Not Building a Wall, But Making a Brick

In a kind of superstitious awe, and needing any help I can get with my NaNoWriMo project, I have downloaded a rather nifty little application called Desktop Oblique: it's a little widget wot randomly displays one of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies every time you start up Windows, or on demand... and logs the results.

Friday, 01 November, 2002,7:42:21 PM
Is the information correct?
Decide that no, it's not: my protagonist is mistaken, and it's not the End of the World after all. The story is to explore what in his past and his makeup made him think it was in the first place.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,9:54:39 AM
Use 'unqualified' people
The protagonist's neighbor offers an unprofessional psychiatric opinion.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,4:50:57 PM
Accept advice
I talk to D: the family of the story is gving me some trouble. There really needs to be an older daughter as well as the infant, to make the dynamic work. Working her in will mean going back and doing a lot of jiggering. D reminds me that all the backwriting counts towards my word total.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,5:10:35 PM
Be extravagant
Decide finally to add the older daughter after all.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,7:20:54 PM
You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
Get fed up and change all the names. Jim Gaffney is now Thomas Vigil: baby Linda is now Tess: the late Mrs. Vigil, who was Mira, is now Laura, while Mira becomes the older daughter.

Saturday, 02 November, 2002,7:24:57 PM
Simply a matter of work
Write. And write. And write. And write. And write.

Sunday, 03 November, 2002,6:11:17 AM
Faced with a choice, do both
Should Mira go to Manhattan to see the movie, or go to the Turner's dinner party?

Monday, 04 November, 2002,5:48:55 AM
Disciplined self-indulgence
Vigil's profession (composer of advertising jingles) gives me a legitimate means to write a thousand words on American popular music and culture, in a manner that actually deepens the themes of the book!

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:30:24 AM
Turn it upside down
Decide that maybe Vigil should not literally go hiking the Appalachian Trail—that it should just be a metaphor for a difficult thing undertaken and failed.

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:32:27 PM
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
When the downtown hipster finds himself widowed...

The suit is matte black, a three-season worsted wool undertaker suit: the shirt is black, too—its slight sheen cutting interesting texture patterns against the lapel and the knubbly raw silk tie, also black. Tom Vigil is in mourning, of course: he has never articulated, even to himself, his promise to wear only black for the rest of his life, but he holds to it—all day, every day. Everything that he might wear, everything in his closet and drawers, everything on his hooks and pegs, his T-shirts, his jeans, his barn jacket and topcoat, even his boxers are black.

Vigil's inclination to mourning has not been as drastic for him as it would be for most people: for him it was simply a matter of gradually, over the last thirteen months, winnowing out of his wardrobe those items which were not already black. Because Vigil is a musician, and has lived his entire adult life in and/or around New York City, those items were relatively few. And now they are none.

Monday, 04 November, 2002,7:45:05 PM
Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

"We've talked about it before."
"Yeah. yeah, I guess we have."
"Please. I think we've... This has been a good marriage."
"Yes. Mostly. Yes it has."
"Fifteen years. That's a good run. And I don't—you can't say we've failed. I don't think we have. But we don't have to keep doing this to ourselves. To each other."

And so on.