Michael Janairo

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Category: Writing

  • So long, 2020!

    A cold December night

    Someday, 2020 will make sense. As the year draws to a close, there are a few pre-pandemic “lasts” to remember.

    • Last movie at a movie theater: “1917” on Feb. 2 — Glad I saw it in a theater on a big screen. At the theater I often go to, there is rarely a big crowd for the movies I want to see (and by then “1917” had been out for a while).
    • Last meal in a restaurant: Le Colonne Restaurant at the Hilton Hotel at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport on March 11 — The food was fine — I can’t remember what we had, but tables had been spread apart for social distancing, and there were diners at only about four other tables. We were only there to be sure to get our morning flight out of Rome, leaving the country early as more and more flights were being canceled, including our flights out of Genoa.
    • Last workout at the gym: Feb. 29 — I did some warmups and cooldowns, with a 5K run on the indoor track in between at a time of 33 minutes and 22 seconds
    • Last day working in person at the office: Tuesday, March 3.
    • Last time I had a cold: Maybe sometime in 2019
    (more…)

  • Line of Advance Announces Winners of 2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards

    Some great news today: Line of Advance, a nonprofit literary journal founded by three veterans of the war in Afghanistan, wrote me this morning to say I poem I wrote inspired by stories of my Lolo during World War II is a winner in the 2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards. The poem will be published online in September and in print in October in an anthology called Our Best War Stories.

    I have always been proud of my family members’ military service, my uncle Raymond, killed in action in World War II, and my Lolo, father, and Uncle Tony — all three of them West Point grads. You can read a little bit more about my Lolo in a previous post.

    Now I am also proud to be among the first group of civilians to be honored with this award, for both poetry and prose. This year was the first year military family members were invited to submit to the annual contest. I’m glad they expanded who is eligible. When you are part of a military family, a lot of your daily life is defined by the military experience—everyday things like where you live, where you shop, changes in schools and places of worship.

    Thank you to Line of Advance, editor Christopher Lyke, and guest judge Katey Schultz, and congratulations to all the winners!

    Among the winners, here are all the prize-winners in my category: poetry by a military family member:

    • First-prize: “Pursuit” by Lisa Stice
    • Second-prize: “Dancing with my Father” by Ellyana Gomez
    • Third-prize: “An Offering” by Michael Janairo

    You can read the award announcement here.

  • New poem just published in Abridged

    Check out my latest experiment in language, a poem called “Chaos Theory: The Butterfly Wing Set” recently published in the online poetry/art journal Abridged, out of Northern Ireland.

    You can find the poem here: https://www.abridged.zone/echoes-3-chaos-theory-the-butterfly-wings-set/

  • NaNoWriMo Day 27: Crossing the 50,000-word mark

    Screen Shot 2019-11-27 at 10.32.53 PM

    So I hit 50,161 words a few minutes ago. Despite what the certificate above suggests, I know the novel isn’t done. In fact, I just stopped in the middle of a scene because it is getting late. I’ve been busy writing the past few weeks, so haven’t been keeping up with blogging about the writing. But this feels good.

    Still, I think I have about another 30,000 words to go until this draft is done, so maybe December will be National Novel Draft Completion Month, and then next few months after that will be all about the revision.

    Thanks for reading along!

  • NaNoWriMo Day 11

    img_1426Words for the day: 1,441

    Total words: 19,863

    Not much to say. I may have crossed a threshold, and figured something out.

    Now saving my words for the NaNoWriMo.

  • NaNoWriMo Days 7–10

    photo of person walking near orange leafed trees
    Photo by KIM DAE JEUNG on Pexels.com

    Words for Day 7: Zero

    Words for Day 8: 1,573

    Words for Day 9: 3,542

    Words for Day 10: 4,595

    Total words: 18,422

    Late fall deep freeze crept in over the last few days, and I ran out of steam (or was it time) for any writing on Day 7. So it was an accidental day off; however, a little brain rest can always be helpful.

    I spent some of my writing time over the last few days doing something I’m not sure I was supposed to be doing during NaNoWriMo, considering one of the mantras of the month is to write, write, write, always moving forward to get more words down. I went back and did a little editing, adding and expanding on earlier sections.

    Yes, there definitely was a net gain, but I did have to delete some words. It felt very much not in the spirit of the month when, after about an hour of writing and getting down a few hundred (maybe almost 1,000) words, I removed some of the no longer relevant passages and found myself suddenly at a net zero.

    Words, they come and go. Oh, well.

     

  • NaNoWriMo Day 6

    I’m using this image, which I found searching for the word “breathe,” which I mean in a positive way, though this could be verging on “drown.” Ambiguity.
    Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

    Words for the day: 1,477

    Total words: 8,712

    Still behind the NaNo schedule, but I’m happy with the day’s results. One of the things that I reminded myself to do tonight is give a scene a chance to breathe. So I went back a few paragraphs from where I had left off last night, and realized that I needed to break up a character’s paragraph-long quote. That allowed that character to test and measure other characters’ reactions to what she was saying, as well as allowing other characters to say things — thus slightly changing the direction of the conversation as I had written it yesterday (characters! with their own thoughts!).

    Perhaps most importantly, it allowed me the space to insert moments in which my main character could witness, think, and evaluate things. This, I think, will deepen a reader’s understanding and empathy for the main character, and it allowed a quick flashback for some background information that deepens the history of the main character.

    So in some ways, I ended my writing session by getting back to where I had left off the night before, but I put down a lot of important words that lets the story breathe and the characters express their lives in new ways.

    A good writing session.

  • NaNoWriMo Day 5

    Photo by sergio souza on Pexels.com

    So Tuesday turned out to be a tough day. I squeezed out only 320 words, before I was just too tired. (even this post is a day late)

    New total: 7,235 (just 42,765 to go!)

    More tonight, I hope.

  • NaNoWriMo Day 4

    Total words for Monday: 1,186

    Project total so far: 6,915

    Back to work — it’s the first Monday of NaNoWriMo! — so I expected to get fewer words down. According to the NaNoWriMo 50,000-word challenge, the daily average is 1,667 — so at least for today I am a little bit above average. I expect that to slip a bit.

    With the writing, though, I think I still know what’s going on — so that’s a good thing.