In anticipation of National Novel Writing Month, and because I adore you all, free NaNoWriMo Calendar wallpapers all round. these come in handy to help log the word count. Whipped these up myself, so feel free to click on the picture and download away. My gift to you.
If you’re in the mood for something with more vintage oomph, cruise on over to Fresh Ribbon where I’ve left a little something extra. There are more colors, by the way, and you’re just a click or two from choosing.
Enjoy!
Tomorrow is October, and you know what that means. Just to get everyone in the mood, I whipped up a few countdown calendar wallpapers for all my National Novel Writing Month folk. Just click on the picture and download away.
I\’ll be slinging typebars as NoTelling with you this year, so buddy up and let\’s get this show on the road! Follow my blog with Bloglovin
We made a smooth mess. Always do. Six women, a mountain of yarn, dyes to die for, and a rainy Saturday. We have enough now to knit a sweater for Saturn and mittens for all its moons. The only thing missing now is winter.
For anyone interested, the secret is simple. Add yellow.
Before the dyeing and the Pinterest brunch, we made an offhand discovery. Our hostess had a pile of ancient quilt squares stacked up like an undiscovered treasure. Each hand-sewn block was tacked to old newspapers and ironed into submission. The woman who worked the needle on these pieces meant business and I’m sorry I never met her.
I suspect that soon we will spread out these jewels and try to reconstruct this sweet woman’s creative intent.
The quilts pieces are one story. The other is on the newspaper backing dated between August and November 1928 from a New Orleans newspaper. We now know how much to pay for a fresh Sunday dress, the cost of a reasonable boy’s overcoat, and where to go for perfect ringlets and waves.
We also know about Madam Priscilla, but not nearly enough.
The important thing is this: When you gather half a dozen women on a rainy afternoon and feed inspiration with cinnamon, we can conjure up more than gossip.
We can spin straw into gold.
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| NaNoWriMo |
Hear that tick-tick-ticking? I do too. It means that in a little over a month the starting gun goes off and we’re galloping willy-nilly toward some ridiculous 50,000 word writing goal. Preposterous. Crazy.
And I’m still going to do it. This won’t be my first rodeo. In fact, it will be my third and I know in my tired bones the insanity inherent in taking on such a project. I don’t care. There’s no feeling like slamming out those words every single day, and no feeling like finally limping inarticulate and finger-bone aching to the 50K finish.
A novel. Done. There it is.
You stumble out of your house into the world and tell perfect strangers in the WalMart checkout line. You tell your friends, even the ones who don’t write, and even though you realize most of them don’t give a tinker’s damn, you whisper hoarsely…fifty-thousand words. The friends who love you will give you carb-filled goodies and say bless your heart. And you nibble and smile and say yes, yes bless me.
But it’s not about the carbs or the blank stares at the WalMart checkout. This is about the kind of winning that tattoos itself on your DNA. No matter what else happens – if you are, God forbod, run flat by a Cotton Belt freight train – you finished a novel. It might be a first-draft messy bed, but it’s unmistakeably there.
Join me. I know there are a thousand reasons not to, but do it anyway. November will come and go and on December 1st you will either have a completed novel or you won’t. We all have stories that need telling, and yours could finally be told. Imagine looking at a stack of printed paper that is all you, all story, and imagine that finally and for once you did it.
Now go sign up at the National Novel Writing Month website and look for me. We’ll talk about planning and not planning another time – I have SCADS of handy advice that can make this the best month of your life. Seriously.
You can do this. We can do this.
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| Crescent Hotel, Eureka Springs, AR c. 1890s (Wikimedia Commons) |
Had a marvelous getaway this summer – shopping, knitting, scribbling, eating, ghost touring – up in the Ozark Mountains where a Very Big Outstreched Jesus looks unsmiling on all of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. He turns most of his stern gaze across the mountain toward the Crescent Hotel. After what I discovered, he probably should.
A Little Background Music
The Crescent Hotel was built in 1886 and spent its first fifteen years as a year-round hotspot for the ridiculously rich. To the hounds, and all that. It appears the rich nouveaued elsewhere after a while and owners needed to keep the place running for the eight or nine months their clientele were otherwise entertained. In 1908 the Crescent Hotel opened the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women that catered to wealthy men’s daughters and kept the place financially afloat.
In 1937, a charlatan and failed magician named Norman Baker bought the hotel after he was run out of Iowa on a rail for practicing medicine without a license. He immediately turned the Crescent into a homeopathic cancer hospital and pulled in over 500k a year watching people die while he gave them his own special watermelon seed and carbolic acid elixir. By 1940, he was convicted of mail fraud and spent his final days in Leavenworth dying of cancer. Karma.
The Hauntings
The Crescent Hotel is famous for its ghosts, and there are plenty. A lusty stone mason named Michael tends to be inappropriate with women who stay in room 218. Theodora is a cancer patient who regularly moves in and out of room 419, although she sometimes forgets her key. A nurse rattles a gurney down the second floor hall at all times of night. Dancer Irene Castle twirls around here and there as a celebrity spirit. Even Dr. Baker himself has been seen roaming the basement that was once his autopsy room.
The one I’m most interested in is an unnamed Woman in White, a student of the Conservatory for Women who either threw herself or was pushed from the third floor balcony. She was “with child” and rumored to be in love with a local boy. Although I didn’t see her, it’s said she often tends to float upward from the place she fell.
The Best Stories begin with Questions
And I have plenty. While I find the good doctor’s story intriguing, tales of chicanery and confidence men in Arkansas are fairly commonplace. The handsy stone mason ghost is more of an anecdotal punchline. For true story power, it’s the Conservatory for Women and that young thing tumbling over the balcony.
A nine-month finishing school for wealthy young women. What rich man sends his precious daughter in the best marriageable years of her life to such a remote location? I didn’t buy this initially, and for a day or so assumed these were Working Girls housed at the Crescent Hotel for the convenience of wealthy male visitors. It’s still a possibility.
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| One of the few pictures of the girls at the Conservatory. They’re bowling. |
If the Conservatory was truly the school it purported to be, there should be attendance records, and those easy enough to research. It’s the “why” that’s compelling. Were these girls troublesome enough at home to require shipping off? Or were they In Trouble, and the Crescent Hotel a lying-in hospital for unwed mothers? The historical and physical juxtaposition of St. Elizabeth’s Church, with it’s odd bell tower entry yards from the hotel’s front door is curious. The sisters of St. Elizabeth’s operated a small hospital and girls’ school at the same time, although probably for a less moneyed clientele. Was there an orphanage? Makes me wonder.
So do the stories about laundry being lowered up and down via pullies and a large basket. And there’s that Woman in White plunging over the third floor railing.
Bottom line, at the turn of the last century wealthy girls in their late teens and early twenties were busy making their debuts and finding husbands, they were not lingering most of a year far away from home in the Arkansas Ozarks. There were reasons girls were sent away like that, and none of them were flattering.
There’s the story.
And the Very Big Jesus? No connection. It turns out the 65 1/2 foot statue was the centerpiece of a late-60s religious themepark that never quite materialized. God I love Arkansas.
For the curious:
Links to videos from visitors, including my favorite series featuring some charming kids who do a great job narrating their investigation. In addition, a few ghostly photos taken by hotel guests and visitors.
No Telling 
