Anticipation

NaNoWriMo begins in 3 hours and ten minutes. No title, no name for my main male character, no outline, oh mercy.

Our DIL is at the hospital, they are inducing labor in the wee early hours around oh-dark-hundred. First grandchild!!!

EEEEK!!!

Excited and nervous on all counts. Pictures as soon as I have some!

13 Things to Do Now that NaNoWriMo is Over

I haven't participated in Thursday Thirteen in a while. Here's my list for this week!

1. Release my inner editor from the closet where I stuffed her on November 1st.
2. Learn how to spell again. (see #1)
3. Enjoy using contractions again.
4. Stop feeling like I need to write out numerals so that they count toward my word count.
5. Enjoy not worrying about how many words are in a paragraph.
6. Avoid other writing challenges until January 1st.
7. Set up the new layout for this here blog.
8. Plan the music for the church sing along on Dec. 16th.
9. Plan the music for the church women's meeting on Dec. 12th.
10. Switch numbers 8 & 9 up above.
11. Clean my house.
12. Get back to being in regular touch with friends.
13. Sleep more.

Not too bad, only 11 and 13 are iffy. *g* I'm hoping to get to #7 after work today. The hubby is out of town and the child stays after for tutoring, so its really just a matter of biting the bullet and pasting in the new code. I already tried it on a test blog and I really like it, so away we go!

Home again, home again

The short version: Thanksgiving was wonderful. We spent two days in North Carolina with our younger son and his wife. We slept, we ate, we drove around and sightsee'd (sight-saw?) ... At any rate, we looked at lots of stuff. *g*

I spent some time writing (by hand! oh, the horrors!) in an attempt to finish my entry for NaNoWriMo, and I accomplished that today.

So now I'm going to rest on my laurels (they're actually quite comfy, those laurels of mine) and enjoy a little bit of calmness before the true insanity of the Advent/Christmas season explodes around me.

The long version: Well, I'm going to save that for another, more serious (but equally happy) post.

Words, words, words ...

"The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get."

That was a favorite quotation of mine when I was a child. It appealed to some quirky little corner of the humor center of my brain. I know that there are other pithy quotes to apply to my topic for today, but at the moment I am too tired to remember them. There is at least one about knowing when to cut your losses, yadda yadda yadda.

All of this is to say that I'm officially bowing out of NaNoWriMo. It took a week for it to become not-so-much fun any longer. Yes, I know, I waxed poetic about it in the car Saturday evening on the way to a friend's birthday gathering, and I still believe everything I said. However, I have no way of catching up on my word count and still retaining my sanity. The fact that we will be in San Francisco from November 24th through 30th had a lot to do with my decision. The deadline for NaNo is the 30th, and there is no way I can get my minimum daily word count (1,667 words) while on a family trip, especially not with all of the things we have planned. We were on family trips in 2006 and 2007, too, but the holiday fell on dates that made this easier to manage. Also? I wasn't working then. Hello! All day at home to write!

We were out for the evening both last Friday and Saturday, and most of yesterday was spent either in church or at meetings. That was three days with hardly any writing at all. Could I really force it and still finish? Maybe, but at what cost?

This isn't the year for me, but it is the year for many of my friends! So, I will be here cheering you on and if you need advice you all know where to find me. Now shoo! Why are you still here reading? Go write!

"It's November, do you know what your word count is?"

Oh look, it's (almost) October 1st

And some of us know what that means. It means we, the few, the proud, the angst-ridden, have signed up for NaNoWriMo, or in its longer form, National Novel Writing Month.

We are students, we are parents, we hold full time jobs, we have spouses and significant others, and we are prepared to forsake all of that to spend thirty days glued to our keyboards or duct taped to our legal pads. The actual writing never begins until the stroke of 12:01am on November 1st, but October? October is filled with the sheer joy of plotting! Making outlines! Scribbling scene ideas on 3x5 index cards so that we can shuffle them at will as we control our fictional little pieces of the world.

We busily post our introductions to the message boards at the official site, and we squeal about how we have the most amazing ideas ever, and we research. Oh mercy, we research until we know, we just know that it's going to be perfect!

We stock up on coffee, or M&Ms, or sugar-free gum; we buy a funny hat to wear when we're writing so that no one will dare bother us. (The hat is a signal to our loved ones, but seriously? They don't need the hat to know that we've gone completely insane.) We plan to attend local write-ins. Remember love-ins? They're sort of the same, but with laptops, and pencils and pads, and with clothing ... well, anyway. We attempt to flock together with like-minded people in our hometowns once a week and challenge each other to word wars. Word wars!

Sounds serious? You bet. But it's just about the most fun you can have for thirty days as you work your way from absolutely nothing up to 50,000 words. That's right, 50,000 words in thirty days. Just for laughs, the Thanksgiving holiday is thrown into the month and you are descended upon by hoards of relatives who do not understand your continual need to sneak away and write 'just a little more'. Thus, you really don't have a full thirty days, now do you?

What do you write about? That's up to you. Find something you like, take an odd idea and roll with it.

The quote below is a favorite of mine. Embrace it, and then read the entire article.

Know the needs and desires of your characters; find out something they want badly, and take it away from them.


Dramatic plotting made simple


See you at the finish line!