I am in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, typing on the computer, while my mother-in-law cooks dinner and Angie kisses the boys’ little feet. This sentence, I suppose, is what strikes fear in the hearts of the out-of-state Mormons who are flooding the supporters of Proposition 8 with funds–25 million dollars so far, to be exact. Somehow, my having a mother-in-law (cooking dinner) and a father-in-law (out hunting!) and a spouse (female and monitoring two boys opening kitchen cabinets) and two sons (exploring Grandpa and Nana’s house) shakes the very foundations of their marriages. All marriages. Except, I guess, my own.

And it is National Coming Out Day.

When I graduated from my M.F.A. program, Ian McKellen (Sir Ian to you) gave the commencement address. (Is that what it is called? Angie and my mother-in-law and I cannot quite agree.) Anyway, he had come out relatively recently, given his age (this was in the mid-nineties and he’s sixty-nine now. You do the math; this is a blog about writing). And he said, Come out, in every way that you can. And support your gay and lesbian family members so that they can come out. There I was, with my whole New York family–cousins of my father who, like my father, were born in the 1920s–and they were being extolled by a world-famous, brilliant actor to come out and to support me in coming out. It was splendid.

If I was worth my salt as a blogger, I would find and scan the photograph of Sir Ian and me (and my partner at the time) on the steps of the School of the Arts. But I am a writer, so I will just tell you that I wore a blue flowered dress, and Sir Ian and my former partner wore suits, and behind us bricks lead up to the stone steps and huge glass doors, and my lipstick is a bit overly bright red, but I am twenty-five and the world owes me a living.

Well, no. That was my father: when, at twenty-one, he graduated from medical school, he sat back at his commencement ceremony and thought, “Now the world owes me a living.” When I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I had no such illusions. But I will venture to say that the world owes me some civil rights.

Here are a couple of things I want to say to people who oppose my right to marry on the basis that it somehow threatens their own marriages or notion of marriage: if homosexuality cannot be stamped out by death, the threat of death, ostracization, beatings, derision, exclusion, legal and religious persecution, an absence of representation, and so forth, I really don’t think heterosexuality is in grave danger from gay marriage. And if your kid sees my family and learns something new is possible, the life saved may be your kid’s.

Meanwhile, if you are a writer (or a reader or, really, anyone): come out, in any way necessary for you. Be vivid. Be quirky. Be honest. Be strange. Admit that you want to write. Admit that you love this particular book or that particular song. Confess your joy at sitting in the park with someone who makes you laugh. You know that your capacity for love, like mine, extends beyond the bounds of what you’ve been taught or offered, that it is an enormous force that can create sonnets and children and some very awkward voice mail messages. Say so.

Happy Coming Out Day!

To donate to NO on PROP 8 — and counter those out-of-state Mormons, click here. Spread the word!

First, let me admit that I have blithely typed that title in, as if I had advice to dispense, but in fact, I have questions. Slightly desperate questions. But let me start somewhere else.

Yesterday afternoon, I was grumpy. We were trying to find sound equipment for some interviews I am doing, and as usual, we also wanted to equipment to multi-task for several other projects, actual and fantasy. And we wanted it to be very, very inexpensive. But of excellent quality.

The boys, of course, just wanted to play. No amount of singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” could convince them that driving around in their carseats had anything to do with the kind of fun they were after.

The guy at the audio place (which we chose because it shares the name of one of our sons) was absolutely humorless. It is a rare person who can be around Angie and not crack a smile. And here was Angie with Charlie on her back, dancing around and asking sincere, well-researched questions about audio equipment with humorous asides. No smile. No equipment, either. Just a glass counter, a long hallway, and this guy.

We left. Now it was too late to go to Radio Shack or anywhere else, because the park had risen forcefully to the top of the agenda. So off we went, to Totland, our home away from home. At Totland, we found Amanda and Vivian playing. We met Amanda and Matt in our birth class for Leo, when Amanda was pregnant with Vivian. Vivian can talk and give kisses–which the boys blushingly appreciated. Amanda offered us the loan of Matt’s microphone, which we were able to pick up that very evening, right after we picked up our near weekly Cheeseboard pizza. (Review of Pizza: YUM.)

Right then, while we were ending up with a very, very inexpensive, high quality microphone that we could aquire in the park (the boys approved of that), a big boy came along the cement path “road” at Totland in a large blue jeep decorated with a young punks dot com sticker. Charlie was in his own plastic orange car, but he was focused on honking and steering, and wasn’t actually moving anywhere. Leo was pushing a sort of lawn-mower toy with the little balls inside a plastic window that pop. It was a toy that made me wonder if we could get some sort of vacuum cleaner that he could push around the house like that . . . I got up to steer Charlie to the side of the road and direct Leo over next to Mama, and the dad of the big boy in the jeep said something about how it was hard to get anywhere.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” I said. I live in Berkeley; these kinds of cliches passed off as insight are exected of me. Nonetheless, as I sat back down on the tiny cement wall, I found myself thinking about that cliche. And how infrequently I take in the journey; how frantic I am about the destinations–all four-hundred-fifty-six of them. Leo pushed his lawn-mower over to the water table and back. Charlie honked his horn and spun the wheel of his car. And I thought, I have no idea what’s going to happen.

I’m too superstitious to write down what I thought next, but it had to do with mortality and not knowing how long any of us would be around. What if this was it? Birds, butterflies and a special raccoon danced in the mural on my left. The guy who lives at Totland after the kids go home came back with his dinner and sat at one of the picnic tables under the oak trees. Angie was next to me, and Amanda came back with her pink iPhone and Matt’s yes to loaning us the microphone. The journey . . . What if this is it?

It doesn’t mean I don’t clean the kitchen (god knows) or write my blog or negotiate with Angie over which lucky one of us will get to take a shower today. It doesn’t even mean that I want to play in the sandbox more than I want to read a book. While I appreciate the opportunity to see the world all big and new again, I do slip back into my grown-up perspective awfully fast and want the kind of entertainment I am used to–with words and ideas at center.

It just swings the balance back to something a little closer to center: the journey and the destination. I’ll give equal value to the part I get to experience, and take a little energy back from the endpoint off where the horizon vanishes.

So, what does this tell us about time management? Maybe that the term forces an approach: management. For Angie’s birthclass, Ange and Leo (3 months old) and I met privately with Nancy Bardacke, who teaches mindful birthing. Nancy told me that I was trying to “micromanage the unknown.” Now that’s pretty much what I consider to be my job description, and probably have since I began, at age 7, to spend my time alternating–every few days–between my mother’s basement flat and my father’s house.

So what I want to suggest to myself and to other writers and parents and other insanely busy people, is that we launch a new field: time experiencing. Here’s one exercise: instead of making a list of what you have to do, make a list of what you’ve done this week that you loved. Or liked. Or just showed up for. Here’s mine:

1) Sat in the front yard playing with my sons.

2) Kissed the back of Angie’s neck.

3) Listened to an interview with Carol Muske-Dukes from the archives of Fresh Air.

4) Donated money to Obama (first time I made a donation to a political campaign in nearly 25 years, since I was a kid).

5) Had a great conversation with one of my clients.

6) Talked on the phone with my friend Katia.

7) Read the whole New Yorker in bed beside the sleeping boys.

8 ) Resolved a traffic jam at Totland in the warm twilight hours of the day.

At the start of last November, I had a two-month-old baby and a six-month-old baby. Years before I’d published a novel, and for the years since, I had been revising and revising my second novel, Strip. Sure, I had written some short stories, published some articles, made a couple of films, even. I’d gotten and given up a tenure-track teaching job, and taught elsewhere and privately, too. I’d moved across the country a couple of times since my first novel was published. In other words, I kept busy, which is sometimes the same thing as productive and sometimes not.

But I was not really a writer. “A real writer is someone who really writes,” Marge Piercy says in her rather profound poem “For the Young Who Want To.”

This is not to say that someone else had penned my novels–the published one or the endlessly revised one–or articles or any of that. It was just that, despite knowing better, I had a sort of passionate, on-again, off-again relationship with the kind of Writing that hangs out in clubs with people who call themselves “Inspiration” and “Great Idea” and “Excitement.” They have little gang rumbles with people who call themselves “Doubt” and “Brilliant Editor” and “You Could Do Better.”

Having babies got me really focused. I couldn’t hang out with that kind of writing anymore, had no time for skirmishes or romances or other capital-D Distractions. But did I have time to write?

That’s when NaNoWriMo came along. It sounds goofy, amaturish, like a crutch or a scam or some kind of edifice with nothing behind it, perhaps. But what, you may be asking, is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, Friends, is National Novel Writing Month. A web site; a sort of a program; a contest in which the number of winners is unlimited. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.com . . .

So there I was with the two babies, and after they would fall asleep, around 7 or 8 p.m., I would sit down, half-asleep myself, and type out about 2,000 words. (Officially, you must write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30 to “win.” This works out to 1667 words/ day, but I started a day or two late, so I aimed for 2000 words. Also, I knew that I would be cutting so much of what I wrote, that I felt I had to get over 80,000 before I stopped.)

I crossed the 50,000 word line at the end of November, and then I kept on going, at a slightly less hectic pace, but more or less the same, until about Xmas, when I got to about 85,000 words and the end of a draft.

Those are the logistics. Also included are writing buddies, all sort of cafe events and marathons across the country (none of which I participated in because of the aforementioned babies), pep talks sent out by NaNoWriMo from various authors, and forums where you can get advice, solicit plot suggestions, commiserate, or just waste time.

Oh, and there are a number of people who’ve published their NaNoWriMo books (after, one assumes, significant revision), including Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall, as well as Sara Gruen, whose Water for Elephants was a NaNoWriMo book, as was a previous book of hers. (There’s a list at the web site of other published authors; these were the ones I’d heard of . . .)

But more importantly than all of that, for me, is the personal experience I had of sitting down, night after night, exhausted and uninspired much of the time, leaking breast milk, to pound away at the keyboard. Sometimes I was nearly asleep, leaning close to the screen of my trusty laptop, letting my unconscious take over. My unconscious did all right.

Sure, the book is full of extra information, a lot of “ideas” and digressions, and even an excess of description. But I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to writing fiction. This comes from a certain fear, I think, something M.F.A.-driven that has to do with “purple prose” and a tendency toward embellishment and nostalgia. In other words, I have been developing a style that is in many ways opposite to my own “natural” style–a reaction to the “faults” that others have pointed out to me.

Fitzgerald said something about keeping all the quirks that the critics hated because that was his original style. I can’t find the quote right now, even at Google, but my larger point is that writing a first draft full of my inherent stylistic choices taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

Honestly, while I was doing this–churning out 2000 words every night–I felt confident that I would continue doing this every day for the rest of my life. I felt a kinship to Joyce Carol Oates that I’d never felt before. Because if only half of what I wrote was worthwhile, I could still write several decent novels a year at this rate, and raise up a passel of babies, too.

I forgot that babies stop sleeping so much and start running around and talking, at which point they need to be chased and answered, and it’s just harder to mull over the coming night’s writing while chasing and talking than it is while humming, rocking and nursing. I also forgot that good habits are hard-earned. Which is to say that I have not continued to write 2000 words every day, or even 1000 (though since I began blogging, I’ve written some number every other day or so).

However: November approaches.

Here’s what happens when I put my seat in the seat and type. Characters do things I hadn’t imagined; scenes develop; histories unfold; the people talk to each other and I listen, carefully, sleepily, and take notes. I know more and have more to say in front of a keyboard than I ever do anywhere else. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” My partner, Angie, talks about writing in that way–to find out what happens. When you write everyday, no matter what, you get as close as possible to being a reader of your own work, with the attendant pleasures, surprises and identifications readers get to experience.

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates once on the radio (with either Terri Gross or Michael Krazny, can’t remember), in which she talked about how she goes jogging every day, and while she jogs, she tells herself stories, so that when she goes to the keyboard, all she has to do is write from recall. Let us not forget that she lives in New Jersey, a place of winter, of snow. So this takes some dedication to the running, not to mention the writing.

In any case, for that month, I was more of a writer than I’d ever been, despite the above mentioned published novel, the unpublished novel, the M.F.A., and the teaching. Which is to say: I was writing. And when you are writing you don’t much care if you are a writer, just as when you are making love, you don’t much care if you are a lover. You’re just doing it, and it’s great.

So I invite you to join me over at the NaNoWriMo site. Become my “buddy,” so we can encourage each other along. I know you are busy and perhaps frightened and maybe you have a dissertation due or a job that drains you or babies to tend, but really, is that any excuse not to write a novel in November?

[Note: Fifteen percent of the 100,000 people who participated in NaNoWriMo last year completed their 50k words. Check out the course I am offering to see you through before, during and after: http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses. Thanks.]