Well, that takes care of *that*

Kinda says it all, huh?

50,000+ words as of 22:15 PST, but it's taken me an hour to upload a text version to the NaNoWriMo site for word count verification and to make it official.

I'm on Chapter 8 of a 10 Chapter novel.
I'm in love with all my characters, including the horrible ones. Because I created them. (Mwah ha ha.)
And I'm sleep deprived in a newborn-baby-in-the-house way. Which I suppose is appropriate.

Next step? Sleep.
After that? Finish the novel, clean up the novel, have the thing critiqued, and then maybe find a home for it. It's easy to have lofty ambitions when one is giddy with lack of sleep and fulfillment of crazy goals.

Not to mention having faced a double-dog dare with honor.

And speaking of which, please note that whatever twisted mechanism in my psyche it is that has caused me to be so susceptible to dares of this nature has been shut off for the foreseeable future. So nyah nyah to you potential darers out there. Yes, you. You know who you are.

Although I do owe a boatload of thanks to the people who challenged, supported, encouraged and tolerated me and this crazy project for the last 30 days. Thank you SO MUCH. I couldn't have done it without you. Really.

And if you're lucky, I'll never do it with (to) you again.

46,023

...but who's counting?

43,311 words

At this rate, I hope to finish 50,000 words toward the novel by the end of the day Wednesday.

It's all so friggin' melodramatic, this story. I didn't expect it to be. But it is. There's no literary genius here, folks. I guess that'll have to come later ("in my later novels"?? !). This is just practice telling a longer, more involved story that spans several days, two continents, and characters from four countries. It's me praciticing not making it perfect but making it done.

Fun.

Really, just a hair before midnight...

And I'm posting to say that I'm at 39,000+ words. And I'll write the remaining 1000 to reach my 40k goal momentarily, then go to bed until 4am (having slept 8-11pm already). Such strange hours I keep, I know. But it works. Short term.

Back to it...

Home, and happy

Returned from a great weekend with relatives, and am now spending catching up time with Beatrice the rat, who was obviously bored stiff while left alone for a few days.

The writing is coming along. It'll be some crazy push to make 50,000 words happen by midnight Wednesday, but I am still being stubbornly optimistic and hope to get there.

I can see, now, however, that 50,000 words won't be the end of this particular novel at the pace its going - in its "fat draft" incarnation. However, I also know it will be reduced down like a good sauce by about 1/3rd before I'm really finished, so the end product will be closer to 50K when all is said and done.

Ahhh...vacation

A nice, long day. Went for a run, went to downtown Pismo with Mom to get a coffee, watched the kids play in the hotel pool (while I wrote a bit), went down to the beach to make sandcastles, get wet and gritty, and take lots of pics, had lunch out, shopped, and then hung out at my brother's family's home, playing games and writing some more.)

Nearly at 33,000 words but the night is young.

While the girls, exhausted from the day, are sacked out, and D. sleeps too (with earplugs in), I'll stay up and write some more.


The meme that Josh found and Suzanne beat me to:

What Kind of Princess are You?
brought to you by Quizilla



The Traditional Princess

You are generous, graceful, and practical with both
feet planted firmly on the ground. You tend to
be a little on the old-fashioned side. You
value home, hearth, and family life and love to
be of service to others.

Role Models: Snow White, Maid Marian

You are most likely to: Discover a hidden talent
for spinning straw into gold.




Okay. Yeah. That works for me.

Thanks

Among the things for which I am thankful?
Thank. You.


It has been a good day, although there was precious little time to work on the novel until nearly 10pm.
I am starting to think this thing will have to be written in whatever nonsense, non-English form it is I have come up with while sleep-typing, and then translated by a professional gobbledygook-to-English translator later. That's what I think.

31,000+ words .Must stay up sleep-typing until things get more interesting. One of the story's main characters is about to run into a spot of trouble that will galvanize the protagonist and other characters. I should at least try to get that far. At least.

Pismo

The beauty of staying at a nice resort is free wireless access.

So I'm going to have to be trickier with my fake ETD's for trips. We left at 12:30, two hours after the time I'd figured we'd really leave. Spent the afternoon driving, got to Pismo in time for dinner. My mom and sister arrived only a few minutes later (coming the same distance, but from the south instead of the north).

We had dinner at The Splash Cafe, which looks like a bit of a dive, but served the best clam chowder I've ever had. I'm not surprised by their claim that Gourmet & Bon Appetit have requested their recipe.

Tomorrow, we'll get together with my oldest brother and his family for Thanksgiving. There have been hints that my nephews might teach the girls to surf, and R & S are very excited by the prospect.

Now to write.
(I did manage to scribble a page or two in the car on the trip south today, so I'll have a bit to transcribe as a start.)

Doing the Math

29,500 words.

It looks like I'll need to write between 2800 and 3000 words a day to make the NaNo goal. Well, alrighty then. I guess that's what I'll do.

We're leaving tomorrow for a short Thanksgiving trip (but all evil blog-reading house burglars please note that our home has nothing worth stealing and even if it did, we have vicious attack parakeets guarding the place).

Our goal is to depart at a decent hour. Familiar as I am with our two-hours-late-for-any-vacation pattern, I'm telling myself we'll leave at 8:30 so that there will be a chance that we can leave by 10:30.

Apparently, while I was at a Writer's Group meeting / writing session tonight, D and R had a conversation about our ETD.

R: "Papa, we're leaving at nine tomorrow morning."

D: "Ha. If we leave at nine, I'll do a dance in my underwear on the hood of my truck."

pause

R: "I hope we leave at ten."

Not surprisingly...

I am fighting off a cold. It doesn't quite have me in its grip, yet. But there's this nasal-drip and congestion that made me feel all day as though I'd just had a good cry. Chose an early bedtime (and getting up just to write this) instead of staying up late for the novel (apart from 1 new paragraph).

But I do not feel at all worried, somehow. I feel completely sure that I'll be able to make the goal. Hope springs eternal. Stubborn determination in the face of adversity springs eternal, too. But that doesn't have the same ring to it.

27,216

Pre-Monday

I think that in the same way I try now to start being in Weekend Mode (at least mentally) as early as possible on Friday, the Sunday blues are a way of preparing for Monday.

When coworkers ask me on Monday mornings how my weekend was, it's very common for me to have to really scour my brain to recall what happened the previous two days. Part of this may be because I typically stay up too late Sunday nights (case in point), but I think it's also because of some psychological dividing line I lay down between the weekend and the workweek. Sometime Sunday night, I put the weekend behind me. After that, it's in the Past, as distant and fuzzy as Christmas of 1974 or that trip to Hawaii when I was four.

A three-day weekend, however, is a different matter. Three days or more off work, and I really have a hard time going back. It's as though I want to keep a foot, or at least a toe or two, in the water of the Days Away. And I really enjoy my job, too. If I hated my job, I think a 3-day weekend would be enough to make me never go back. One Monday holiday, and I'd be pouring gasoline on the Bridge of Current Employment and looking for somewhere else to be.

27,050 words.

The night is young

Actually, the morning is almost young, but I still wanted to get quite a bit more written tonight.

The problem is, I keep falling asleep at the keys. That's what I get for dealing with the girls' activities until 2pm and then spending until 7pm helping them reorganize and clean their rooms. My choice, so I can't complain. And on the surface, as far as I can tell, it was not because I had any desire not to write.

Maybe it's that I don't fully believe I can do this, at some level. So the choice I have to make in that case is whether to feel like I deserve to succeed, or give in to the old voices inside saying that if I succeed, someone else will end up paying for it and I'll get a heaping helping of Guilt instead of true Satisfaction. (To explain the history behind *that* pattern would take more time and energy than I have tonight, but maybe I'll spell it out it some day.)

Back to work, though. I'd like to be at 30,000 by Monday. I'm only at 24530. If I can get to 26000 tonight, that would be very good.

You've heard of ghost writing? Well, this is like ghost writing, except that it's sleep writing. In the middle of a perfectly normal narrative sentence, I find I'm writing about something bizarre out of my personal life and/or things that make no sense. You know, sentences like, "The next day, she bought a bicycle. It was an older the laundry is probably dry and I should would work in town to run errands like take out the trash farmer's market bread for R's homework tomorrow in math down the street." That's not an actual set of sentences from the doc, but it might as well have been! And I don't possess the talent that Joyce had to get away with truly bizarre stuff, you know?

"Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish." -Finnegans Wake, (4.15-17, quote found here.) Scary, huh?

A NaNo NoWrite day

So, I've had a one day sabbatical from actually writing any part of the novel. This has been a matter of survival, since I was completely on duty with other things and not able to sit down in front of a keyboard or paper until 9:30, and at that time, I just crashed.

It would have been a hard workweek even if it hadn't lasted 6 days. Throw in an event for the school every night Tues-Friday, a sick kid, a Top Secret High Security recovery job for a Hollywood Studio that consumed one of my days at work, a birthday party, and a half-dozen errands and the usual housekeeping and trying to write and job in between the teensy-tiny cracks. Okay. I am SO ready for this weekend. Even though there's a school committee meeting Sat. & a school parent/teacher retreat Sunday, ballet, riding lessons, and company over Sunday. That feels like nothing compared to last week.

I'm even more ready to write this weekend. Somehow. Anyhow.
And next week, when I will work only one full day and two very short days before we are on Thanksgiving vacation - well, next week may well be very good indeed.

23,212 words

..the last 20 of which were written while asleep. It's probably akin to what many great legendary alcoholic or drug-addled authors have done in the past: write while stoned out of their minds and read it over a day or week later, when they are a bit more sober, to see if it's really the brilliant genius work the thought it was when they were wildly composing things influenced by them being under the influence.

Except in this case, I think there might be at most one beautiful or really good line out of the thousands of lines I'll write. And I don't know which one it is. Have no idea. Maybe it's still to come.

Fighting off that I'm-so-tired-I-might-vomit-on-the-keyboard feeling the best way I know how to, now. No - not more coffee! Ha! I fooled you!

It's sleep. I love sleep. So very much. I want to marry sleep. Sleep and my bed. I want to marry them both. It will be a mixed marriage, but hey! in this day and age, that should be ok, right?

Right.

22,576 words - so many, but too few!

I feel like Captain Kirk, gesturing in high drama with a grimace on my face:

"Must...keep...writing..."

Or McCoy:

"Dammit, Jim! I'm a poet, not a novelist!"


But these are just the weird geeky thoughts of a middle-aged working mom who has stayed up past her bedtime. Now that the soy latte and espresso beans have worn off, I hear the big horizontal piece of furniture calling my name.

Proceeding Apace

21076 words. Interesting how dialog just doesn't fill out the word count as quickly as long, boring, expository babbling. Oh well. My characters need to have conversations.

R was home sick today with a very unhappy stomach, and I worked 5-8 then came home to take care of her; so I had time (in theory) but I wrote for less than an hour or so; busied myself instead with other chores and with napping to make up for the hours of sleep lost (from R's sick stomach).

I think she'll be back in school tomorrow. And I'll be back in work. And the novel writing will proceed apace after that. Apparently, the 20,000's are to be gotten out of as quickly as possible. So I'm going to try to de-quagmire myself as soon as possible, given Life etc.










A view from Aberystwyth, Wales, the town where much of the novel takes place.

sleep wins out

Chose sleep tonight over staying up late to write, but did get some writing done in the afternoon. At around 21,000 words - behind, considering, but not so bad if I really am able to get some extra writing in over the Thanksgiving break. (Plus, I have managed to exercise for at least 35 minutes 3 times in the last 4 days.)

As incentive for the novel, I'm telling myself I can't read anymore of the delicious sci-fi candy Dangerous Notes until I write to the climax of my own story. I'm just prior to that in Gillian Bradshaw's book, and am afraid I'll lose some of my own energy in the wind down of her plot.

But allow me to plug her work while I'm at it.

I realize that yesterday's snippy sassy post was not only tardy, it was rude. I'm officially sending it to the back of the class, and am apologizing for my behavior. I (aHEM) can see that I'm having a hard time owning up to it when I completely and utterly forget to pre-date and post-post.

Tonight, however, (and I find this ironic), it truly was 11:59pm when I started this post. But who would believe that of the wolf-crying blogger?

What are you smoking?

If you think there was no post from Sunday 11/13/05, you must be smoking something.

See?

There's this post! Here it is. See?

I'm at 20,000 by the way.

Motivation

However one can get it.

The novel takes place in Wales, and although I used to say I could never write while listening to music, I've found myself listening to Welsh tunes - from traditional to contemporary rock - and writing whatever scenes in the novel are inspired by them.

I've also been listening to quite a bit of spoken Welsh. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that listening to Welsh can't be all that enjoyable, even if you understand one word in ten, and even if it's not in the same room as an actual Welsh person (which would require a mask for protection against the spit produced when a native speaker says, "Machynlleth" for example).

But admitting that I've been listening to Welsh is like admitting I've been eating two pounds of chocolate at day. I'm owning up to the height of self-indulgence, here. If I'd realized that writing a novel was a good excuse to immerse myself again in Wales and all things Welsh, I would have done this years ago.

And no, I haven't been eating two pounds of chocolate a day. Because of course, writing a novel in a month does not produce enough stress in my life. So I'm also concurrently trying to lose weight before seeing relatives at Thanksgiving - watching the calories and exercising a bit more.


18,000+ words. 32,000 to go. Yikes!

What alarm?

So have you ever gone to sleep earlier than you expected to and slept later than you'd planned?

Me too.

Lightly carried

Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

The translation is "Have patience and endure; this unhappiness will one day be beneficial," but I like to think that if Ovid were alive today, he'd be saying, "Hang in there, kid. It'll pay off."

This is the kind of pearl of wisdom and encouragement one runs into when researching Welsh proverbs at the World of Quotes site, I guess. When one is really writing a novel and not surfing the net, of course. Or wasting time talking about going to the gym but not really going. You know, when one is busy writing, one just happens to stumble across such quotes. Quickly, and with one click, and not after an hour of browsing the web or any such nonsense. Of course.

(Just shy of 13,500 words.)

Catching up

...on sleep, that is. I've worked only a few minutes on the story tonight, but I've chosen to skip the early evening coffee, and so I'm falling asleep as I type each sentence, and I have to admit that more than 3 nights in a row of fivish hours of sleep is my limit at present. I do not want to push myself too hard and get sick.

Tomorrow I *may* be able to catch up a bit, I hope. Otherwise, I'm starting to think weekends are the best chance I have to write bigger chunks. Too bad I'm working Sunday.

Anyway, I've fallen asleep three times just writing this! So I'm giving myself a break and going to visit that nice friendly big horizontal piece of furniture in the other room for 6 or 7 hours.

12,000 and change

...still chapter 2, though!

pre-writing blog

Just to be different, I'm blogging first then working on The Novel tonight. If I get some super-duper word count before my eyes fall out of my head and start bouncing around between my keyboard and my wrist pad, I'll post it here. Then I'll pick up my eyeballs and go to bed.



(Another shot from after the Run With The Giraffes event last month.)

Just over 10,000

So it feels like I'm finally getting to know my characters better. It's like we've all had a drink or two at the party and are starting to loosen up a bit. A few more Gin & Tonics and the skeletons might start rolling out of the closets. The plot is becoming more solid as well. It gives me hope. No sleep, but hope.

Working on Chapter 2

Of I don't know how many chapters.
The luxury of writing a novel instead of a poem or story is that not only can I let my characters ramble on, but for the sake of this crazy word count, it's to my advantage if it takes pages for not much to happen.

Except, of course, that when I do a new draft, it'll be half the size of whatever this ends up being.

And in spite of that luxury, I'm only at 9,000 words. Ah, well. That's what happens when one is still trying to do other things like go to the gym and then spend 4 hours at children's birthday parties.

I think I'll have a couple of hours free tomorrow, though.
For now, it's nearly midnight, and I'm turning into a pumpkin...

8058 if you must know

Dear Small But Beloved Reading Audience (all 6 of you!),
For those of you who are asking, I've reach 8,058 words. I hope to be much closer to 13,000 by tomorrow morning, though, so I won't be spending much time blogging.

Get-well-soon wishes to Suzanne's M, and condolences to Suzanne on the demise of her beloved car. (But we're so glad you're all right!)

Can't Blog...sleeping...

...but I'm toasty warm from being under a blanket on the couch and from a blazing fire D made in the wood-burning stove, so it's a very happy kind of sleepy that I'm feeling.

Update on novel when I have something more positive to report. Today was more of a stare-out-the-window-and-figure-out-the-plot kinda day than a pound-it-out-on-the-keyboard kinda day. Also, (not that I'm complaining), I was only home for 30 minutes between 4:45am and 8:30pm, and once I got home, I did nothing more than get the kids to bed and fall asleep on the couch. C'était la vie aujourd'hui.

Another added benefit

Because I have to write this novel during whatever slivers of free time I have in my schedule, I found myself writing for about an hour while the girls had gymnastics lessons today. Imagine working on a novel while in a huge gym full of kids running around and coaches yelling instructions and parents gossiping over coffee. Throw in the siblings of the kids in class, bored and restless and underfoot.

Not conducive. Not exactly a room of one's bloody own.

But I managed to crank out a page or so in between helping with homework (my kid's and that of another random 5th grader there) and supervising my other child (and the other 5th grader's little sister) so that they were somewhere between entertaining each other and setting the place on fire. (It's a fine line, but if you're a parent, you've already had to walk it.)

So what I'm saying is that somehow, I've developed a way to concentrate in the midst of total chaos. Say it with me, now: "Whoo-hoo!"

Lisa suggested I keep a word count of the novel-in-progress on my blog. Not a bad idea. But which word count to use? The one automated by Word itself is probably more generous than an editor would consider. The method I'd learned about 15 years ago is to count words per line and lines per page and work out the average. And then there's the standard "about 250 words per (doublespaced) page." But for the sake of simplicity, I'll go with Word's calculation and then add some extra words (if possible) for insurance.

And drat. I found this note in a NaNoWriMo forum that addresses what one can include and what one can't include towards the final word count: "The only real limits are that it has to be written in November, and not beforehand." So ridiculously long (but new) chapter titles would count, but not the pages I'd written toward another novel and am incorporating into this novel - not, that is, until I have completed the necessary modifications to move them from 1st person to 3rd and from near-past to distant past. That is to say, I'll be re-writing and putting little bits and pieces from previous-year's notes in this new work, but until I actually put them there, I should not count them. This dramatically decreases my count. By like 5,000 words. Blast.


At any rate, kudos (read: are you insane?) to Josh for picking up the same gauntlet he threw down for me. We're on our way!

Day Two Observations

1. Much of writing a novel consists of staring into space thinking about the characters and plot. This is critical for my process, anyway. Driving and showering seem to be great times to hash things out mentally before I waste time wandering around on a page headed in the wrong direction. It means missing Morning Edition and potentially forgetting to use conditioner, but one must make sacrifices.

2. I am only deluding myself if I think I really will go to bed on time but then get up two or three hours later to write for an hour or two. It's a lie! A big fat lie! And also not good for my health--mental or otherwise. I'd learned this lesson earlier with my blogging but apparently seem to think that because I AM WRITING A NOVEL the laws of physics and such go out the window. And float. (Get it? Laws of physics...float? Ha!) Anyway, I can manage the going to bed on time or the staying up to write, but doing both means neither has any quality to it. Note to self: remember One Needed Thing. At a time.

3. Taking the girls to the library while I write is a great idea, and should give me another 2-3 hours a week of production time, but it works even better if I don't spend the time balancing my checkbook.

4. My house is likely to stay much cleaner than usual during NaNoWriMo. True, any time spent not writing is spent not writing, but see #1 above. The fact is, I can and do decide on things like the hair color, eye color, names and history of my characters, as well as plot points, while washing dishes or folding laundry. This cuts down on time spent staring into space while a Word doc is sitting on the screen in front of me, mocking me.

5. The support that friends and spouses show during this time is very helpful. Thanks to all. Um. I mean spouse, of course. Mine, that is. Not that my friends aren't spouses, some of them. But they're not my spouses. Except that one. Of course.

Proof in the Pudding

So the first day of NaNoWriMo is done, and what have I learned?

That I am already too dependent on making this happen through the use of lots of caffeine.

That since I will be single-parenting at night for at least a week while D works a late shift, I'll have to be even more creative and disciplined than I thought I'd have to be.

That if I'm not willing to cut out all social activities for the month to do this (I've talked about my stoopid pride before, haven't I?), I will have to expect to pay the price.

That one of the compromises I make might could be educational videos (like the French language instruction one we currently have from the library) to keep the kids entertained while I write.

But so far, I'm on target. Lots of words written (over 3,000 so far, but that includes a section written 2 years ago that will have to be pared down and re-incorporated correctly).

A fat, horrible, first part of a first chapter of the first draft. An outline. A voice starting to emerge.