Walking in London

That's what I was doing yesterday, and I woke up a bit stiff and sore from all the walking. I wish I'd had more time to spend there, but I got to see the Tower of London and the Globe, which is what I wanted, and the cruise on the Thames gave me a nice overview of the city. I even got a picture of Big Ben. Well, actually, I didn't, because Big Ben is actually the name of the bell INSIDE the clock tower and you can't actually go up there. :)

Taking pictures when the sun is starting to set is a bit tricky. I took a couple pictures of the clock because I wasn't sure I had a good look at it.

Three days to Nano. I'm not entirely ready. Two days to Halloween. I'm not sure I'm ready for that either, but I'll cope. My husband bought more candy while I was gone, and did get the grandkids' goodie bags delivered (though not quite correctly). Ah well, the only real difference was that the girls got hair ties, the boys got extra candy. :)

Well, off to Goring Street and a bit of trinket shopping. :)

Three Days and Counting

Okay, my one bag is now packed and zipped up. My carry-on is nearly ready to go. Now there are only a few little things left to do.

My oldest cat, Sasha already suspects something's up. She's been spending a whole lot of time snuggling on our bed. Poor kitty. I hate leaving them.

I sent off my Nanowrimo care package today. It contained all the essentials: Candy, notepads, writing implements, various sorts of caffeine (tea, coffee, etc.), a CD, bath fizzies, and a toy "Plot Ninja" along with potential plot devices. Hopefully she'll like it. :)

Getting There

I spent part of my break working on my Nano outline. Thankfully, the ideas were flowing. I also have my Nano care package made up and ready to be sent off to my 'partner' in Alabama. Part of my packing is done, along with some of the laundry I needed to do.

Even better, I only have my last two big properties left to turn in, so it's looking pretty good that I can wrap up the September stuff before I leave on vacation. I may even be able to start on October. :)

One week and counting....

It's Getting Closer!

Today was fairly productive. I got the treat bags mostly made up for the grandkids (and my husband ate several packages of Smarties). All I need now is a bit more chocolate. I decided to go with plastic pumpkins that I bought at Big Lots last year. They're small, but awfully cute.

Also did a little packing for my trip. Not much, just makeup for right now. I still need a lot of the clothes I plan to wear, and I so need to do some laundry.

So, back to Nano. I decided to sign up for the Care Package exchange program. Shouldn't be too tough really, considering I can add some of the same stuff for the Halloween goody bags.
I should start working on my outline a little more. Perhaps tomorrow. :)

Progress

I'd decided on the title a while back while looking at a Bicentennial quarter. It would be set in 2076, and be called Tricentennial. Problem was, I didn't have a clear direction for it.

Funny how things can change. In honor of the election year (I'm already sooo tired of the campaign ads), I've decided to put a little bit of a political spin on it. Of course, politics in 2070 aren't like politics in 2008.

My trip's less than 2 weeks away. I'm getting nervous now. I plan to start packing this weekend after my parents leave. I think I have all the things I need, it's just a matter of packing.

OMG!

It's almost time for Nanowrimo again. Well, let's start with an update. I did met the 50,000 word goal before the end of November. Yay, me!

So now for an update on a few things:

1) Work sucks. Hard. I have to work with a very catty bunch of women and it feels like I'm back in high school again! While one frustration factor has left, they chose not to replace her, so now we have to work harder. Oh, and did I mention we now have to plan all our overtime a week ahead?

2) My son came back from his second tour of duty and is now attending Ranger School. I haven't heard from him since July. :(

3) I've been trying to lose weight. I've done this by making small changes such as drinking more water, exercising more and making better food choices, but not actually dieting. I've lost 16 pounds since February. And on Labor Day, I found that I can now wear the next smaller size quite comfortably. I'm also finding myself at a bit of a plateau, so I'm going to have to step things up a little, I think.

4) I've got a big, fun and scary adventure planned for the end of October. I'm going to take a trip to England to visit a good friend. I've only left the continental U.S. once (to go to Hawaii) and I've only left the country once (to go to Canada). This will be an interesting experience. And as an added bonus, I'll be out of the country during the later part of the election campaign, so I'll miss the commercials.

5) This month is my 7 year wedding anniversary. :)

Okay, so on to Nanowrimo. I did think of a title: Tricentennial. It would be set in the year 2076. I've got a little bit outlined. I'm also trying to outline Love, War and Fast Food, and we'll see. But then again, with the presidential race looming, perhaps a bit of a political fiction might be in order.

But there's still a bit of time until Nanowrimo. :)

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...

Post Nanowrimo - Pre Holidaze

Well, another November has come and gone. The first part of the month, I got pretty behind because I had to work four ten hour days because I got Monday October 30th off.

I endured setback after setback, but finally, on the 18th, I started writing like a fiend, and finally got caught up on November 29th. This despite the fact that I misplaced my outline (it was in my gaming bag) and didn't find it again until the 29th.

Therefore, I finished out the last day of November by writing the 50,000th word during the 10 o'clock hour. But I wanted to finish with an average of over 1,700 words before I verified. So prior to eleven, I verified my Nano with about 50,200 words, and called it a night. Phew, that was a really tough one.

The Battle Continues...

This Sunday marked my first 2,000 plus word day. This in spite (or perhaps with the help of) a power failure around 10:30 pm.

However, I'm still a bit behind. Slowly, but surely, I continue to chip away at the deficit and am currently a little over a week behind now.

But hope springs eternal. The month is only half over...

Post Halloween - Nanowrimo is here!

So, let's see,

The candy contest came down to a tie between myself and one other player for first. The owner threw us some tiebreaker questions, and it all came down to who came the closest (without going over) estimating how much she spent ordering from Oriental Trading (one of my fave places too). I won with $119.95.

I gave a good portion of the candy away in the grandkids Halloween bags, but there is still a little bit left.

Now, on to Nano. I was all set to do Love, Death and Fast Food. I really was. But once again, I had another idea. The outlining went along swimmingly, so that's what I decided to go with. Once again, Mara Ravenclaw makes another appearance, but this time, she's only a bit player.

Five days in, and I hit the 5,000 word mark. Not the most auspicious beginning, but hey, I'm not all that far behind, and I had to work long hours and had horrible commutes last week. This week, I get to carpool, so my word count should increase.

October! October! October!

So, September draws to an end, which means I can now start my Halloween shopping and decorating! So I did just that, heading over to Dollar Tree for a few things.

I still have to dig out the Halloween stuff tonight. On a side note, I am tied for first in the Trivia contest I entered. So now it's all down to how well I interpreted her blog entries and whether or not I guessed right on her candy expenditures. We shall see...

So, at the end of September, I missed the monthly goal by scant inches. Doh!
This month, I'm starting out with over 210,000 words, and with a day of having already written over 1,100 words.

I've got a pretty good outline so far for the Nano, but then again, I thought I was doing good on the Julno too. We shall see how things go this year...

The 200K Mark and Assorted Things

Well, I made it to the 200K Mark. Less than 50,000 words to go, which is one whole successful Nanowrimo.

This week was also my 5th wedding anniversary. Wow, has my husband been putting up with me for that long already? We decided to celebrate it for real next weekend, but went out to dinner and a movie on the day of. Dinner was a disaster, but my husband was a cheap date that night because they refunded my money for his meal (he'd ordered a steak well done, they delivered it quite late and very rare).

I also entered an on-line trivia contest. http://fabulouscheesebabe.blogspot.com/

It's a four week contest, with prizes going to the winners. My googling skills were spot-on, because I got 11 points out of a possible 11 after I pointed out to the gal that there was more than one flower that smelled like carrion and was pollinated by flies. Fortunately, I picked Stinking Corpse Lily, rather than my first thought, Corpse Flower, which is actually pollinated by beetles. Her original answer was Voodoo Lily.

This week was a bit tough, as one of the questions (a four star silent film) seems a little subjective. Four stars for one site could be ten for another, after all. But I took my best guess, so I hope it's right...

Getting Closer

This was actually a pretty good week for me, as I had a couple of 1,000 word plus days, so I was able to regain some lost ground. Better yet, I'm less than 5,000 words to the 200K mark, so I should be able to make it this month, barring any unforseen things.

30 days has September, so my club goal for the month is 20,550, so I currently am about 15,000 words from it. Doesn't seem too impossible at this point...but time will tell.

On the PbEM front:

Sodium Noir - the ST is his spotty self, but at least he is posting more than once a week. We also have four new players. We shall see how long they stick around. Things are getting very interesting for my PCs though...

Mage Phoenix - Picking up, but it's still tough having to interact with a player that is very very slow to post.

Paradise Heights - A new game, modern soap opera style. Thought I had a posting partner, but she flaked. However, the GM was kind enough to oblige me. I just wish she had a list of locations, I would have renamed the bar...

Paradise Lost - Slow, but the ST put a new rule in place for posting. We shall see.

Puzzles of Darkness - Slow, and entirely the ST's fault.

Riverton - Picking up, and should be easier to post now.

Shadowrun - Steady, but slow.

On the Nano front - Funny, but I find that my creativity does run out once in a while, and I'm rather uninspired at the moment. But it is only September...