November 1, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

New Writing, New Projects

We’re just two months away from the end of 2014, daylight hours are shortening (Eastern Daylight Time ends tomorrow morning), and I find myself turning toward revision and reflection.

Photo of research notes. — Write Every Day.

For the last few days I’ve been getting caught up in QuickBooks so I don’t have to futz with a million business receipts come January.

And the Maryland Performance Excellence Foundation’s 2014 review cycle has ended: all healthcare applicants received their awards at the Baltimore American Society for Quality banquet on October 16. The MPEF board also recognized me for my work with the examiner team this cycle.

But today’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve logged in, launched my daily writing file, and am ready to go. I made it to 44,000 words as a Rebel last year.

Write every day. That’s the heart of NaNoWriMo. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a novel, a play, an essay series, or any other genre.

What matters is the discipline of daily action on a project you care about. Deliver that project from thoughts in your head to words in print. Be the midwife for your own work this month.

Are you writing with the NaNoWriMo community this year? What are you working on?

Writing Around the Web

If you want a break from your own work, catch up on some of my recent writing.

Patheos columnist Sarah Moon has invited her readers to reconsider the liturgy of their tradition specifically or the Christian faith overall. She began Liberating Liturgies with a reflection and update of the Apostles’ Creed. And she’s been a gracious host of the two-part series on baptismal vows and congregational covenants that I published on this site last year.

Part 1, From Vows to Action, is already up: feel free to share about the vows that bind you to your congregation there.

Some of my Adventist peers noted the passage of October 22 a little less than a fortnight ago. October 22 is the anniversary of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844. The early Adventists who expected Christ’s physical return that October day grieved their disappointment, revised their theology about the timeline, and, within twenty years had reorganized enough to form what is now the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

A few friends and I wondered that week whether our community might benefit from observing October 22 intentionally each fall: we might take memories of that period as a symbol of community resilience rather than as a family embarrassment to be hidden, explained away, or used to induce perfectionist guilt today.

I don’t think that will happen, at least not at the behest of the General Conference calendar. Revisiting what that date can mean will be up to local members: meaning-making is something we can all do.

So that’s what inspired me to ask my Facebook friends about Halloween (October 31), even though it’s a holiday I’ve never celebrated. Spectrum Magazine’s Jared Wright asked me to write, and what resulted is an article on Jamaican parenting, monsters, and facing up to the parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected.

I’m glad at least some readers understand that the article is only tangentially about All Hallows’ Eve.

And In Case You Missed It: A New Project from Akers and Eyer

Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-producers of the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists, have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to support a new project. SGA allowed thousands of people to open a different quality of conversation about Adventist faith and sexuality in their families and with friends.

But pastors and congregational lay leaders still have a lot of questions, and there just aren’t many quality resources available to them.

Check out Daneen and Stephen’s note on the dialogue film they’d like to produce, and support the film at any level you can. They need to raise $20,000 this month to get started, and they’re already 38% of the way there.

Fund good dialogue! And share this campaign with others.

December 24, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Turtle Wisdom

I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time this year. My intention was to write 1,600-2000 words for six to seven days per week month-long, and I finished November with a total of 44,881 words. My NaNoWriMo total didn’t make me a “winner” by the rules of the 50-000 word challenge, but it did give me a structure for re-engaging my research consistently. I’ll be taking that accomplishment—and its momentum—with me into the upcoming year.

When I finished writing up my doctoral study in 2012, I wanted a way to tangibly mark the achievement and capture the lesson learned with something that would outlast the graduation pomp and smiles from visiting relatives.

After some thought, I settled on these pottery turtles.

My two turtles come from the hands of New Mexican Navajo artists Tom Vail Jr. (white-grey with rainbow) and Johnny Williams (glazed black). For the last three years of my program, I spent a few days retreating in New Mexico each fall, and these pieces remind me of the state’s artists, peoples, and land.

They also remind me of wisdom strains that I’d learned as a child and promptly forgotten through the years:

“Slow and steady wins the race…”

“The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong…”

“She that endures to the end shall be saved…”

and then the most prosaic, from one of my research advisors:

“Do a little bit every day.”

It was that last piece of counsel that helped me most through my research topic, around grad student fatigue and despite various family and personal derailments. It kept me current for most of NaNoWriMo, and it’ll also keep me on task with my goals for the coming year.

We’re still a few days away from the calendar turn. What goals do you have for your next 12 months? How can you break them down into manageable pieces? How will you “do a little bit every day”?

October 31, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

A Writing November

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake." — (c) Tom Toles (2005) | “The First Draft of the Rewrite of History”

I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2013), and will be using the 50,000 word-challenge to reboot my research on the British executive branch’s structure, values, personnel, and communications during the 18 months before the UK- and US invaded Iraq.*

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion and the 8th year since I began to study how the Blair administration rendered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “non-compliant” with international protocols on weapons of mass destruction and an “imminent” threat to the UK national interest.

I’ve already written and presented about this case for other communication academics (Popular Culture Association, 2008; Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2009), and I’ve also written a 150-page doctoral study about it with a bibliography nearly 25 pages long. I may write for these readers again in the future, but not next month.

November is about writing about the British executive branch, weapons of mass destruction, secrecy, freedom of information, and civil servants, not for other academics and not as part of a degree program, but for members of the public: people like you who are savvy and curious, who don’t necessarily know a lot about the details of this case, and who care about good governance and want to read high-quality, engaging content about it.

I’m not going to write and revise next month, though; I’m just going to write. By the end of the month, I’ll know whether I have it in me to turn this year-old baby into a book in 2014.

My goals for November are simple enough, and I’m declaring them here to increase the risk:

Write ~2,000 words six days each week for 30 days, or a minimum of 1,670 words daily.
Focus on generating these 50,000-50,100 words, rather than fretting about whether they are good words.
Remember how much I love this project and wonder why it’s taken me so long post-graduation to return to it.

If you’d like to track my progress through November, there’ll be a word count widget in the right column of my homepage. And if you have a fiction or non-fiction book in you too, then you still have a day to sign up! As of tonight, nearly 190,000 other writers are waiting for you.

Expect an update on this from me in a few weeks.

* This intention marks me as a NaNo Rebel. Good luck to all the novelists too!