Week 2 Recap

Week two didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Thursday was good, but Friday we had to pick my husband's co-worker up from the hospital. Between picking up his prescription and taking him home, we didn't get to dinner until 7:30 and I wasn't able to start writing until around 9:00. Saturday wasn't much better. I went in to work in the morning, and took a trip downtown to the Bite of Zupan's, a free event where you get to sample all sorts of yummy stuff. The line was long, but it was really worth it.

However, it meant I didn't get home until 4:00, just in time to spend about an hour writing before I had to run off for my Shadowrun game. Between the two days, I wrote about 1,600 words total, which knocked me off track. On the other hand, I managed to stay on track for 9 whole days...

So now back to playing catch up.

The First Week

As the first week of Nano draws to a close, here's a brief recap:

I started the month off by attending a midnight write-in and took the 1st off. That gave me a 2,000+ word day. The next day wasn't so hot.

Saturday, I had a 2,000+ word day, thanks to a trip to the Dalles (about an hour from our place). We spent the night because my husband was playing in a disc golf tournament the next day. Though my research showed there weren't any restaurants or coffee shops really close to the park, I chose not to have faith in the internet and believed it was simply a lack of information.

Turns out, the park is high up on a hill (and offers some really awesome views) in the middle of a residential zone. The internet told me of a tea parlor downtown, but of course, it wasn't open on Sunday. That left a Burgerville and a coffee shop. I didn't like the vibe of the coffee shop, and wasn't hungry enough to want to hang at the Burgerville, so I bought lunch and took it back to the park. Because I didn't have electricity to power the lap-top, I had to take a few breaks, and also took a short cat nap. Between spending the whole day at the park and driving home, I had a a record-breaking 3,000+ word day.

When the weekdays arrived, I of course haven't written nearly as much, but I've finished off the week with 1,000+ days, each a little better than the other. Even so, thanks to the momentum, I've actually managed to stay on track (and ahead of) the 1,667 word a day goal for the entire week! I am so very excited. This is the best start I've ever had for Nanowrimo.

Now the trick is to keep it up for Thursday and Friday...until the weekend arrives again.

However, we're going out to lunch Friday for a co-worker's birthday, my son is coming down from Fort Lewis (he's an Army Ranger) for the weekend, and I have a Shadowrun game Saturday night. Plus I need to go into work. Then of course, I'm having issues with my car again. I'm going to have the battery tested. Hopefully, that's all it is.

So on to the challenges of Week 2...

On the First Day of Nano...

I began my first day of Nano in earnest at midnight, sharing my table with a first-time Nanoer who works as a cab driver. He'd bought an ancient laptop on Craigslist for $100 so he could write in his cab while waiting for fares. He left after about an hour, and I wished him good luck.

I left a half-hour later with over 716 words done, drove home and went to bed. Before my
husband left for work, he asked me to write 3,000 words and have dinner ready by the time he got home. 3,000 is more than I can typically write in a day, so I got him to agree to 2,000 and dinner ready.

When I woke up, I established that my goal was to shower, dress, do laundry and dishes and have the hamburger defrosting in the sink so I could start working by 12. I completed these goals by 10:30, which means I'm going to start at 11:00. My Rhapsody radio is fired up, and I'm ready to start....

So my husband calls at 4:45 to say that he wanted to stay on the West Side and play disc golf. It was a very nice fall day (pretty rare in these parts), so I said why not. It gave me more time to get dinner ready. Turns out I'd need it because we were out of spaghetti. But I'd already met my goal, and had over 2,000 words completed. :)

It is now about 9:30. I'm pretty tired, so I think I'll turn in as soon as ER is over.

I'm Gonna Wait Till the Midnight Hour

So here I am, Halloween night, waiting for the stroke of midnight at a local coffee house with several other of my fellow Nanoers. I'm told that a pirate will announce when midnight arrives, and we can start novelling in earnest.

On the subject of Halloween, we had 43 trick-or-treaters tonight. Not too shabby, when you consider that we live on a horseshoe drive and we missed the trick or treaters of the five o'clock hour. Now, next year, Halloween will fall on a Friday. Am I going to attend a midnight write-in? Heck no. I hate sharing the road with drunk drivers.

Ten minutes and counting....

Halloween preparations and Nano news

This weekend actually proved pretty productive, in spite of having to go in and work for four hours.

- At work, in the four hours, I turned in the last of my September P & Ls, got my property mailings done, and was able to box up some of my 2006 files, giving me more room to work with.

- On the halloween front: Bought the pumpkin and candy for the trick-or-treaters and got the last piece of my costume. The yard is now decorated and a lot of leaves raked and swept. Some of them even made it into the yard debris bin!. Decided I'm going to make Peanutty Halloween Cookie Pizza, which is a new twist on this recipe: http://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/ShowRecipe.aspx?rid=15308
It uses chocolate chip dough instead of sugar cookie, and halloween m&ms take the place of candy corn, and it also uses dry roasted peanuts. Today I also finished making a black cat necklace that I bought unassembled at Michaels. I'm currently working on the favors I'm going to give out to my co-workers. Two pencils, and a couple of pieces of candy, tied with orange ribbon. Sadly, it took me three tries to find it. Freddy's doesn't have gift ribbon in either orange or black! Big Lots came through, and most of their Halloween stuff was 50% off. Three are done, seven to go.

And that brings me to something that's very irritating. The stores already have their Christmas stuff out! Grr! Whatever happened to enjoying Halloween and Thanksgiving?

-Nano news: Last week, I took a page from Chris Baty's No Plot, No Problem and cleaned off my desk. One week later, it's still fairly clean. :) I had another idea for a novel. I'm not going to discuss it here, because whenever I've brought the topic up on the net, I wind up having technological issues. Only thing is, I can't see very far past the idea, which is typically not enough for a Nano. So that's on hold for a bit. I also attended the local Nanowrimo kickoff party for the first time ever. That was kind of fun, and we even got a little treat bag to take home with us. :) Portland's got a lot of people doing Nano, it seems, because there were at least 50 people in the US Bank meeting room.

I said I'm going to use dice as part of my novel, so allow me to introduce you to them. It's a Chessex 7 die polyhedral set, frosted teal with white numbers. http://www.chessex.com/Dice/Frosted/Teal.htm I won this set at one of Gamestorm's last GM raffles (they use a different method of giving away swag these days). Oh, yeah, Gamestorm is a local gaming convention. I've been attending it since its very early days. Since most of the games I play now involve the use of only one type of die (6-sided or 10-sided), this is actually the only polyhedral set I own. So why not put it to use for a gaming related novel?

Gotta run...I think I'm getting a cold, so it's off to take some Cold-Ez to ward it off. Zinc lozenges are icky, but they do work!

Going with the Flow

This week, I made a fair amount of progress with my Nano novel. I came up with the title, as I'd previously mentioned. I plan to use some actual dice rolls as part of the story, so I'm going to pack a d20 with my laptop.

The characters are starting to flesh themselves out, and the outline is starting to take shape, though I'm not quite sure where to take the story yet.

Well, there's still some time to come up with it....

A Roll of the Dice

So I have a title. The opening scene is actually inspired from a real-life event.

My husband and I went to have dinner around 9 pm and stopped at IHOP. We walked in the doors, and the restaurant was lit, but totally deserted. There was barely any noise from the kitchen and no one was around to greet us.

Finally, someone showed up to serve us and seat us.

So thanks to the Dare I took, I dug through my Yahoo account's Spam folder and came up with the names for my characters.

This year, I'm trying out a little bit of new technology, something called a Liquid Storybook Binder. It's supposed to help you organize a novel and also lets you write it. Though I've used Word and Notepad with the same result.

Dusting off the Cobwebs

Wow, has it been almost a year already? And what a busy one it was, just as this one is now. I took a week's vacation in September, and I'm only just now getting caught up at work, just in time for all the month-end fun to begin.

So here it is, October again, and Nanowrimo looms just around the corner. At least I've decided on my costume for this year. It took a bit of doing, because finding a devil costume that is appropriate for an office is not the easiest task. Fortunately, Party City allows you to try on costumes. I was skeptical that an "Adult Standard" would fit, but it did, and as a bonus, the neckline has a drawstring that allows one to make it lower or higher.

The Nano site is currently as slow as molasses (can't imagine how bad it would be with dialup), but I'm hoping it'll improve. I did donate my $10 to keep the site going. I've taken a few dares, and finally, finally, things are starting to flow a little, and I think I have a story starting to take shape.

This year, I'm going to try to get a good start by attending a midnight write-in and taking the 1st day in November off. We shall see how well the strategy works...