Celery

I had a hard time tonight with celery. . . in art class. We had to draw a still life with vegetables, one of which was celery. From where I was sitting, it was foreshortened, and I had a really hard time making it look like anything. I must have drawn and erased the whole picture several times, and it still doesn't look like much. Besides the frustration of drawing it, the celery insisted on smelling like celery for the whole two-hour class. And I was hungry, so it smelled very good, though I know celery is not everyone's idea of a delicacy.

I bought some celery on the way home, mainly to photograph it from various angles so I can figure out how to draw it. After I finish my current work project, of course, which is almost at an end.

Meanwhile, in the band classroom next door to the art room at the junior high where I am taking the drawing course, there is a flute student who plays for the first half of our class every week. After the first tentative scales of the first week, she is progressing nicely and quite rapidly, playing Bach minuets this week. Would that one could make such quick progress on the cello!

I am making progress on the Corelli sonata we will be playing on October 28. My teacher gave me some excellent fingerings, and lots of encouragement, and soon I will have more time to practice.

Encouraging thoughts on cello progress

I've been reading The Spanish Bow (Romano-Lax), though am not too far into it yet. The main character does not begin studying the cello until the age of 14 (almost an adult beginner!), and, at the point where I am now, he is 16, and discouraged:

"The more I played, the less happy I felt with my playing. My ear was improving faster than my hands, my expectations rising ahead of my abilities. It was not pleasant to spend so many hours along [practicing]."

At this point he is practicing 10-12 hours a day and still not happy with his sound. Eventually, of course, his sound improves. Mine will too. It's just that I have the same problem with my ear and expectations. Back to practicing.

Finer things of life

Our basic drawing class homework last week was to draw a scene from home, a corner of your desk, or part of a kitchen counter. I looked around and decided every surface of my home was too cluttered to make any sort of drawing, so I composed this still life with flute. It's hard to compose a still life with cello.

It is an unfinished rough sketch which still needs lots of work, so I am not including it here as evidence of my drawing talent or lack thereof. What was interesting was my teacher's reaction. I figured she might comment on the lovely range of values (darks and lights), which was the point of the exercise, or the nice angle of the flute. What she said, when she showed the drawing to the class, was that it was a nice expression of the finer things in life: wine, flowers, and, she said, looking at me, musical talent. I beamed, not about my own talent, such as it is, but about the concept of musical talent being one of the finer things of life (the playing music, not just the listening to it, certainly another fine thing).

(She left out the apples, which, possibly, she didn't recognize them as apples; or perhaps she, too, had too many apples one year.)

I was interested in trying to make the flute shiny, which I didn't quite achieve here. It would be hard to play a flute this lumpy. Perhaps it would have helped if I hadn't left my homework until the last minute.

I don't actually drink wine when I practice, but what's a still life without a bottle of wine?

Musical medicine

I've been feeling under the weather the last couple of days. It is probably related to my daughter's weekend adventure. She went out to western Massachusetts to visit some college friends, and they went apple-picking. My daughter came home with a half-bushel of tart apples. That's a lot of apples. So, I think I ate too many apples. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but two or three a day...not so much.

I didn't practice much the last couple of days due to the apple-induced queasiness, and, when I did practice, I just sounded awful. I went to church concert rehearsal tonight, full of excuses and apologies. As we played, though, and the music enveloped me, I gradually felt stronger. The other instruments seemed to make my cello sound good, and I played better than I had at home. There remains one tricky part that I have to work on, but we still have a couple of weeks and another couple of rehearsals, so all should be well, so long as we all stay healthy.

So, back to the apples. We made an apple pie, but there are still numerous apples remaining. Tomorrow, we'll make applesauce, which is, coincidentally, part of the BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast) bland diet. Kind of like the hair of the dog that bit you.

NaNoWriMo

I have never written an entire short story, but I have decided to write a novel in November. I am participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. Participants are expected to write a novel (50,000 words) in a month (1,666 2/3 words per day, according to the NaNoWriMo web site). It doesn't have to be great literature, and no one will actually read it unless you want them to. The idea is to just encourage people to write, to dispel that starting-at-a-blank-computer-screen writer's block, and get going. Your efforts may be sheer drivel, but out of that drivel, the organizers say, will come some good things, maybe even some good writing. You're not supposed to edit as you go, just write, ignoring your inner critic, and (finally) produce that novel you've always wanted to write, or at least a portion of it. (You edit in December or January.) The social support and pressure of thousands of people around the world doing this at the same time is supposed to encourage and sustain you. There are online and local support groups, tips and suggestions, and a guidebook, No Plot, No Problem! A plot is helpful though.

NaNoWriMo began in 1999 with 21 participants. Last year there were 79,000, with 13,000 finishing 50,000 words by the end of the month.

You're supposed to tell everyone you know that you are participating. According to NaNoWriMo:

Tell everyone you know that you're writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who've had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

So, I'm telling you about my novel. It will (probably, maybe, possibly) be about a woman in her 50s or 60s, who reinvents herself several times (not necessarily successfully) as she ages and about the other people, mostly women, who influence her. A friend referred to this, in a kindly way, as a "menopause novel," and it probably is. My concept is, of course, somewhat autobiographical, drawing on my life, my mother's life, several relatives and friends, people like Elizabeth Layton, and a dreadful woman who entered my life 10 or 11 years ago, just about a year before she died, suddenly, of ovarian cancer. We collided, and I kind of ricocheted off her in an ultimately positive way. There will be cellos in my novel, of course, and chamber music groups, artists, and someone who owns a restaurant. It will probably take place on Cape Cod because I like Cape Cod-based fiction and so that, should I ever finish it, there will be a spot for it on local bookstore shelves. I'll probably write in first person, perhaps from several different characters' points of view. It won't be a memoir; it will be fiction, just loosely based on my experiences, so that I can veer off and climb Mount Everest or actually master the cello in my novel, if I choose to.

Write what you know, they say. Or, better, write the novel you want to read. My novel could easily change change direction completely, of course. Fictional characters do have a way of going off in their own directions.

I do not intend to blog the novel as I write; I am quite sure it will need significant editing before it sees the light of day. I don't really expect to reach 150,000 words either. Even though I tend toward long, verbose posts, 1,666 and 2/3 words every day are a lot of words, and I am already a little overextended. But this is something I have always wanted to do. I do spend a bit of time on the Internet; perhaps I can convert that time into a novel-like substance.

As required, I will not begin writing the novel in advance of the November 1 start date, but I have, as recommended, started jotting down some notes and trying to figure out a plot and define some characters.

Mostly, though, I am reading other people's novels for inspiration. I just finished George Hagen's The Laments and starting Andromeda Romano-Lax's (what a name!) novel inspired by Casals: The Spanish Bow. One of these days I would like to write a novel based on an historical figure in music. I loved Marrying Mozart, for instance. But I don't think NaNoWriMo is the time for that. An historical novel requires at least a little time for research.

Oh, and I also signed up for NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month. All you have to do is post to your blog every day in November. This one I'm sure I can do. I don't think there are any length or content rules. I have looked at the blogs of random participants, and they seem to be bloggers serious about their content, not people who would post "I blogged today!" and call it a post. There are various self-identified subgroupings of bloggers. I joined the one for people doing both NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo, though I don't think anyone in this group will have much time for posting there. There is another group dedicated to commenting on other participant's blogs. There is a music group, but it seems to be for those who like to embed or link to music clips, rather than create it.

This particular post is over 900 words. Maybe it won't be impossible to write 1,666 and 2/3 words a day--at least once or twice.

Holiday

I slept until 11:30 am again today, second Monday in a row. I was up to 4:30 am working on a deadline, but allowing liberal amounts of time for making JibJab "Starring You" movies for dear friends and my for sister, whose birthday it is today. Happy Birthday, Diana!

At least I did not miss cello lesson again today, as I did last week. There is no cello lesson today due to the Columbus Day holiday. I've been taking it easy--it is good to take a break now and then, even if the work piles up while you meander.

I took a little extra time to practice the cello today, writing in some fingering for the church concert pieces. Until today, I had only sightread the pieces twice with the group, but hadn't found time to practice them at home. We have a rehearsal at the church on Thursday, and I am hoping to be reasonably prepared. Amazing how much a little advance figuring out of fingering helps.

Thanks to my friend Carol, who alerted me to its presence at the library, I have started reading The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax, a novel inspired by the life of Pablo Casals. If you read the Cello.org message boards, you probably know that Casals' autobiography/biography, Joys and Sorrows, is available to read online. I think The Spanish Bow is only inspired by Casals, not intended to be an historical novel, but it will be interesting to compare the two.

October Beach

Though it was sunny and bright in town, it was grey and foggy on the beach. I crept as close as I could to these cormorants.

Just a little too close for their comfort!

One remained, fearless or oblivious.