At the End of Things

This is it: The last post of my Year of Writing. According to my current statistics, I’ve written over 85,000 words for this project. I bundled in some stuff I’ve written in the past on this blog that I felt was still relevant to this project and with that content I’m over 100,000 words!

According to the Internets (Okay, a post at Writer’s Digest on the subject), that 100k words puts me in the range of a good novel or memoir, so I’m calling it: I wrote a frickin’ book!

The reality is, no one besides me has edited this so that’s 100k of my words. Unless I put it before some editor’s red pen, I’ve no clue if that 100k becomes 50k of edited words or 80k. Nonetheless, I suspect it’s at this point that an author might call it Done and ship it off to the next stage in the process, were that the goal.

Of course, that was never my goal. This was about two things, one of which I was pretty clear on and the other was sort of a quieter reason which I haven’t really talked much about.

So, the first goal: Practice. You don’t get good at something without working at it. So, let’s say 100k words written over 100-150 hours of work over the course of the year. That’s no where near the 10,000 hours to reach Malcolm Gladwell’s criteria but it’s 100-150 hours of focus on the goal that I didn’t have before setting out towards this goal.

Having completed this, I do believe I could write something else in this range of word count. I’ve no clue what it would be about. This last year I’ve wandered all over the place searching for content, mining my youth, current events and stories of and with my family. There’s certainly a plethora of other family related stuff but this was the stuff that I felt comfortable sharing in a public forum. There’s obviously family stuff that I chose not to share either because it was private or embarrassing and that’s okay.

The second goal: I wanted to write something to and for my kids. Someday I’m not going to be this guy who I am in my 48th year of life. I’ll be different in 10 years and perhaps I’ll remember less or recall things differently. What’s important to me now may not be what’s important to me in 20 years. Additionally, I wanted an excuse to try and capture some stories for my kids that might help them understand how the kid in the story became the old man they face in the future. I have a somewhat clear vision of how I came to be the person I am but I don’t think I’ve likely tried hard to help them understand how I got to be who I am. They didn’t really meet me until late in my 20s (my son was born when I was 23, my daughter when I was 27), so by the time they began to be able to notice, I was already an old guy in my 30s. That guy in the 20s was lost to them as nothing more than stories and, of course, they had no interest then (or perhaps now) in that guy or his stories. But, someday they might care. If not them, maybe their own kids might be curious about who grampa was when he wasn’t an old man.

I think it’s easy to forget that our parents weren’t always the people we recall from when we were growing up. Before we came along they were part of a couple, probably a young couple enjoying being a couple. Before that they were single men and women who have stories they may or may not want to share. Before that they were kids in school, much like my kids were and the grandkids will be.

There are common experiences we all share. Parallels to be seen. I see similarities between how my kids might problem solve or think about things. I see similarities in the things that challenge them that challenged me. Sometimes I want to apologize, sometimes I want to explain, sometimes I just feel pride though I may not always point any of those things out.

I wanted them to have a snapshot – in this case a yearlong snapshot – of who I am at this age, at this time in my life, in this year when my daughter turned 21 and graduated from college, in this year when my son decided to go back to college and is in his first really serious relationship. These things are all huge events in their lives so they have no reason to be paying any attention to who their old man is or who he was. But, like me, I imagine a day will come when they are curious and with this they will have something to look back on and maybe, like hearing an old recording of someone, it’ll spark their own memories of this time of the me that was in 2013.

I don’t have any audio recording of my mother. She didn’t really like getting recorded on video or audio and now the only recordings of her might be a few old VCR tapes which, now that I think about it, I need to be sure get ripped to digital in hopes of saving them.

So, the second goal was about trying to leave something for my kids for when I’m old, or when I’m no longer around. Something that tries to capture for them a bit of who I am … who I was during this year.

My thanks to everyone who took the time to read any of this and especially those who reached out with a kind word of encouragement or just let me know they had read it. That was really nice to see. I heard from folks I hadn’t heard from in years or, in at least one case, decades! That was a welcome and very pleasant surprising side-effect of this exercise.

Now, what to do next year?