Happy Birthday, Miss Emily!

Unlike many modern-day celebrities, Emily Dickinson fervently avoided the spotlight. Born in Amherst, Ma, in 1830, she lived a reclusive life, rarely seeing anyone face-to-face once she had left school and returned home to care for her mother, who suffered from chronic illness.

Her shyness extended to the point that she would listen, out of sight, after inviting a friend over to play music for her. Although she appears to have fallen in love several times during her life, she never married. Her eccentricities included dressing all in white, using unconventional punctuation and phrasing in her poems and letters, and writing letters even to those who lived nearby, such as her sister-in-law who lived just next door, rather than engaging in conversation in person.

During her lifetime, less than a dozen of her poems were pubished. Fortunately, her sister Lavinia and a couple of friends edited the rest of her poems and published them posthumously.

To read more about her life and how her work was preserved, go to http://womenshistory.about.com/od/dickinsonemily/a/emily_dickinson.htm.

In honor of Emily Dickinson's birthday today, I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite poems by this American poet and fellow New Englander.

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody,

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

--Emily Dickinson

Some other writers and poets born in December:

Joyce Kilmer - poet Dec. 6, 1886

James Thurber - humorist - Dec. 8, 1894

John Milton - poet - Dec. 9, 1608

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - novelist - Dec. 11, 1918

Harriet Monroe - poet - Dec. 23, 1860

Robert Bly - author - Dec. 23, 1926

Mary Higgins Clark - author - Dec. 24, 1931

Rudyard Kipling - writer - Dec. 30, 1865

If you have a favorite Dickinson poem, please share it in the comments section.

Day Thirty: Where Do We Go From Here?

This is it. At midnight tonight, NaNoWriMo 2009 will be history. Those who have reached the finish line will be celebrating their victories. Those who did not, will celebrate their attempt and redouble their efforts to cross the finish line next year. All will heave a sigh of relief and anticipate the return to a more normal life.

What lies ahead? For some, December is NaNo novel editing month, but others, like myself, plan to put that off until after the holidays when there will be fewer (we hope) distractions. Again this year, CreateSpace is offering to print a free proof copy of each NaNo novel that was completed. This offer is good for six months and coupons will be available December 2.

In April, there is another writing challenge: Script Frenzy. The goal is to write a 100-page original script during the month. According to the Script Frenzy website http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/), this may be in the form of a screen play, stage play, TV show, short film, or graphic novel. To help you prepare for April, the website offers a series of "How To" guidelines for each category as well as advice from experts. As with NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy also has a Young Writers Program.

In addition to the challenge of writing a novel during November, I challenged myself to blog every day. While it was a lot of fun, it was also a lot of work to come up with new and, hopefully, interesting material on a daily basis. Beginning with December, I plan to blog once a week and see how that goes. I would like to invite you, my readers, to submit questions and topic ideas that pertain to writing, animals, chronic illness, or life in general, and I will endeavor to include those in my blog posts. I hope we can have some interesting discussions, and perhaps there will be a contest or two or some other enjoyable activities in the year ahead. So, if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments section or drop me an e-mail. And thank you for joining me in my NaNoWriMo journey this year.