Finis.

Can I get a Woo to the Hoo?

For the second time in 5 years of trying, I actually manged to write 50,000 whole words (plus a few more) in 30 days. I actually had to add an epilogue to stretch my word count to 50,000, so clearly, when I revisit this story in a few months I'm going to have to do a better job of fleshing it out. Either that or admit that it would make a better short story and cut a lot out instead.

The important thing is, I accomplished my primary goal, which was to remember how to enjoy writing again. This is most important because I was seriously at a place where I was so completely discouraged that I was considering giving up on my writing aspirations for good. They just didn't seem worth the effort any more. But that's enough of THAT noise. This month has reminded me that I'm a writer at my core, and whether or not I'm actually working on anything at the moment, or whether or not I ever publish a piece of fiction, that fundamental part of me will never change. I will always be a writer.

So now what? Well, for starters, I'm going to accept Inkygirl's Word Count Challenge and commit to writing at least 250 words a day to keep from losing my momentum. And then I'm going to finish the non-fiction e-book on how to start an online business for no overhead that I started back in August. Once that's done, I'm going to take another stab at fixing The Hero Factor before pulling Dominion of the Damned off of the back burner and finishing that rough draft. And then if there's still time before next November, I'm going to take another look at what I just finished and see if any of it is salvageable.

I'm also going to make time to read other people's books again, something I avoided all month long. I've had Marjorie M. Liu's A Wild Light and Cherie Priest's Boneshaker sitting on my coffee table waiting to be read all month, and I just added Jim Butcher's Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files to the stack. I'm sure to be getting more books for Christmas, too, so that ought to keep my inner bookworm happy for a while. Those are all affiliate links, by the way.

But for now I'm going to rest my noggin and start knitting these adorable Christmas ornaments, the kit for which just arrived today. Congrats to any and all of my fellow Nano'ers who've entered the winner's circle, and to anyone still struggling to get those words down before midnight: You can do it! Go Team You!

NaNoWriMo - Winding Down

There's only one more day left in this year's NaNoWriMo, and I'm only about 2,500 words away from my second "win." I only have one more scene left to write, so I'll probably have to go back and flesh out some earlier scenes to round it out to 50,000.

The last couple of weeks were pretty hectic, so it was hard to keep up. I spent Black Friday safely ensconced in my office, avoiding the shopping crowd and getting my word count up to speed. I wrote about 6,000 that day, and then had to take Saturday off to let my brain recover (and go see Harry Potter), but then I wrote another 3,500 or so at yesterday's write-in, putting that final word count goal within easy reach.

I haven't decided yet whether to knock out that last few thousand today, or if I want to break it up and work at a slightly more leisurely pace right up until the deadline. Either way, the next time I post here, it will be finished, and then we can go back to business as usual.

Why It's a Good Idea to Write Every Day

Thanks to the combination of busy-ness and a tired brain, I didn't write anything on my novel Thursday, Friday or Saturday of last week. When I stopped writing Wednesday night, I had good momentum, a good idea of where to go next, and excitement about getting back to it. By the time Sunday rolled around, I had lost all of that, and Sunday's write-in was an exercise in pure frustration. I still managed to add another 3,000 words to my word count before the library kicked us all out, but they were forced and awkward and not nearly as good or cohesive as what I would have written had I kept up my momentum, something that even writing just a hundred or so words a day would have done for me.

As if that wasn't enough difficulty to deal with, when I sat down before the write-in on Sunday to try to get my head back into the story, all I could think about instead were possible ways to fix the problems with The Hero Factor, the urban fantasy WIP I've been tinkering away on for years and finally stuck in a drawer earlier this year. And now I'm starting to get excited about that story again--much more excited than I am about my current NaNoWriMo project. Even so, I'm going to stick with my current novel draft till the end of the month, because I won't know if it's salvageable if I don't finish it. Hopefully I'll find its groove again, and this time I won't lose it by taking such a long break. Either way, I now need to write 2,245 words per day in order to hit 50,000 by the deadline. Guess I'd better get to it, then.

Holly Lisle Offering Free Plot Outline Mini-Course

Guess what, fellow writers? The awesome Holly Lisle, whose story and character crafting advice is some of the best I've ever encountered, is offering up her seven-week Plot Outline Mini-course for FREE! Here's the link.

I've never been able to afford any of her premium noveling courses, but I've found the wealth of free advice on her web site to be extremely helpful, so you can bet I'm signing up for this. It might be just thing thing I need to transform my NaNoWriMo project from a jumbled mess of stream-of-consciousness ideas into an actual, coherent story.

Speaking of my NaNo project, last night as I hunkered down to bring my word count up to speed, I had a breakthrough and realized how the story ends. Now that it has a definite sense of direction it's really starting to take shape. I'm starting to feel confident that by the end of the month I'll have some decent raw material to work with. And best yet, my main NaNo goal for this year has been accomplished: I'm excited about writing again. Hoorays!

NaNoWriMo Week 3

Today is the halfway point for NaNoWriMo, and I'm about half way to the 50,000 word goal. I'm actually about 400 words behind; yesterday's write-in group got kicked out just five minutes too early for me to hit 25,000. I meant to make up that last few hundred last night, but after catching up on some housework I instead succumbed to the allure of all of the TV shows I still needed to catch up on.

Yesterday's write-in was a lot more productive than last week's. I wasn't the only one who thought it would be a good idea to remember to bring earphones this time, and there was a lot more writing than talking getting done as a group. I ended up writing about 3,500 words at the write-in, more than making up for my lag after last week's events. It's a good thing, because I don't know if I'm going to find the time to write today. Maybe if I did that instead of blogging....

By now I think I have a pretty good idea what my story is about, although I still have no idea where it's headed, if that makes any sense. I've started plotting out about three to five scenes at a time instead of strictly making things up as I write, which I think is working better for me and giving the story a sense of direction.

How's you're NaNo going? Are you leaving me in your dust, are you struggling to catch up, or are you like me and steadily plodding along, right on track? Or have you gotten to the point where you're ready to toss in the towel?

---

Update on Step-Dad-In-Law: We went to see him on Saturday. He's still hooked up to the ventilator in ICU, but while we were there he was conscious enough to nod his head to let us know he could hear us. He still has a lot of fluid in his lungs, but his blood counts are slowly improving. All in all, it was an encouraging visit. We'll try to visit him again in the next day or two.

Life Happens Once Again. It Must Be November.

It seems to be an inevitable happenstance of NaNoWriMo that whenever I really start making headway on my novel, Life Happens in such a way that I'm forced to do a major priority shift for the rest of the month. On Tuesday evening my mom-in-law called to let us know that she'd got up that morning to find her husband (Matt's step-dad) lying unconscious in the hallway and had him rushed to the hospital after she couldn't wake him up. He'd apparently collapsed from a combo of extremely low electrolytes and extremely high blood sugar (he's diabetic), and was suffering kidney failure and respiratory failure. He's been in ICU in an induced coma and hooked up to a ventilator ever since. His blood chemistry is improving, though, so his doctors are optimistic that he'll pull through. We're remaining hopeful and doing our best to trust that whatever happens, God is in control of the situation.

I feel terrible for my MIL right now. Her husband is disabled (he has emphysema on top of diabetes and is tethered to an oxygen tank at all times) and highly dependent on her, but she's been out of work for the last six months or so. They're struggling to make ends meet, and the only insurance they currently have is the limited Medicaid coverage he gets. So to help keep a roof over their heads, they've been basically living on ramen noodles and cutting back on both of their medications. So I know she's feeling at least partially responsible, even though she was just doing the best she could in a crappy situation.

Matt and I had no idea how badly off they were, because she doesn't want to worry us. But now that we know we're going to do everything we can to make sure they have healthy food to eat and can take all of their meds. It won't be that easy for us, either, since we're not exactly overflowing with disposable income, but this is just more opportunity to trust in the Lord's provision--something I've gotten pretty good at over the last couple of years.

I've been keeping my head down (read: staying off of Twitter and other fun parts of the Internet) all week, trying to get on top of my work after several projects all heated up at once toward the end of last week. I'm pretty well caught up, but I'm going to stay in head-down mode today to get ahead so I can take a long weekend to focus on my in-laws.

As for NaNoWriMo, so far I've managed to keep up my word count (not that you'd know it by the yellow boxes on that widget in the previous post--apparently it only lights up green if you actually write 1,667 words that day, regardless of whether your overall word count is ahead of where it should be), and I'm going to do my best to keep it up. Of course it's fallen a few notches on the priority list right now, but to keep writing diligently through a crisis is a skill I badly need to learn. Normally, the slightest crisis or upheaval makes me throw up my hands and banish writing to the back burner, a practice that's not going to serve me if I ever want to have a career in writing fiction.

At any rate, if you are the praying sort and could remember my in-laws in your prayers, both they and we will really appreciate it.

NaNoWriMo - Kicking Off Week 2

Yeegads, but writers are boring when they're actually writing, aren't we? All we talk about is word count this and protagonist that, as if nothing in the world exists other than these hopefully entertaining delusions that we're trying to get out of our heads and onto paper. And I'm no different, even though I don't lead the most exciting life (or provide the most exhilarating blog content) in the first place.

At any rate, it's the beginning of Week 2, and my word count is back on track after falling behind toward the end of last week, thanks mainly to yesterday's local write-in. At first I was a little worried that the write-in was going to be a waste of writing time (albeit a FUN waste), since everyone there was pretty chatty, but then we did group sprints and challenges that got me back up to speed.

I'm done writing for today, and I'm actually slightly ahead. I think this is a pretty amazing feat considering I still have no idea where this story is going. One thing I do know, that I didn't figure out until today, is that this is the kind of story that really needs to be told in first person. Once I switched POVs, it started to flow a little easier.

I'm still having to squeeze it in by doing 15 minutes writing sprints in between client projects, but that's actually working pretty well. I keep my focus during the sprints and I can get down about 600 words in 15 minutes. It only takes three such sprints to meet my word count quota for the day. I'm not really sure if this is more beneficial to the story than having the luxury of plenty of time to stare out the window and ponder what should happen next, but there's certainly something to be said for developing the discipline to power through and fit writing into the cracks of the day instead of insisting that you can't write without at least two solid hours to allow the imagination to wander and give the muse time to flit down from oh high. But I figure this is more of a "zero draft" than a first draft, a big pre-writing exercise that will help me know and understand my protagonist and her motivations, and how she needs to change and grow in order to make her story compelling. But this is all info that will make that official first draft much easier to write.

So how's your NaNo novel coming?

Hey! Ho! Let's 'Wrimo!

I'm not planning to do a daily progress report here, but it seems fitting to go ahead and do a NaNoWriMo kick-off post, if for no other reason than so you don't have to stare at our jack-o-lanterns all week. It's the end of Day 1--at least, as far as I'm concerned--and I've got 2,021 words of brand-spanking new novel under my belt to show for it.

This is mostly thanks to staying up to write until 2:00 this morning. I then planned to get up at 10:00 and put in a couple more hours before starting my work day, but the problem with staying up late to write is that when I lie down and turn out the light my brain wants to keep writing, which is not conducive to falling asleep at any hour even remotely reasonable. Which means I slept right through my allocated morning writing time, and had to make it up with word sprints squeezed in between client projects throughout the rest of the day.

But that worked, and that's the important thing. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get up on time and hit my word count early in the day, but if not, this sprinting-between-projects method isn't a bad alternative.

How'd your first day go, fellow WriMo-ers?

Happy Free Candy Day, Halloweenies!

I have to take back everything I said about ignoring the social side of NaNoWriMo this year. I finally logged into the regional forum a few days ago and saw that they've scheduled Sunday afternoon write-ins at my neighborhood library, so clearly it's a sign from above that I'm SUPPOSED to go, right? They also scheduled a pre-launch meet & greet for this afternoon at Borders, from which I've just returned with "NaNo Survival Kit" goodie bag in hand. I saw some familiar faces from the last couple of years and hit it off with some new ones, and now I'm totally psyched to dive in and get my novelin' on at the stroke of midnight.

I was thinking I might try the Snowflake Method for this year's novel, but it involves a lot of the pre-writing that I said I was going to skip this year, so I think instead I'm going to stick to my original plan to just pants it all the way. This doesn't terrify me as much as it probably should. Although I should probably at the very least spend some time over the next several hours thinking of a good first sentence, so I can hit the ground running.

In the mean time, I need to go clean a big pile of junk off my craft table and gut our pumpkin patch finds so Matt and I can carve 'em up while we wait for the parade of trick-or-treaters to start ringing our bell. After that it'll be a night of classic horror movies and junk food. Hopefully I won't put myself into a sugar coma before midnight rolls around.

These bad boys are about to be lobotomized.

Getting Off the 'WriMo Fence

I’ve been riding the fence about whether to do NaNoWriMo this year. With a week to go until it starts, I think I’ve decided to go for it. Sadly, I’ll probably have to forgo the social aspects--I can either make time to write OR to hang out in the forums and go to the parties and write-ins, but not both; and since the goal is to see how many words of manuscript you can produce, not how much you can gab about it and post in the forums... I’m sure you get the idea. And so far I haven’t even had time to see what’s going on in the local forum, or to update my profile on the web site.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is the month of November. To participate, you try to write at least 50,000 words on a brand new novel by the end of the month. I’ve been playing along every year since 2006. The only year I “won” and actually accomplished all 50,000 words was in 2007, when I hammered out the first draft of This Old Haunt. In 2008 I invoked the Zokoutu clause--which states that if you’ve won in a previous year you can go ahead and work on a story already in progress--to finish the first draft of the same novel that had also served as my 2006 entry. I won by my own standards, in that I finished the draft, but it didn’t take 50,000 words to get there, so I didn’t get the winner’s badge.

Last year I went in whole hog for the first half of the month, attending all of the local meetups and write-ins and hammering out about 20,000 words on a story about what vampires would do if a zombie apocalypse threatened to wipe out their food supply. Then I found out I was pregnant, and suddenly zombies and vampires were the last things on my mind, so I dropped out.

Since then I’ve had a pretty tumultuous year, with back-to-back miscarriages leaving me without much of a desire to write. I’ve managed to joylessly crank out several factual articles for pay, and I managed a few essays, and a couple of half-hearted attempts at a new novel. I tried to polish a third draft of that 2006/2008 manuscript, but it just wasn’t coming together and I filed it away in that proverbial drawer where first (and second and sometimes third and fourth) novels often go to die.

Now we come back around to where this bumpy year started. I’m approaching it with ambivalence--my second baby’s due date was to be November 4th, so that’s weighing on me. Plus I’m really busy with work right now. But I know that I’ll never run out of excuses to put off getting back to my fiction writing, and that if I wait for perfect timing I’ll never write fiction again.

So my goal for this November is simply to write fiction again. I’m not going to worry about word count, and I’m not going to do any pre-writing preparation. I’ve got the nugget of a plot and I’m just going to take that and write by the seat of my pants and see what comes of it. If I can get back into a regular writing habit--and more importantly, if I can discover the joy of writing fiction for myself again--I’ll consider it a win, regardless of whether or not my word count bar turns purple.

What about you, dear readers? Are any of you doing NaNo this year? If so, what are your personal goals, and what are you doing to prepare? By the way, if you want to be my NaNoWriMo buddy, you can click here to add me.

Marketing & Miscellany

The Marketing:

I spent much of the weekend polishing up my online presence to appear a little more professional. Most significantly, this included updating my LinkedIn profile, changing my Tumblr blog into a portfolio for personal and practice projects, and launching JMBauhaus(.net), my new central hub which is now the easiest way to keep up with everything I'm doing online if you're inclined to do so (Big Sis).

I was forced to switch from .com to .net thanks to my stupidity in letting my jmbauhaus.com domain expire earlier this year. Dotster then wanted a hundred dollars to renew it; otherwise I had to wait 90 days for it to go back on the market. Which I decided to do, but before I could register it again some domain squatters snatched it up, and there's no telling how much they want for it, but they can just sit on it, because I don't want it badly enough to pay more than $10 for it, and I don't see anybody else wanting it, either. I'm perfectly happy being an $8 .net instead. So enjoy your worthless jmbauhaus.com domain there, squatters!

ANyway. Since I'm so enamored with the service that's hosting my new site, Flavors.me, I'm offering a very affordable Flavors.me customization package.

Another new service I'm offering is through Fiverr.com: $5 Typographical Logos. I enjoy logo design but I don't get a lot of opportunity to practice it, so hopefully this is a way to give me some practice and beef up my portfolio in that area.

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but I'm also running a contest to drum up "fans" for my Facebook business page. I'm offering a free custom Twitter background (a $60 value) to one random winner. All you have to do to enter is "like" my Task Wrangler page on Facebook and leave a comment in the discussion there declaring your entry. Click here for contest details.

So far it's working like a charm... not. Apparently nobody wants their own fancy custom Twitter background badly enough to bother clicking a "Like" button and leaving a comment. Which is to say that if you DO want your own fancy custom Twitter background, your chances of winning at this point are VERY good.

Of course, if nobody enters, that's less work for me to do, so win-win, I guess.

The Miscellany

It's officially fall now, right? Or is that tomorrow? Either way, I'm ready for this late summer we're having to get lost and leave me alone. September started out promisingly enough with a nice reprieve from the ridiculously hot weather we had in July and August, but it's gotten hot again, and I couldn't be more ready for fall weather to get here. I'm just afraid that we'll have a repeat of last year, where it pretty much skipped right over the usual great fall weather and went straight from hot and miserable to cold and crappy. We're starting to gear up for another short camping trip in October, and I've a feeling Matt will want to go no matter what, so I'm really crossing my fingers for it not to be cold and crappy all month. Come on, October. Show me why you were always my favorite month.

To help beat the heat and get myself in a fall state of mine, I've been watching a lot of spooky stuff, i.e. horror movies and Ghost Hunters. I don't know why scary stuff puts me in mind of fall--I guess it's because for me fall = Halloween. At any rate, I'm in the mood these days for safe scares. This will probably come back to bite me when we're camping next month and I find myself having to go out into the darkness by myself in the middle of the night for a potty emergency.

It's also that time of year for me to decide whether I'll be doing NaNoWriMo, and if so, what will I be writing? Right now I'm kind of leaning towards giving it a pass this year. Last year I started out gang-busters, hitting about 20,000 words in the first week before I found out I was pregnant, and all of the baby drama ensued, and my focus went right out the window. If I do it this year I'll either invoke the Zokutou Clause and finish Dominion of the Damned, or challenge myself to write a collection of memoirs and personal essays all month.

If I do the latter, I figure I'll post them here as I go and then maybe collect the good ones into a chap book or see if any of them are good enough for the magazine market. The problem is that I just can't seem to get excited about writing -- which might be all the more reason why I should sign up for 'WriMo. It might also make a good distraction from the fact that baby #2 would've been due the first week of November, which I'm already starting to struggle with a little... which probably explains my current ambivalence toward writing, and toward NaNoWriMo in particular. I remember thinking that there was no way I'd be able to do it this year because I'd be busy taking care of a newborn baby, so the fact that there's really no reason for me not to do it makes me pretty sad.

In less depressing news, these past two weeks I've pretty much had my head down, brushing up on my web design skills and learning new software and new techniques to prepare for a web site overhaul for a new client. I've been learning a lot, but I haven't been doing much else, and the imbalance is starting to wear on me. I'm beginning to feel lethargic and headachey all the time, and I'm already putting the weight back on that I managed to shed over the summer. So starting today I've got to start forcing myself to make time for regular workouts again. Between the new TV season kicking off in full force this week and Matt's recent habit of spending his evenings holed up in the bedroom to study, it should be pretty easy for me to start parking myself on the stationary bike in front of the TV every night.

What about you guys? Are any of you doing 'WriMo this year? If so, do you know what you'll be working on?

Happy Halloween!

It's my second-favorite day of the year! In celebration I gathered old Halloween photos from mine and Matt's childhoods and uploaded them into a Super '70s Halloween Flickr set. Enjoy the mom-made costumes and the retrotastic '70s home decor.

It's a perfect fall day, which should lead to some perfect trick-or-treat weather. I'm spending the rest of daylight puttering around and getting things ready for the lil' beggars who'll be ringing our doorbell after dark. Then Matt and I will carve our pumpkins (and toast the pumpkin seeds, natch!) and maybe have time to squeeze in a scary movie before it's time for me to head off to my local NaNoWriMo kick-off party! The month-long madness starts at midnight, and I'm beyond psyched.

What are your Halloween plans? If you're doing NaNo, are you as psyched as I am? Are you digging in at midnight, or are you going to wait until a more reasonable hour tomorrow to get started? Do tell!

Non-Goals and 'WriMo Chatter

You know, I had goals for this week, but when I neglect to blog them on Monday, I forget all about them by Wednesday. But they really haven't changed much: stay healthy, keep gearing up for NaNo, keep my clients happy...those pretty much sum it up.

The healthy part could be going better. I admit that I'm highly suggestible and paranoid when it comes to illness, especially since we lost our health coverage; but it seems like every time I go to the store, the next day I feel run down and have a scratchy throat. So far, eating Vitamin C, Zink and Echinacea tablets like candy and drinking lots of licorice tea (it has anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties) has been keeping that scratchy-throat, icky feeling temporary, and I've been making it a point to get plenty of sleep to keep my immune system strong -- when I'm able to sleep and not wide awake with insomnia, that is. I haven't been doing so well in the exercise department -- it's so hard in the moment, when I'm feeling run down, to convince myself that exercise will make me feel better, even when I know perfectly well that it will.

I'm keeping myself in a NaNo state of mind this week by trying out new noveling software as a possible replacement for yWriter. I've been plugging all of my character profiles and my loose outline in to StoryBook, but I'm afraid it's causing me to over-plan and plot out too much detail before I ever write a single word. I really wanted to go at it with just a loose plan, not a detailed itinerary for each and every scene and character moment. So I'm backing off from that, and I'll stick with the low-tech legal pad and note cards I scribbled all over last week. I am rather impressed with another one I tried, though: q10 is a no-frills, full-screen word processor designed to reduce distraction, and I think it's perfect for the purposes of NaNoWriMo. The thing I like best is that you can turn on (or off, if it doesn't strike your fancy) typewriter sounds while you type. I love having them on - it makes me feel like I'm writing and not just tapping words on my keyboard (which is something I do all day long that often has nothing at all to do with writing). I think I'm going to use it to draft all of my stories and paid copy from now on.

Hey, remember when I said I wished I could organize a Halloween-night NaNo kick-off party and midnight write-in? Well, the fabulous municipal liaison this year went and did just that. It's not a costume or pajama party like in my fantasy, but it still sounds awesome, and it seems like we've got a fun group of people shaping up this year. So I guess I'll be going to the write-ins after all. Now I just need to convince Husband to let me take the laptop so I won't be stuck fighting with my N- and B- and space-bar-less AlphaSmart again this year. And so I can have something to play music on while I write.


On the work front, I'm going to try very hard to get at least a couple of my home lighting blog articles for November written this week, if not all of them. I've got some more web site copy that I'd also like to get out of the way, so I can focus most of my writing energy on the novel. But I've also got some more major web design changes that one client requested, and my very first professional video edit, and those are both pretty time consuming, so we'll see how that goes.

But for now, I'm going to have a snack and watch new-to-me Chuck on Hulu until I get sleepy enough to go to bed.

Tell me what you're doing to get ready for NaNoWriMo, or any other projects minor or major, in the comments. Oh! And if you'd like a NaNo buddy over there, feel free to add me.

Insomnia-induced NaNoWriMo ramblings

I'm coming at dawn from the wrong side this morning. My circadian rhythms are so far out of whack that I never even felt like going to bed all night. I'm feeling a little like it now, but if I went to bed now I'd sleep the whole day away and be right back where I started tomorrow morning.

I whiled away the wee, small hours by finishing up a copy writing project I've been doing for a while, and since finishing I've been blowing off steam by playing around with graphics for my NaNo profile. It's been a productive week of novel planning, and I've got all of my main POV characters profiled, a stack of notecards full of scene ideas to arrange, and, wonder of wonders, I even have a title:



With all of that, I was feeling inspired enough to mock-up a fake book cover. I found an image on a royalty free graphics site that was almost too perfect, added my text, and voila! A "cover" that I almost wish I could actually use if this book ever sells to a publisher. Of course, knowing me, there's bound to be more romance than is indicated here, but I'm pretty sure that the whole zombies vs. vampires thing is my hook.

Speaking of which, here's the "synopsis" that's currently in my profile, which is not so much a plot synopsis, since I don't know enough to write one of those yet, as it is my "Big Idea" thought process:

Dominion of the Damned explores the question of how an underground race of vampires would react to a global zombie infestation killing off their food supply. Assuming that, since they're a different kind of living dead, vampires A) would be immune to the zombie-making virus and B) would be ignored by zombies who crave living flesh, it would fall to the vampires to defend humanity against the zombie hordes. But then, how would humanity, now an endangered species, react to the "saviors" who still see them as food?

And lastly, my "excerpt", which is more of a character study/scene fragment, and which may or may not make it into the manuscript, and which definitely does not count toward my 50,000 words, because that would be cheating:

Hannah stood back from the exam table to study Noah. Sitting there without his clothes, he looked so tiny and frail. Under the sickly green glare of the fluorescent lighting, he looked paler than ever, his ribs and sunken chest a testament to his malnourishment. Glancing up, she almost jumped at the ghastly image looking back at her before realizing it was her own reflection in the polished steel of a medical cabinet. She didn't look much better than her brother. The chestnut hair that had once been her crowning glory had thinned and lost its luster. She was just as pale as Noah, and the visible cheekbones she had once prayed to get while making fish-faces in the bathroom mirror only made her look skeletal and tired. Add in sunken eyes with dark circles underneath, and she could almost be mistaken for just another member of the walking dead. Not a good look if one wanted to keep her head attached. She tore her eyes away from the image before the reality of it could make her cry, and gave another start to see Alex standing beside her.

His eyebrows raised questioningly at her gasp, and she looked back at the cabinet's reflective surface. She hadn't imagined it: only she and Noah showed up there. As she moved closer to the exam table and pulled Noah protectively against her, Alex followed her gaze. “Oh, yes. That. I haven't figured that one out yet.”

“Figured what out?” asked Noah, oblivious to the strangeness, the otherness of Alex.

Alex pointed at his non-reflection. “The mirrors. It's one aspect of vampirism that my science has failed to explain to me.” His gaze caught Hannah's and he smiled, briefly, before pulling a scope from the pocket of his white lab coat and bending level with Noah's head. “All right, let's have a look at you, small one.”

And that is what's been keeping me occupied and awake in the pre-dawn hours of the morning. Right now, Husband is also up, because his brand of insomnia wakes him up super early, and he put on Treasure of the Sierra Madre while he's having breakfast. I'm debating on whether to make some coffee and have some breakfast along with him, or cave in to the sleepy and go to bed. But I think I can hold out at least a couple more hours, and then take a short nap that'll get me through the rest of the day, and then maybe I'll stand a chance of falling asleep at a more reasonable hour tonight. So I guess coffee and breakfast it is, then. And then maybe I'll get to work arranging that stack of notecards into something that vaguely resembles a plot.

Casting my novel - the male lead

Don't you love writing kismet? I'm working up character profiles for my NaNoWriMo project, and I was researching Slavic names for my male vampire protagonist. I settled on Alexandr Konstantin, which means "steadfast defender of mankind," which is apropros given his role in the story. I was also trying to get a mental picture of him, so out of curiosity I Googled the name, and this is what I found.

Yeah, he'll do.

A loose writing schedule. Because you know how well those always work out for me.

The Hero Factor mark-ups are finished, and here's the breakdown:

60 total scenes

12 of which will be brand new

and of which approximately 1/3 of those remaining will require extensive revisions

but the rest just need some tightening and grammar clean-up.

I wish that I had time to get the actual rewrites done before NaNoWriMo, and for about a minute I almost deluded myself into giving it a try. But realistically there's just no way, so I'm putting it safely away until January (because November is all about NaNo and December is all about recovering from NaNo), when I'll commence the re-writes, which I estimate will take me 4 to 6 weeks, depending on how busy I am in other areas. And even though it's supposed to be a "one pass" method, I'm still planning to show the next draft to a few people and then do another quick pass based on their feedback before I start querying on it. But I plan to have my query package ready to go by March. I'll spend that whole month on submissions, and then start editing the NaNo project in April, and right now I'm feeling ambitious enough to go ahead and say I'll get it revised and ready to query in time for next year's NaNo.

And that's the next year in writing, for me. It might sound like a ridiculous goal, considering that I've been working on Hero Factor since before I met my husband (which would be about 5 years); but I think I'm finally getting the hang of this whole "writing and editing a non-fanfic novel by myself without input and constant hand-holding by other fanfic writers" thing, so I don't think it's totally delusional of me to aim for two novels a year from now on, regardless of whether or not any of them ever get published. If nothing else, I can at least share them online with all five of my semi-loyal readers.

Speaking of which, the more time that goes by without any feedback on This Old Haunt, the more I think it was a mistake to have ever posted it in the first place, and I'm thinking of taking it down. I'm not trolling for compliments, I'm just sayin', and giving anyone who still wants to read it fair warning that it won't be up for much longer. I'll leave it another week or two for anyone who's in the middle of it to finish. But I've given it some thought, and even if it's passably entertaining, the almost complete lack of reader enthusiasm tells me it's definitely not a stellar example of my abilities, and leaving it up could hurt my chances of getting published in the long run. But hey, it was an experiment in the medium, and I'm glad I did it, because now I know that the serialized blog format is not for me. Neither is the podcast novel. I tried recording this one as a podcast and didn't get past two episodes because I kind of hated the whole process as much as I hate my own voice.

On Monday -- scratch that, make it Tuesday; Mondays carry too many work deadlines -- I'll start plotting my NaNo project. I'm going to give Holly Lisle's Notecard Plotting Method a try. Hopefully I can get it plotted out next week, and then give it another week to just simmer and stew in my noggin before it's time to commence the actual writing. Which, I'm thinking, will kick off at midnight on November 1st, since it's so conveniently situated on a weekend this year. I'm also thinking about getting Husband to go see Paranormal Activity with me on Halloween to ensure that there's no way I'll sleep that night, but I don't know yet whether we'll have the funds, and I also don't know yet whether I'm too chicken for that movie. Look, people, I still have nightmares about Samara. I honestly don't know if I can handle PA.

In non-writing news, I made doughnuts this morning, the easy cheater Sandra Lee kind my mom used to make where you take canned biscuit dough, poke a hole in it, deep fry it and then put it in a bag with cinnamon and sugar (or powdered sugar, but we didn't have any on hand) and shake well. And they were every bit as delightful as I remembered, even though I hadn't eaten one in at least 25 years. Man, I's old. And incidentally, that also makes some awesome easy cheater fry bread. Just leave out the bag full of sugar.

Now I'm gonna go get my domestic on and do some cleaning. And possibly some lazy Halloween crafting. Here's hoping the rest of you are having an enjoyable weekend.

Last week, this week, and a month from now (yay NaNoWriMo!)

I know I said I'd start posting my goals again last Monday, but then I got slammed with work. So far this freelance biz is feast or famine, and my regular clients all seem to be on the same cycle as to when they have work for me. I'm not complaining. The busy times are great, as they mean we get to eat and pay the mortgage, and the stress of multiple deadlines isn't nearly as burdensome as the stress of wondering how to pay the bills.

My brain was pretty fried by Friday night, though, and I spent the weekend trying not to think about work and just recover so I could dig in again this week, which promises to be another busy one. I actually had planned to get a lot done on Saturday, including blogging and posting the next ep of This Old Haunt, but I got hit with a pretty bad headache, and all I managed to get done were some errands and a few scenes of Hero Factor marked up for revisions. Then I spent Sunday puttering around the house getting the cleaning and laundry done. Well, mostly done. I'm still waiting on the last load to dry so I can put it away before I get to work on client projects.

I also put out the Halloween decorations yesterday, which made me ridiculously happy. I love October and Halloween so hard. I wish I wish I wish that I had a group of local NaNoWriMo buddies who I could invite over for a Halloween pajama-costume party and then kick off 'WriMo at midnight with an overnight write-in. But I don't, so I guess I'll just have to settle for a virtual version. I really hoped that by going to the meetups and write-ins during last year's 'WriMo that I would make some local writing buddies, but I didn't really click with anybody. Frankly, nobody seemed that interested in clicking. I got the impression from most of the participants that they were there to put their heads down and write, not to be social. Which was fine, as that's my inclination too, but, y'know, you can do that on your own. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of group write-ins, doesn't it? Or maybe I'm just projecting my shy, introverted nature onto everybody else and it was really just me and my inability to make friends in general. I don't think it is just me, though. I'm far from the only person to make the observation that Tulsa is a hard town to meet and get to know people in. Folks here are generally friendly on the surface, but also generally keep to themselves when it comes to making any real connections. At any rate, I'm feeling a bit less inclined to bother with any of the meetups this year.

And how that paragraph went from "Yay, Halloween!" to NaNoWriMo and a lament about the somewhat aloof nature of native Tulsans is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.

Anyway, speaking of 'WriMo and Hero Factor, it's pretty clear that I'm not going to finish editing the latter in time for the former. But I should at least get all of the revisions marked up, so I can start typing the changes once my brain recovers from the November writing frenzy. Whenever my time frees up a little, I'll go ahead and start plotting out my 'WriMo project. I've got to be careful not to overplan - after all, the only time I've actually won NaNoWriMo was when I threw my hat in at the last minute with only a vague idea for a plot and pantsed the whole thing. That ended up becoming This Old Haunt, the next episode of which I'll edit and post once I'm done here, so watch the Twitter stream for an announcement that it's up if that interests you.

I know I said I'd start posting my goals again, but my goals this week are pretty simple and don't really merit a whole post: meet my clients' deadlines while remembering to still take care of my physical and spiritual health. And try not to let the house devolve into a chaotic mess that I'll have to spend hours cleaning up next weekend. I'd like to try to connect in person with a friend or two this week, but I don't know if my deadlines will allow for that. We'll see how it goes.

I will sign off now with a link to the Where the Wild Things Are movie soundtrack, composed and performed by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is cool and mellow and happy-making all at once, and is also streaming free for the time being. Enjoy. And while you do, tell me how you've been, and what you hope to accomplish this week, in the comments.

Things that are most excellent

1. Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper. It's like a fizzy orgasm in your mouth.

2. Having a short Christmas list and the funds to cover it.

3. Slow work days.

4. Free fancy Blogger templates.

5. Pretty toenails. Not that I have those right now.

6. WINNING NANOWRIMO OMGBBQETC!!!!!

13 Reasons there's no Thursday Thirteen this week

1. Nanowrimo.
   
   
2. Nanowrimo.
   
   
3. Nanowrimo.
   
   
4. Nanowrimo.
   
   
5. Nanowrimo.
   
   
6. Nanowrimo.
   
   
7. Nanowrimo.
   
   
8. Nanowrimo.
   
   
9. Nanowrimo.
   
   
10. Nanowrimo.
    
    
11. Nanowrimo.
    
    
12. Nanowrimo.
    
    
13. Nanowrimo.

Now I'm going to take a break before I get into "All work and no play makes Jean a dull girl" territory. Red rum!

Nano updates: where to find 'em

In case you haven't figured it out yet (and if my Sitemeter reports are any indication, you haven't; neither has anybody else), I'm blogging about my NaNo progress, such as it is, over at Jean Writes Genre.