Slogging my way through the novel.  It was so easy last month.  It got a little gunky midway through, but now the going’s a little easier.  I’m a bit past 67,000 words right now.  Not really where I wanted to be by now, but I think I’ll still finish by Christmas.

Just celebrated my little girl’s first birthday last weekend.  I can’t believe she’s 1 year old already.  We kept it low-key, just family.  It was nice, and she got lots of toys.  She’s been busy playing with the packaging and boxes all week.

Ventured back into the fabulous world of freelance court reporting today.  It’s been over a year since I’ve reported anything, so I’ve been busy getting my software in order, getting my equipment dusted off and charged up, and practicing on my stenotyping speed.  I feel so out of shape!  My wrists are mewing pathetically right now.  (For some reason, regular typing and stenotyping seem to use slightly different muscles.)  But my assignment went well this morning.  Like riding a bike. <g>

What else?  I’ve been developing some plans for the blog.  Nothing Earth-shattering, but I am repurposing it with the intent of bringing more consistent, frequent, and hopefully helpful posts for fellow newbie writers, as well as some humor bits.  More on that in coming days.

Other than that, just chasing the baby around.  Whew!  She’s in full Explorer mode, pulling clothes out of hampers, digging in kitchen cabinets, and turning every piece of paper she comes across into party confetti.  Considering this time last year she was in an incubator with tubes, I couldn’t be more grateful.  Life really is good.

Well, it finally happened.  I spent the last two years avoiding reformatting my hard drive.  A couple of months ago, I took my laptop apart and gave it a thorough cleaning, a new squirt of thermal gunk for the processor, fished out all the crumbs from beneath the keys.  I had high hopes that all my computer needed was to be clean.

Apparently not.  And I have to confess, through most of the month of November, while caught up in the fervor that is NaNoWriMo, I was getting the Blue Screen of Death pretty regularly.  I just kept telling the computer, “Ah, no big deal, just go back to the last config settings that worked.”  That should keep working, right?

Nope.  Unmountable boot volume.  Would not, could not make the darn thing boot up from the recovery disk.

I should back up a pace here and just mention that the day that my boot volume decided to stay unmountable was on the day that my final project for my creative writing class was due, and all of my work that was to be included in my fiction portfolio was on my laptop waiting to be printed.

So I did what I had to do.  I put it out of its misery and reformatted the darn thing.  The neat thing was, I didn’t pop a vein, I didn’t curse — not once! — and I didn’t even blame my husband.

How was I able to maintain such a cool head amid such fire-stoking events?  Well, I’m glad you asked.

For the first time in my life, I had BACKED UP MY STUFF!

[The crowd goes wild.]

Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Yes.  Thank you.

That’s right, folks.  A few weeks ago, sensing that perhaps I had attracted the god Murphy’s attention, I had purchased a little 4GB flash drive that attaches to my key ring.  I also had the whole shebang backed up on a large external hard drive (that took care of all the pictures, court reporter files, music, and videos).

So when it became apparent that my computer was not going to mount its boot volume for me, I calmly switched to another computer and got my homework done and printed.  And then the next morning, I trotted down to my favorite Starbucks and reformatted my hard drive while sipping a latte.  Quite surreal.

(And if it sounds like I’m bragging…well, I am.  This is the first time I’ve handled a situation like this with any amount of grace.  If ever one of my previous brushes with the Blue Screen of Death had happened to be recorded on video, I’m sure it would be on YouTube right now, garnering votes as the “Best Freakout.”)

So I’m more than halfway done with the novel, I’ve got one class left in my creative writing class, and the year is coming to a close.  I’ve learned so much in the past couple months that I have to break them up into separate posts.

But today I thought I’d simply post my goals for this month.  I’ve done this in the past with varying degrees of success.  But I feel confident enough — and driven enough — to post my goals for this month.

The first is easy enough.  I’m finishing the book I started last month.  It’s coming along.  It’s almost like a souffle.  I don’t want to say it too loud for fear I’ll deflate it.  But I’m trucking along, and I hope to finish it before Christmas.

The second one is one I’ve been talking about forever it seems.  But I will finish the revisions of my scifi novella and put together the graphic novel proposal for my brother, the fabulous artist, to read and consider.

Finally, I’d like to get a couple of new short stories written.  I was surprised at how many short stories I was able to write last month while NaNoWriMo was going on, and I want to keep up the momentum…though at some point I’ll have to start revising and submitting.

So I’ll add that in.  I will submit for publication at least two pieces.

There ya go.  Feel free to publicly flog me if I goof off and wander off track.  And I would love to hear other people’s goals.  I know you’re out there, plugging away industriously.

I’ll be posting more stuff on the creative writing process as I go along, as well as some humor pieces I’ve been working on.  Gotta change it up a bit here and there.

Anyway, pardon my brevity.  I gotta get back to the novel.  This is NaNoWriMo Part 2. <G>

I have just validated my word count (final official count:  50,113), been awarded this cool web badge, and downloaded my customizable certificate of weener-tude.

I feels good.  I feels real good.  🙂

Before the baby was born, I had loads of time to write.  In fact, thinking about how much time I wasted pains me the way burning $100 bills pains Scrooge McDuck.

Even so, with all that time up the ying-yang, my productivity and efficiency weren’t all that great.  In fact, they were terrible!  I was getting stuff written, but it was a lot of put it off, put it off, put it off, write it all in one big glut, then sleep.  Then I’d spend a few weeks gearing up for the next cycle, which meant putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, et cetera.

Now, in the midst of NaNoWriMo frenzy, pushing 43,000 words so far, I have also written two short stories for my class that I’m fairly happy with.  My first drafts are closer to final draft than the first drafts of my previous stories, they’re shorter and more concise, and I wrote them in record time…all because I needed to get back to the novel in a hurry.

On top of that, I’ve probably posted to this blog more than I have any other month, as well as kept up on some other writing projects.

And the wild thing is I’ve been able to do this around the baby, who rightly takes up 99% of my time.  Fat Cat plays with her for two hours in the morning, and she gets her Dada time.  The rest of the time, she’s with me.  I even write in bed while she naps.

It’s sort of mind-boggling, to be honest.  I’ve spent months trying to get through a revision of a 70-page novella, and in the course of 24 days, I’ve written over 170 pages.  How does that happen?

I guess I’ve been going about this the wrong way all along.  I should have had a baby a long time ago.  🙂

This is where I dream in front of the computer these days.  My NaNoWriMo novel has taken me to breathtaking places.

But this is the reason I’ve been a bit quiet.  Just plugging along.  I just broke 36,000 words today.  I feel like I was really streaking along there for a bit, but I kind of got gummed up the past few days working out plot tangles.  It’s been worth the slow-down though.  The antagonist, a very seductive Venetian man, has removed his mask and revealed his true self to me, which has, in turn, changed the whole feeling of the book for me, making it just a shade darker.  Me likey.

So I’ve been busy enjoying my characters’ travels.  I’m even dreaming of murky green canals and handcarved teahouses.  I’m determined to finish this book before the end of the month.  I am a woman obsessed!

So off I go!

I love language, and I had a ton of fun looking up American idioms for a short story I wrote today.  I found myself giggling in Starbucks with people around me wondering what I had up my sleeve.  It’s no wonder that the English language puts non-English speakers into a fog.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• In like Flynn
• A lost ball in the high weeds
• One sandwich short of a picnic
• Bean counter
• Bless your pointy little head
• Left-handed cigarette
• Not enough room to swing a cat
• Go down like a cup of cold sick
• How long is a piece of string?

An unfamiliar one I came across was, “Use your loaf.”  I can’t wait to use that one on Fat Cat.  He’ll have a gas at that one.

One of the websites I came across had a funky font that was hard on the eyes.  “Sick as a dog,” became “Slick as a dog.”  “Icing on the cake,” looked like “Itching on the cake.”  Silly rabbit.

It gave me a crazy idea that I thought I’d run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.  Revise a common idiom and see what floats to the top.  And send them my way!  I’d love to read them!

P.S.  NaNoWriMo Update:  30,400 words.  I am over the moon!  🙂

Fat Cat thinks it’s not a good idea to write about a place you’re not familiar with.  My take on it is you go where the story takes you.

Of course, it’s ideal to experience firsthand a particular locale, but it’s not always possible.  Think about folks who write about 20,000 leagues under the sea, or galaxies far, far away.

That’s what research is for.

Half of my NaNoWriMo novel takes place in Venice, Italy, during Carnival time.  Although I’ve been to Venice before, I was 12 at the time, so — well, you know.  It’s been a while.

Yeah, I have my Italian phrase book and Venice guidebook, along with a couple of maps I purchased from B&N, but obviously, those resources represent a small fraction of the universe of Venice, and only specific tiny facets.

This is where the Internet never ceases to amaze me.

I discovered a wonderful website called SlowTravel that has a huge archive of slow travel trip reports to dozens of different countries.  And they’re a wonderful resource, these firsthand travelogues.  One particular trip report was over a 100 pages long, beautifully written, and filled with fantastic details regarding food, customs, and language.  That’s where I came across a comment that Italian toilets don’t have seats.

Great.  Because in one scene, my protagonist suffers a very unfortunate bout of diarrhea and has to scramble to find a public toilet.  I remembered the little tidbit about toilets in Italy having no seats, so I did a search to verify that fact.

Guess what?  Not only does PoopReport.com have an article regarding Italian toilets, but it covers details like water pressure and what to expect in different regions, accompanied by 17 pictures.  Like a toilet trip report.  And they have poop reports in various destinations including Ethiopia and Iran, cleverly entitled “Travel Logs.” Who knew?

In my research, I’ve also discovered that Modern day Carnival in Venice begins with the Vollo del’Angelo, or the Flight of the Angel, during which a famous woman “flies” suspended on a cable from the Companile tower in Piazza San Marco to the loggia of Palazzo Ducale (except in 2008, when the rapper Coolio did the honors).

Since my protagonist is there to witness the event in my story, I needed to find a way to describe it realistically.  Besides the numerous pictures and videos that can be found, I also found this totally rad 360-degree interactive panaramic picture that can be manipulated to look at the scene from every angle.  Amazing.  It’s like standing in this frozen moment of time.  I can see that the sky is clear, the crowd is literally packed asses to elbows, and everyone’s got a camera held up above their heads.  Fantastic detail.

Not only that, but a search of YouTube will uncover videos of almost anything you can imagine.  Searching the Flight of the Angel revealed the little detail that they played “Hallelujah” over loudspeakers during the 2009 event.

So although it would be ideal for me to be able to experience all 10 days of Carnival in Venice, including all the wonderful masquerade parties and the wonderful restaurants, it’s not in the cards for me at this time.

However, that doesn’t mean I still can’t write about it, because it’s not so important that I get to go to Venice as it is that my readers get to go to Venice.

Which reminds me, my next novel takes place in mythological Hawaii.  Menehune country.  I can’t wait to visit.

I started this blog entry on the 5th.  This is what I wrote:

“It’s 4:14 a.m. as I type this.  I’m 5,283 words into my novel for NaNoWriMo.  My husband and baby are in bed, undoubtedly warm and cuddly, under the blankets with the fan on.  I’m taking a short break from writing.  I’m wondering when the blood is going to start flowing back into my posterior.”

That’s when I think I checked on the baby and got seduced into bed by my slumbering family.  I put up a good fight, but in the end, I had to raise the white flag.  Babies smell so good.   🙂

Now it’s the 11th — scratch that.  It’s the 12th.  I’m still on schedule with NaNoWriMo at 19,000+ words, and something’s changed in me, for the better.  I’m finding out for myself the truth about time management — it’s bogus.  There is no management of time.  What utter nonsense — and arrogance on my part! — to think that time can be managed.  And I think I’ve known that for a long time.  There is only now, and that’s all anybody’s got.

Truth be told, this is the first time in years that I’ve spent every free moment devoted to moving the story forward.  Being a new parent has shrunk my “free time” to the size of a peanut compared what I was used to, and yet, I’ve become twice as productive, and only getting better.

Not only am I writing faster, focused on moving the story forward, ignoring my inner editor — that wretched, jealous bitch — but I’m getting rid of the extras in order to trade back more time.  Emails, surfing, shopping, excessive research, blog-reading, even unnecessary eating (my favorite)…these things have all fallen by the wayside in favor of the book.

That’s right.  Now, instead of thinking, planning, dreaming about writing, poking stories along here and there with my slowpoke stick, I am writing the book.  And it’s a book now, no doubt about it.  Not an idea, not a concept, not an outline, or even a synopsis.  It’s a friggin’ book.

Originally, my intention with this post was to ask people when they write, whether they’re more productive in the morning, afternoon, evening, et cetera, as I, myself, used to be a night owl, but have found I’m more productive if I write in the morning.

But like time management, ultimately all that type of discussion can be pretty pointless and lead to procrastination strategies I’m better off without.  I prefer to write every morning from 10:00 to noon at my local Starbucks.  That’s my preference, and that’s when the juices seem to run the juiciest.  However, it is a rare occurrence these days.  So here I am after midnight, squeezing in a blog post before I jump back to the book.  Glory be!

Turns out, the best time for me to write is now.  It always has been.  I just was too busy avoiding it to realize it.  So back into the trenches I go.

NaNoWriMo has completely taken up what very limited free time I have.  I’m at 13,000 words now, so I’m keeping up, though just barely.  But the other writing projects have suffered, including the blog.  I’m working on striking a balance, but I admit, I’m excited about the 13,000 words I’ve got.  They’re starting to look suspiciously like a real novel, and I like it.  But no worries.  I haven’t disappeared.  And I will post more frequently.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some pictures I took during our morning walk.  The first picture was taken a few days ago, and the second one was taken today.  This is a prime example of what California weather can be like.  The sun always prevails.

But it was absolutely wonderful walking in the mist.  For once, it was quiet.  Somehow, the fog muffles everything.  It’s like walking around incognito.  I love it.  The Pups seemed to love it too.  She poked her nose out of the stroller and kept breathing in deeply, letting the wet soak her face.  By the time we got home, we were both pink-nosed and renewed.