Bethanie's Brain

So we drove home from Florida yesterday and are safely back in Itty-Bitty City once again, where it is considerably colder than the shorts-and-T-shirt temps we had became used to. Sad, that, but one cannot vacation forever when one is not independently wealthy, which - sadder still - we are not. The trip went well (no one puked!), but I wrote NOTHING. Instead of working on my own novel, I spent my non-driving hours reading some (truly dreadful) "stock" romance novels (I got them for free and I believe it to be an essential part of my writer education to read other fiction genres (and I learned a lot - mostly about what NOT to do - but more about that later)), regardless of whether or not they actually interest me (and let's just say "stock" romance is, erm... not my first choice). Anyway. The point of this post is to lay out in public the fact that I have not yet completed my December goal of 22,500 words and the phrase "The End" typed at the bottom o...

Still making progress, but slogging along. Christmas, Florida, and family are NOT conducive to writing. Like, at all. I wrote all of 29 words before the kids woke up yesterday, and then it was non-stop Everything Else all day long. Tennis, shopping, Bananagrams ( great game!), and movies (Wall-e, which is effing brilliant) - oh, yes, and eating, let's not forget eating - took up the rest of the day. This morning I managed to get just over 1000 words, so all is not lost, but I wanted to be DONE by now! Arrrgh! At least, the story is where it is supposed to be. Two more scenes and That's. It. Until it's time to edit and probably add another 20K... OK, I think I'll go quietly insane now... .

Hello from sunny - but cool - Florida! Yes, we're here! We made it! And with only two bouts of car sickness (thank you, Ms. Baby) and a minimum of 'are-we-there-yets' (thank you whoever invented portable DVD players). It was one long, long day, but whatever. It's over and I went swimming yesterday. Progress on NaNo 2008 creeps along. I wrote NOTHING in the car at all, though I did get some really sticky plot problems worked out. I don't know why, but driving always helps immensely in that area. Terry Brooks mentions this in his book on writing, and I doubt it would work for everyone (not everyone actually likes driving), but there's something about having a particular proportion of my brain occupied with a task like that that frees the rest of the brain for more interesting things. So, yippee for that! It's hard to find time to write here, though. The kids want to play. My sisters and my mom want to shop and talk and eat and drink coffee ALL DAY. I thi...

Thanks to Soleil's blog, I found a nifty little word counter thing-a-ma-bob! The Angel and the Assassin 72,022 / 80,000 (89.0%) This is cool, because it shows what I did before (the gray area) and the progress I'm making on 'phase II', so to speak. Very cool! And I think if you click on it, you can get one too! :-D EDIT: Ooo, weird... does it look all broke up to you? It seems to be fine in my sidebar, but here in the actual post, it's ... been julienned! Ack! .

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 70,121 Cumulative Total Words for December: 13,432 Aaaah! I broke 70K last night and it felt good. Bran and Heilla are still a crazy mess and I still don't understand a few critical things that are happening, but I'm just going to go with it. I really, really want to finish the draft by the end of December and I'm running out of time! We leave for Florida next Sunday, and between Christmas and my sisters, I have a feeling not much writing is going to get done there... Plus, there are some other BIG things going on: I got my business licenses from the county and city last week, which means I really need to get the content written for the website so it's ready when the design is done. Saturday in the mail I got notification that the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences thinks I have enough experience to be eligible to take their certification exam - woo-hoo! and I'm thrilled, but now I have to go through the study guide, figure out whe...

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 68,936 Cumulative Total Words for December: 12,247 I am happy to report that the pogo stick worked and the story is now suffering under the weight of some serious Plot Bunny Proliferation Problems (which I will take any day over Brick Walls of Utter Nothingness, thankyouverymuch). Yahoo! In part, I owe this wonderous turn of events to the fact that I woke up at 3:30 AM horrified that I still had No Idea what Fancy Dessert I was going to bring this afternoon to Christmas-Early-Because-Everyone's-Traveling-This-Year at the in-laws (OMG, did that even make sense? how much coffee have I had today...). Thanks to Internet-on-my-Phone, I soon found something (cranberry orange bundt cake!) and tried to go back to sleep. However. Bran and Heilla kept jabbing me in the back and whinging on about how they were cold, lost in the fog and hungry and would I please, please, pleeeeeeeease consider getting out of bed (even though it was still dark) and get them out ...

For once, not one of my own... Happened across this today: What happens when you remove the first "e" from the word "genome"? Yes! You guessed it! You get a "gnome-wide association study"!!!!! 'Cuz, yanno, the better we understand the gnomes among us, the happier our gardens will be. Or something. Anyway, Go Gnomes!! .

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 65,433 Cumulative Total Words for December: 8,744 Yep. Still steaming along and even averaging over 900 words a day! Which is bloody amazing considering how much else is going on (most of which I can't even talk about, because it's so top secret...). Unfortunately, it's all about to come to a crashing halt. At least, it's trying to... I can see a brick wall on the horizon. See, Bran and his girl have to escape. They're currently on a forced march through the wilderness to a worse prison than they were in before. But that isn't even the real problem. The real problem is that they have to get away before the bad guy catches up to them, and he's not far behind. Only they have no means of getting away because they're marching through a meadow. There's no cover. No bushes. No boulders. Not so much as a tall weed to hide behind. Plus, it's early spring, so the meadow grass is all flat and half rotted from sitting unde...

Or, at least, there is someone with some sense out there. Someone posted a link to this NY Times article on writing to the AMWA freelance listserve. It's brilliant and painfully, painfully true. Typing Without A Clue And it reinforces my sense that SOMETHING has got to change in the publishing industry, and that if it doesn't change itself, we-the-writers will figure out a way to circumvent it. Maybe POD. Maybe PDF. Maybe something entirely different. I don't know. But there has be a way. There has to be. Because I'm tired of waiting to read Susan's novel about Trevor and the gang . I'm tired of not having hard copies of Joely's stuff . I'm tired of reading about people like Joe the Plumber and OJ Simpson getting published, while people who can actually tell a damn good story don't. OK, so what if the rules are the rules and life isn't fair. I say let's change the damn rules already. So there. .

So Ms. Baby (a.k.a. the Loudest Child on the Planet), out of the blue this morning, starts yowling at the top of her lungs and stomping her feet as she marches across the living room floor, comes to an abrupt halt between my desk and the couch her sister is sitting on, grins around at her now rapt audience and says, "Hi Everybody!". Something tells me her teenage years are going to be... "interesting". .

Boss Lady had a meeting today with somebody who arrived when I was away from my desk (they have to walk by me to get to her), so I didn't know who it was. I could hear them talking, but they were speaking in Chinese, which I don't understand well enough to figure out who the visitor was from listening in. And then the visitor laughed - a good laugh, genuine, not fake. And then I smiled, because I knew exactly who it was. It's a good thing when you can recognize a person from their laugh, and it makes you smile, you know what I mean? .

Amazingly enough... I have not yet fallen behind! OK, OK - so I'm only going for 750 words/day. That's still the Mt. Everest of goals some days, what with grant deadlines, kids, colds, Christmas, and the ever-present Hell known as Housework... :) And things are getting "interesting". I had this one character that had sort of dead ended during NaNo, so I had just let her sit and pout in a corner. Monday morning on the commute in to FPU, she burst out with what actually happens with her while her cousin is being tortured...! Yahoo! Total December Words: 2,399 Total Words for the 2008 NaNo: 59,088 .

I was going to actually sit down and re-figure out how much story I have to write, then post a number, but naturally Boss Lady has a grant to submit tomorrow, so - no time for such pleasures... However, my ball park guess is 9 more scenes and since my scenes tend to run about 2500 words, it comes out to 22,500 for December, which it totally doable. I've set my daily goal at 750 words and snagged that easily yesterday. Tonight, of course, will all about the angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels) and the genes in this pathway related to breast cancer survival. Oh, the joy. I can hardly contain it. Gah! .

Weeee-hooo! I won! *does happy dance* Naturally, the story is only 2/3 to 3/4 of the way to the extra-happy happy-dance state of Actually Finished, but it's a good start. I took Turkey Day off (well, from writing-writing... I took a notebook and pen and worked out the final scenes in the car on the way to the sister-in-law's house), but on Friday decided rather than be trampled to death in a shopping frenzy, I would get back to work and try to get as much done as I could, so I would have less to do in December -- because I WILL finish the story in December, come hell or high water. We've got a long (15-hour) car ride to my parents' place in Florida, so there's a good chunk of time, even if I have to do a lot of the driving myself (I may be driving one way with just me and the girlz, but we'll see, we have yet to finalize dates and such...) Anyway, I'm still using the 200-word Trick , because it works so incredibly well for me. I routinely hit 2,000 on ...

Word Count as of 7 AM today: 46,009 Word Count as of 6 PM today: 49,018 Which is impressive for me, until you consider that I've been at it just as hard for the last 3 hours, BUT : Word Count as of 9 PM today: 49, 436 Oooo - 400 words in three hours. Positively smokin' , baby. *blows raspberries* Why, I cannot say, but it's alway the last 700 words of NaNo that are the hardest to spit out onto the bloody page. Always. They kill me. .

Itty-bitty, 197os kitchens with NO COUNTERSPACE are clearly in violation of the Geneva Convention. I'm sure of it. I mean, seriously, I've had dollhouses with bigger kitchens than mine. Bah! Humbug. .

So if you have kids and you write, you know how hard it can be to find writing time. Some days, it is well nigh impossible ... OK, make that most days.... And then you decide to do NaNoWriMo . And discover that you knew nothing about trying to find writing time. :) This year has been especially challenging for me, because my work schedule has changed since last year, so the time I used to have on reserve for writing - 5 AM to whenever the kids woke up - is no longer available, because I'm getting ready for and then am on my way to ye olde work-work. That has left the couple of hours after the kids go to bed at 8 or 8:30, by which time I'm usually asleep on my feet and incapable of writing anything I don't hate myself for in the morning. Two weeks ago, however, I found the Magic Elixir. No, really! And I managed laundry and kitchen dredging at the same time! You think I'm lying - and that's OK. But it's all true! What's the big secret? Well, I do not ...

It is now midnight and I should be in bed, but I must express my ... I don't even know... shock, awe, amazement-at-the-shit-that-comes-out-of-my-head? Something like that. It's like this: My very boring, very plain, very straight laced, very innocent (or so I thought...) main character up and decided she could not avoid murdering someone today. Murder! She couldn't avoid it. She really couldn't. It was a terrible line, and she had to cross it, but I am appalled. Appalled . And very much not OK with this turn of events. (How sympathetic is a character that is that cold blooded??) But mostly, I am very, very shocked at how terrifyingly neatly this murder thing fits in with something else that I already knew about but didn't know the particulars of. See, there are these bloody knives that another character finds later on. Only I didn't know whose blood was on them or how it got there. And now I do. 0.0 .

It happens every time I write any kind of fiction. I don't know why it still surprises me. But it does. I guess there's just something sort of shocking (and exciting and magical, truth be told...) about your characters looking up from the page/screen, giving you the hairy eyeball, then shaking their heads at each other and - in unison- yanking the plot out from between your fingers. It's just so ... well, I don't know what to call it, but it's very similar to the rush I got in my younger (and fitter) days from skiing and rock & ice climbing. Thrilling, maybe? I don't know. That seems corny. Whatever. Let's just say it's just really, really cool when you realize that your charcters know your story better than you do. As you might have guessed, it happened again today. I had this scene all planned out where these two characters, who haven't been getting along, suddenly find some common ground. Only they didn't. Well, actually, they not on...

So I was sick yesterday - couldn't-get-out-of-bed sick, no less. And I didn't write a word. Not. One. Word. That is a new record low for me for a NaNo daily word count (previously, it was 57 - really!). My first ZERO day. Eep! I don't much like it, especially since - another first - I am officially BEHIND on the word count of the day tally. I've always, always, always been ahead. Always. Until now. Don't much like this either.... and I'm hoping I'm not starting a trend that will result in this being the first year I don't "win".... That would seriously suck. Seriously! .