw and the Cooked. This was prompted by the release last week (and my receipt of) of Harrison’s Complete Poems. I am also making good progress with Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories. I feel confident that I will complete them this month, which will give me time to get caught up on my genre fiction in the run up to ConFusion 2022, assuming the upsurge in COVID doesn’t cause the con to be cancelled again.

In writing news, there is not a lot happening other than journaling, thanks to a general malaise. I have a lot of great ideas, but right now the though of writing them down exhausts me.

This Year Can’t End Soon Enough

John Winkelman

New reading material from the week of December 5, 2021

This past Wednesday I received my COVID booster shot at a local pharmacy and, like with the first and second shots in April, I felt an immediate sense of relief which was welcome but not altogether pleasant. It was something like a hangover, a post-stress reaction to getting a thing which is desired but not wanted, if you follow me. Since it was necessary, I was glad to get it, but I would much rather that it was not necessary. But this is the world in which we now live.

I just found out that an old friend has entered hospice, which, coming after another friend passed a couple of weeks ago, and two others in late winter and early summer of this year (none from COVID), really took the energy out of me. And all this in addition to Mom dying back at the beginning of September. Yeah, 2021 can go straight to hell, which at this point is kind of redundant.

On a more positive note, this was a most excellent week for the library at Winkelman Abbey, with many books and magazines arriving in this, the first full week of December.

First up is The Tempered Steel of Antiquity Grey by Shawn Speakman, newly arrived from a successful Kickstarter. This is another of the Kickstarters which was significantly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated fallout and supply chain disruption. I suspect this will not be the last Kickstarter reward which will suffer from the events of the past couple of years, and at this point it is probably fair to say that this will be the normal state of affairs for the foreseeable future. As Hofstadter’s Law states, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Next up is the latest issue of The Paris Review. I recently cancelled my subscription, or rather the automatic renewal of my subscription, as I have not read any of the previous six issues. However, the thought of no longer receiving The Paris Review causes me a sense of unease, so that cancellation may soon, well, be cancelled.

Next up are two(!) books from my subscription to the catalog of And Other Stories — Paulo Scott’s Phenotypes, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and Mona Arshi’s Somebody Loves You.

Next is issue 44 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a small magazine of great words published by Small Beer Press.

Next is Terminal Uprising by Jim Hines. This is my second copy of this book. Hines signed the first one at ConFusion 2020, and I gave it to some friends who live on the east side of the state. This copy, however, is MINE, and I hope to get it signed at ConFusion 2022, which is scheduled for the third weekend in January.

And finally, the boxed set of the Interdependency series (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox) by John Scalzi, of which much to my surprise I did not own copies. This is also a purchase specifically meant for receiving one or more signatures, as Mr. Scalzi is a regular attendee at ConFusion.

Jim Harrison Collected Poems

As Zyra and I were leaving to pick up dinner last night I noticed a box tucked in a sheltered corner of our porch. When I opened it I found my copy of the single-volume edition of Harrison’s Complete Poems, which I was not expecting to arrive for several more weeks. This book is gorgeous; nearly 950 pages long, and it contains, as it says on the cover, all of Harrison’s poetry. This edition includes a beautiful introduction penned by Terry Tempest Williams, and cover art, as with so many of Harrison’s other books, by the late Russell Chatham.

Wednesday night after Tai Chi class, I watched the book launch event for Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems, hosted by his publisher Copper Canyon Press. It included stories about Harrison, as well as his friends reading some of his poems. I have been a fan of Jim Harrison since the early 1990s when, at the suggestion of one of my professors, I picked up Wolf. One book led to another, and I have never looked back nor regretted a single minute spent reading his words.

The event was recorded and is available for viewing here on YouTube.

In reading news, I am (still) working my way through the stories in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as well as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I am enjoying both immensely, but times being what they are I don’t have a lot of energy or focus, and these books each deserve both. So I am reading slowly and in small chunks.

In writing news I am noodling around with a short story and a few poems, trying to work up the energy to dive back into my partially-completed NaNoWriMo manuscript. I would have made better progress, but 2021 keeps finding way to kick my legs out from under me, metaphorically speaking. So maybe I will hit my writing goals for the year. All I can say about that is, this year was a hell of a lot better than last year, writerly-speaking, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good.

December Again? Already?

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of November 28, 2021. And Pepper

It really does seem that the past year has gone by in a haze where the differences between days are mostly in the length of time between sunrise and sunset, if such things even matter any more in a world where an entire year of a television series can be binge-watched in a single day.

This week was light on new reading material, with the only new words to arrive contained with the new issue of Poetry.

In reading news, I am still working my way through David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which is endlessly informative, enlightening, and infuriating. Given that I am reading it a few pages a time, in bed before I fall asleep, I expect I will need to go back and re-read Debt in order to get everything out of it that it offers.

I have just begin reading The Eternal Husband, and Other Stories, a collection of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s short stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I read The Brothers Karamazov at the beginning of the year, and it seemed fitting to have Dostoevsky-shaped bookends for this, one of the strangest and most stressful years I can remember. I had an idea that I would do an annual “Dostoevsky December.” We will see how that plays out in the years to come.

In writing news, I took a few days off from prose writing and worked on a couple of poems and some journaling, of which I did very little during NaNoWriMo. I have a short story I would like to complete and polish up for a December 31 submission deadline, but even if I miss the deadline I think the story is good enough that it would make the cut in another venue.

NaNoWriMo 2021 Wrap-Up Post

John Winkelman

NaNoWriMo 2021 Winner Shirt

So here it is, a few days after the wrap-up of National Novel Writing Month for 2021. Somehow I found the time and focus to write my 50,000+ words, crossing the finish line in the early evening of November 25. Our Thanksgiving plans were upended so I took advantage of the extra time to push through to the end.

2021 was, in the parlance of our times, a hell of a year. Between the new reality of life in the middle of a multi-year pandemic, unexpected expenses, and the loss of three friends and my mother, I didn’t think I would have the energy, time, and focus to start a new project, much less see it through to completion.

But complete it I did, or at least complete the 50,000 words needed to win NaNoWriMo. I attribute this to several factors in my life here in the COVID years.

First, my wonderful partner, who herself is a writer and so understands the need to have time and space to work on creative projects.

Next, our cats Poe and Pepper, who insist that I am out of bed every morning at 5:00 to feed them. I am a morning person anyway, so this is not a big deal, though before the cats arrived I would get out of bed between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. I put that extra time to good use, getting in a solid couple of hours of writing at least five mornings a week, even though the amount of words I produced in that time varied wildly, depending on my energy level.

Third, I tried something new this year for the structure of my writing: Instead of going chapter by chapter, as I have done with past projects, I created 30 blank documents in Google Drive, one for each day of the month, and on each day I wrote exclusively in that document. If I ended the day in the middle of a previous chapter, the rest of that chapter would go in the new document.

I don’t know where I got the idea for this approach, other than that I have kept a daily (-ish) journal since sometime in 1991. The point there isn’t to write a set amount, but to write every day. There is no pressure to complete something. To borrow a phrase, the journey is the destination.

And this approach worked! I kept a running tally of my word count in a separate spreadsheet, and I appended the word count of each document to the title at the end of the day, so I could see at a glance where I was with respect to my goals. At no point during November did I drop below the minimum daily average of 1,667 words. And I didn’t miss a single day of writing before I hit 50,000 words.

I can’t say that this approach will work for everyone. And I don’t think it will work for those years where I write a collection of short stories instead of a single novel. But having November broken out as a series of quasi-journal entries made it easy for me to write every day, even if some days I only wrote a couple of hundred words. The days where I wrote 5,000 or more easily made up for the slow days.

As for the quality and content of what I wrote, I think it was improved by removing the pressure to complete “a chapter” by the end of the day. Certainly the words came more easily and I found myself getting into the flow of the story more easily. And in my experience the draft is just better when the writing is easy.

That is not to say that the editing part will be easy. No matter my frame of mind, I wrote 50,000 words, only sketchily-planned, in a month. This draft, when complete, will be not yet even be the first draft. That will come after the round of edits which I use to e.g. make sure the characters have the same names from one day to the next, and that a character who was killed on day 2 doesn’t suddenly reappear on day 20, unless that was the plan all along.

So I would call my NaNoWriMo 2021 experience an unexpected and unqualified success.

 

November 2021 Reading List

John Winkelman

Books I Read in November 2021

This month was almost wholly devoted to writing for NaNoWriMo, so I only read a few short stories, all of them in the single book which I completed for the month: Dreams of Stars and Lies, a collection of short fiction written by West Michigan author Jean Davis. I made more progress on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, but I think it will be a few more weeks before I am finished with that one.

Books

  1. Davis, Jean, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.26)

Short Prose

  1. Davis, Jean, “Battery”, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.24)
  2. Davis, Jean, “Devolution”, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.24)
  3. Davis, Jean, “Legacy”, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.24)
  4. Davis, Jean, “Mrs. Gilroy”, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.24)
  5. Davis, Jean, “Sipper”, Dreams of Stars and Lies (2021.11.26)

IWSG, December 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the Insecure writer’s Support Group post for December 2021.

Well here we are, the day after the end of NaNoWriMo 2021, and I am actually feeling…good? Hyped? Pumped? I reached 50,000 words on Thanksgiving Day, which was fortunate because the rest of the holiday weekend was fraught and full of family drama.

But I won NaNoWriMo 2021, in one of the most stressful years of my life. It provided for me a distraction and an escape from all the [gestures at everything], and I made good progress on the sequel to the book I didn’t finish last year, which means I am now in a good place to go back and finish my book from 2020.

This month’s IWSG question is the following:

In your writing, what stresses you the most? What delights you?

The stresses in my writing life vary over time, depending on many outside factors. But the stress factor which pops up most consistently is when the words just…don’t…work. I don’t mean writer’s block, or any kind of general malaise which prevents me from getting my head in the proper space to put words to paper. I mean the disconnect between the thing I am trying to say and what ends up on the surface in front of me. I have a great idea for a poem or a story, and I sit down to get it out of my head and onto the screen, and the words just kind of…sit there. Whatever energy went into transcribing the multidimensional multimedia images from my imagination down onto the page is now gone. The words are stagnant, uninteresting, completely lost in translation.

Riffing on Michelangelo’s quote about finding the piece of art inside the stone, this particular stone, if I hacked away at it, would only contain a slightly smaller stone. This is the state of mind where I can easily slip into the impostor syndrome mindset, which is difficult to overcome, as it provides its own sort of self-sustaining energy.

In contrast, what delights me the most is when I get some words written and they are exactly what I was trying to convey, and instead of sitting there like a lump of rock, they glow in all their myriad facets of wonder. And even if (to abuse the metaphor) they sit there like a lump of rock, this time they are the rock which contains within it a sculpture of sublime beauty and detail. These are the drafts within which you can already see the story in its final, perfect form, and all you need to do is remove the extraneous and polish the remaining.

The process of writing which results in such a feeling tends to provide its own sustaining energy; the groove or flow or zone where time seems to disappear and I feel like I am writing in an eternal now, though in the mundane world that eternity may only last for a few minutes.

I couldn’t say which I feel more often while writing – stress or delight – but since I am still writing, thirty-plus years after I first started, I would say that a single moment of writing success makes up for almost any amount of writing stress.

 

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