Nanowrimo Party and Warnings

Last night was the kick off party for Nano in the Charlotte area. The first thing we did was play the penny game which is an easy way of introducing yourself. You take a penny from a bag, look at the year on it, and when it's your turn, you introduce yourself and tell one story from your life in that year. Mine happened to be the year I dislocated my shoulder while throwing away a bag of garbage. What are the odds I'd get the year 1982 on my penny? *rolling eyes* It made for a good ice breaker, though. After that, how bad can your life be, right?

In all seriousness, though,I was impressed with the teenagers who dragged their parents out to come to this party. It is a relief to me that there are so many young people taking writing seriously, I mean beyond texting. These kids are organized and ready to go. Five of them are in the same creative writing class in school and were the representatives for the group that are doing Nano this year. Apparently it is not a school assignment. They found out about it and formed a club to do it.

Another of the teens is 14 and full of ideas. Her goal is to put 80,000 words down this year because she found out that though 50,000 sounds like a lot of words, it wasn't enough to tell the story she wanted to tell. By the way, she got 50,001 words last year.

Monday starts the month of the hand cramps and brain fog. You'll know a Nano-er by the glazed look in their eyes and the mumbling to themselves about story lines, dialog, and characters. Here are a few rules for your own protection during the month of November while Nano-ers are running around trying to get their stories down.

• Try to be patient if a complete stranger stops you in the grocery store and has a mostly one sided conversation with you about dragons blushing and the common hair color of gnomes.
• If you're buying lotto tickets, stick them in your purse or pocket quickly because a Nano-er is likely to snatch them out of your hand to write down a sudden inspiration.
• If you're in traffic and the car in front of you stops suddenly and you see a frantic search going on inside the car, calmly go around, the person is trying to find some paper and a pen. Honking only makes them lose their train of thought and they become mildly violent because that could have been the perfect ending to the story.
• Don't mess with a Nano-er at 11:30 pm November 30th. They are like bears coming out of hibernation in the spring and will harm anyone who comes between them and their 50,000th word.

So, there you have it, survival tips if you live around Nano people. Just be patient and recognize they've lost their mind for the month and they're not really responsible for what happens. December 1st, you'll have the normal person back again.

Here's a quick update in other news, Em has a tablet that she loves. She's been drawing her cartoon people like crazy. I have a meeting with one of T's teachers and counselor on Monday. It seems like the teacher thinks he can do more than he does and is confused as to why he doesn't push himself to excel. Hmmm, I think it's called a teenage boy.

Nano Starts Soon

October is almost over which means Halloween is upon us and Nano starts soon. Our organizer here in Charlotte, Charity, is doing a great job and the writing energy is tremendous on the Nano site. The real question is, on October 15th will any of us be quite so pumped and ready to write? From experience I can tell you ... no.

By the middle of the month we'll all be waking up in the morning wondering what kind of idiots we were to sign up for this impossible task. I mean really, what were we thinking? 50,000 words in 30 days? Are we nuts? Apparently we are because there are winners. There are crazy people out there who write a complete novel in 30 days and go on to polish it and sell it.

I'm not one of them but I hear they exist. Could be one of those urban legends but I sincerely hope not. That hope is what keeps me writing for Nano. I've finished, I've been a 50,000 word winner, but I've not written anything that is close to salable, at least not in it's current form. I've tried the revision process, which any of you who have followed here long enough can attest to. I've done an epic fail at revision.

I've been told that the best thing to do with a Nano story is to put it away. Don't look at it, don't think about it, don't revise it. Just put it away for at least a month if not 6 months or more. Yeah right, fat chance. After all, I've just produced this whopping monster of words, I have to cut it down to size, organize and rewrite the thing while it's fresh in my mind. Wrong. Burn out. Severe hatred. Shelved for life. Been there, going to try not to do that this year.

So, now that you know more about Nano and the process than you ever wanted to, anyone want to come write with me? I assure you, few are professionals and all are welcome. All you have to do is write. This is for you Histrel. *evil grin* Ha! Nailed you! That'll teach you to let me know that you're watching my Nano progress.

Anyway, if you're interested, post a comment and we'll make arrangements to "meet" and record our progress. Go to nanowrimo.org and sign up. You'll probably find a group where you live. Above all, have fun.

Nano, Halloween, and Gaming

I'm officially part of Nano this year. I even signed up to take napkins and cups to the kick off party next Friday. Still, there's that inner frozen writer walking around reeking with the smell of fear, it's eyes filled with apprehension. What if I sit down and there's nothing there? What if I go all month and there's only a blank document at the end of it? Anyone have a paper bag? Anyone? How about a Valium?

Yep, that's the way it feels when you know you have exactly 30 days to write a minimum of 50,000 words. Not that something horrible happens to you if you don't. There's just the shame in front of your Nano buddies, and if you're like me and have stupidly blogged about it, the shame in front of THE WHOLE WORLD. Luckily I only have 10 followers. Well, except for anyone who reads this because it's attached to facebook. Great, no pressure.

Em was invited to a Halloween party. Guess who she's going to be. Zim, of course. She just has to figure out how to do his hair. If her hair was just a tad bit shorter, I could slap some goop in it and make it do the little curly-cue thing on top but her hair is too long and heavy. I suggested she make a cap with the hair on it. She's thinking it over.

T picked up Fallout New Vegas yesterday. Apparently, it's in post-apocalyptic Vegas and everyone is some kind of mutant. According to T, it's a good game. I like games like Destroy All Humans which was totally dorky, but, hey, it's my speed. I can just feel T and Em rolling their eyes at me.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. Hyperventilation, well-shellacked hair, and mutants in Vegas. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Nano, School Writing, and New Authors

It's Nano time again but I haven't decided whether I'll be participating or not. With my school schedule, I'm not sure I'll have the time or the writing energy to get 50,000 words in print in a month. I may just try to keep track of the friends I made last year and hope they'll let me attend a few of the write-ins even though I'll be writing school papers and not a novel.

I've been writing business papers lately. My head is full of ethics and social responsibility. I don't enjoy researching businesses and their practices and deciding whether they have a heightened sense of ethical conduct or not. Unfortunately, there are not many out there that actually do. I've noticed that many of them do good with one hand while hurting the environment with the other. It all seems to come down to money. I get so disgusted with this class.

The writing part has been good for me though. I'm also taking a professional writing class that is changing how I look at writing. When I was a member of The Writing Bridge, there was one person that I never quite understood. She is very good at taking all the emotion out of a piece and looking at it in a completely objective manner. Her critiques were that way and her writing was that way. This class explains it. She is a researcher and her writing professionally has to be objective, without emotion. You can't do that all day and not have it spill over into your writing. It all starts to make sense now. She was the hardest person for me to understand when she'd critique my work because I look at writing completely differently than she does. Now, I look at what she's written and I get what she's saying. So, thank you for the great critiques, Saoirse, even though the thanks is a bit late.

I've been reading two authors that are new to my library. The first one I finished was a period mystery piece called A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch. It was an Agatha Award nominee so I thought it should be pretty good. He did a decent job of constructing the mystery but I didn't feel pulled into the world he was trying to build. If you do a period piece, you have to know that time thoroughly in order to make it believable. While it was a quick read and fairly entertaining, it seemed a bit flat to me. The characters weren't as engrossing as I'd like them to be. The hero is a happy-go-lucky sort who doesn't have to work at all and solves mysteries because he's basically bored with his life. No problems there although a good dark side to his nature would have made him a bit more interesting. The mystery was pretty well laid out with some very nice red herrings although when you get to the end you've known who did it for a while. It was too obvious. Sometimes you just want to bonk the detective in the head with a board to get them to wake up. Mr. Finch has two other books published in this series and I'm hoping they'll be a bit better. It feels like his characters need to grow up a bit before they're really good characters you want to keep with you. Perhaps Mr. Finch will get better with time and practice. I hope so.

I'll let you know what I think of the second writer when I finish reading the book. It's all right so far but not as good as I was looking for it to be.

Just a quick side note. For anyone out there who is a Sherlock Holmes fan, try the series of books written by Laurie King. She writes of Holmes in his retirement after he got married. She constructs great mysteries and stays true to Doyle's vision of Holmes while adding her own touch with Holmes' wife. They are the best I've found for additions to the Holmes legacy.

The latest thoughts from the kids are: if you're speaking French, you're probably spitting on people and Zim rules. I know you couldn't possibly live without those two pieces of knowledge.