DutchInLaw

Maybe I'm totally crazy to even consider it, but I log into the familiar blue and white NANOWRIMO website anyway. National Novel Writing Month? Sure, I may be about twenty weeks pregnant, living in a fixer-upper house overseas, and spending my days as expat mother and wife, but why not start writing a new novel this November? I'm sure the first people who signed up for the NANOWRIMO challenge were crazy too. And the people who first had the idea to turn the international, vague dream of "Write a novel some day" into a website with definable numbers and a voracious writing community. I didn't know anything of the sort existed until a few years ago, and now I enthusiastically sign up for almost every new session or 'camp' throughout the year. But the big pull is, of course, the month of November, when people around the world look at the slogan on the site header, "The world needs your novel," and decide it's somehow true.  The site...

I looked around me as I walked, thinking about what to write. How do you put images, smells, and feelings into words? Especially random, disconnected moments in days like that one. Above me in an apartment building, two women in Muslim headscarves sat on a balcony and watched the world - the calm, sunny for the moment, world in the Netherlands. How many thousands of kilometers from home are they? Or have their families lived here for generations. Next to them sat a solid 'quad'- a four wheeled road-ready vehicle. What a picture that would have made, but I didn't have my camera with me. I kept walking. Bikers in tight-fitting spandex - 'snelfietsers' - passed me by. One, paused to check his bike, smiled at me; a girl in rolled up jeans and a tank top, who decided on a whim that the day was too pretty to waste and was walking the 9 kilometers home from her parents-in-law. Her Dutch parents-in-law. Her own parents were hundreds of kilometers and an ocean away, no...