I turned 31 this year. Given a family history of heart disease, as well as a recent hospitalization in January, my life expectancy is probably less than 78.8 years, which is the most recent estimate for American adults. That gives me 47 more years, at most. Not quite middle age, but well past 1/3.

I’ve been writing “seriously,” by which I mean writing for market, since 2006. That’s 10 years. In that time, I’ve written and submitted 12 short works (short stories, novelettes, etc.) and 5 novels. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I also wrote half as many unfinished shorts and just as many unfinished novels.

Image: poster for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

I have a very complicated relationship with my biological father. My parents divorced early in my life, and I rarely saw my father growing up. We lost touch for nearly a decade, until we reconnected a few years ago after finding each other on Facebook. Personal reasons kept him out of my life (which I won’t discuss here), but meeting him again after I had become an adult was bittersweet.

Here’s a scene I wrote tonight for Altars and Acolytes (or whatever the title ends up being). It seems as though I may finally have this draft done by the end of May, after over a year of disassembly and revision. I haven’t edited this scene apart from a couple of misspellings, and I don’t know how well it works out of context. Anyway, enjoy!

My fling with the democratic socialist from Vermont lasted one month.

(Inspired by this exchange.)

The mountain would not come to me,
    So I went to the mountain.
I slogged upstream, wading through the creek.
On the trail, the ground gave way beneath my soles, and I slid.
Climbing up the face, my sweaty palms grasped against handholds without gripping.
But at the top
   The summit fled.

What is regret? The side-effect of opportunity cost.

It was three years ago that I decided to go on vacation in Japan. I had the money, the time off, and a lifelong inclination to do so. I still think about that trip when I catch a photo of some combini on Reddit or a PR event with a mascot in the press.

As it so happened, my Studio Ghibli-inspired Pandora playlist had a track called “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” on it. It was a remix on a compilation album called, appropriately, Big in Japan. I think I heard that song dozens of times leading up to, and well after, my stay overseas.

To say this year has been trying would be an enormous understatement.

I attempted to get a job with JET, an overseas teaching program run by the government of Japan, and failed. I applied for graduate school, was accepted to several institutions, but had to back out when I suffered an anxiety attack in July. This led to me leaving my job, moving out of my apartment, and applying for a completely different overseas teaching program. I nearly accepted their job offer before I realized that my destiny (and my sanity) both remained in America.

I’ve moved … twice. Once in September, and once just recently. I sold or gave away half of my possessions, which I spoke about a while back. Most of what I had left was in storage for months, which I’m now beginning to carry back into my new living space. I slept on my own floor for several weeks, and a few days just recently.

I also lost NaNoWriMo for a second year in a row, though I made significant progress on a novel during that time.

And yet…

For this year’s NaNoWriMo project, one hard decision I made was to rename my story. My last title was A Buried Stone Gate, which I changed to Altars and Acolytes. It was hard because the artifact central to the plot, a stone arch hidden in sprawling government land, was called a “gate.” But, it turns out, it wasn’t a gate at all.

This year for National Novel Writing Month, I’m committing a cardinal sin: I’m cheating.

Normally, one starts a novel fresh at the start of the month, writing at least 50,000 words, while using only pre-writing material like outlines, character profiles, etc. (Some of my friends charge in with no plan at all, literally starting from scratch.) I’ve bent the rules a bit my past two attempts, using a story nugget in a much shorter work as the basis for a novel-length draft, but I’d always written 99% of those November words fresh.

Image: cover for Travel Light

For several weeks now I’ve been downsizing, in a few senses of the word. Just recently I began selling my furniture, the pieces that are too big to tote to a donation dropoff or a dumpster. I slept on the floor for the first time in about ten years; in 2005 I volunteered to clean up rural areas in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and I slept on the floor of a fellowship hall then.