Last week, I participated in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000, the winter edition of 1000 words of summer, writing at least 1000 words a day for 6 days. The timing was good, as I had finished American Spy on Sunday and the Mini 1000 started Monday. Mostly, I didn't read during the week while I was writing. When I did, I read essays from Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Yesterday was a weird day and for a while I thought I wasn't going to get my 1000 words. I read the titular essay in the Chee book in the morning, because I wasn't really sure where I was going with my writing and I thought it might help. But when I finished, I still wasn't feeling much like writing. Instead, I went out to run an errand that I thought would take an hour or so. I ended up running into a friend and talking with her for a long time and when I got home it was four hours later. I had planned to go to a movie last night. I had less than two hours before I was supposed to leave, so I sat down at the computer to try and just get the thousand words out, but they wouldn't come. I was tired. I laid down on the couch and read another essay in the Chee book, "The Writing Life" about his experience as a student of Annie Dillard's. That essay included some really great advice, but by that time I had less than an hour before I was supposed to leave for the movie. I decided to stay home instead. I rested some more, and then finally I wrote. I don't think I actually hit the thousand word mark, but I ended the six days with more than 6000 words, so I averaged more than 1000 words a day, which is good enough for me. With that weight off me, I decided I could start a new book.
It was later in the day then I usually read, but but I was in the mood to read. Last Night in Nuuk was the very last book on my shelves, because it's the book by the youngest author in my collection. (I've read a couple authors who are younger, but no longer have their books.) I'm not sure what prompted me to pull it out yesterday, but I did a count the other day to see how far along I was on my world books reading project. I thought I was around 75 countries, but it turns out I'm somewhere between 80 and 83 depending what you count. (The higher number is if you count Yaa Gyasi toward Ghana; Viet Thanh Nguyen toward Vietnam; and Albert Camus toward Algeria. There are perhaps some other equally uncertain books that I have counted, but the are the ones that stand out for me.) In any case, I realized that I could feasibly reach the 100 country mark this year, possibly even with books I already own. This was a start.
