My father, Clifford E. Coy, was in the Air Force. He completed his service after the Gulf of Tonkin incident but before full escalation that would have sent him to Vietnam. Instead, during the ramp-up to the Vietnam War, he spent more than three years in Turkey, doing information technology work. While, unlike my grandfather, he never saw the front lines–and liked to joke with my grandfather that while Pop-pop (as I called him) was getting malaria and being shot at by the Japanese, Dad was being fed well-cooked German cuisine in climate-controlled bases in Turkey with cabin boys who made their beds and cleaned their rooms. Of course, the reason for this was that he was working on computer programs and military technology that aided in the upcoming war (that we never should have entered, but that’s an entirely different story).

When my father died this past February, he too was presented with American Legion honors for serving the country. Sitting next to my mother at his grave, I wept softly when the Air Force member, in full dress blues, knelt on the frozen ground in front of her and said, “On behalf of the President of the United States, the Department of the Air Force, and a grateful nation, we offer this flag for the faithful and dedicated service.”* Today, I remember him and the under-appreciated work he and his fellow information technology-based military members, did and continue to do, in service to this country.

-M. Elizabeth Williams,
Proud daughter, granddaughter, and great-grand niece of American Veterans.

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• By the Numbers: 236 Years (whitehouse.gov)

Since 2000, I’ve made valiant attempts to complete a piece of fiction that’s at least 50,000 words in length–and failed miserably more often than I’ve succeeded. In ten years, I “won” NaNo only three times, with novels entitled Darkness Falls, Salem, and Metropark — of those three, only Metropark remains on my computer, perhaps worthy of being salvaged at some future date, while the other two were unceremoniously and unremorsefully dumped into the Trash during a hard drive purge a few years back.

Funny thing about writing for the sake of achieving a word count–it doesn’t usually amount to grand literature or even reach a Stephanie Meyers level of writing, which is quite sad now that I think about it.

Though, as a girl, I always dreamed of being a professional writer, of waking up late into the day, shuffling to my computer in my pajamas, and hammering out words while surviving off of multiple royalty checks and speakers fees, the sad truth was that, no matter how many writing contests I won as a teenager–and I won quite a few–my writing never progressed beyond a level that will always best a 12th grader but cannot compete with my dear, departed David Foster Wallace, or even rise to the level of J. K. Rowling–a woman, for all of her excellent plotting, world-building, and story weaving skills cannot use a semi-colon to save her life. Hell, to actually write the damned Twilight saga would be an improvement on what I can churn out when I’m actively attempting good literature–and by all means, NaNoWriMo is not about good literature. It’s simply about sitting down and writing a novel to say “I’ve written a novel!” to have the discipline and fortitude it takes to do something as insane as sacrifice your social life for thirty days and nights to churn out 50,000 words that no one other than you will probably ever read.

It’s a special kind of insanity, if you think about it.

So why am I doing it? Why put myself up to the challenge when I already have succeeded simply by writing three completely novels in the past? Well, because I want to write this novel. This novel, the novel I’ve plotted, outlined, and done character charts for in the last week, is a novel I’ve tried to write nearly a dozen times, a novel that’s so personal, I usually walk away after the first chapter, never to pick it up again until the next NaNoWriMo, the next time I’m unemployed, the next time I’m sitting around feeling depressed and sorry for myself and I remember my unloved and neglected character Shane Edwards, whose story has rattled around in my brain for at least eight years, dying to be told. He was a catalyst in Metropark, but when I wrote that novel, I’d already tried and failed to write Shane’s novel, at the time entitled Red Light Fever, after the Liz Phair song of the same name. Since then, it’s gone through many titles, including Don’t Come Back For Me, Until It’s Gone, Around Midnight (after my favorite The Airborne Toxic Event song, “Sometime Around Midnight”) and my most recent favorite and last year’s NaNoWriMo attempt, I’ll Never Finish This Novel.

The poor boy deserves his story to be told, once and for all, and this year, the stars seem to have aligned to allow me to write the story in a way that’s worthy of a character, based on my favorite authors, who’s been abused by his author-god for far too long.

2 days left. Then, the madness begins.