I’m at 3,574 words and counting.

Now to bed.  Fat Cat’s back home from his trip to Texas, and he and Pupsters are both curled up in bed, cozy, warm, and snoozy…and that’s where I wants to be too!

"Typing" by Monocoello - deviantART.com - licensed under Creative Commons

Pow!  And we’re off!  This is the year I go from Participant to Winner!  I will be posting my progress as I go along.  Feel free to nag, badger, and pester at whim.

Good luck to everyone crazy enough to take on this endeavor.  May you arrive at the finish line to the sounds of cheers by crazed fans, tears of happiness of loved ones, and 50,000 words tucked under one arm.  Eat lots of carbs, and type really, really fast.

That’s right.  I feel better, thanks for asking.  Turns out I had a “touch” of the stomach flu.  That “touch” had the wallop of a backhanded bitch slap if you ask me, but I’m better now…and back to my bad eating habits.  Yay!

Despite being down for the count so many days in a row, I still had a pretty productive week as far as writing goes.  We’ve just ended the poetry section of my creative writing class, and so I revised everything I had produced so far for my portfolio and was pretty pleased with some of the pieces.  A huge deal considering my limited experience with poetry.

Now that we’re done with poetry, we’re finally wading into fiction, familiar territory.  Cheers went up in the class, I tell you.  But when I say we’re wading, it’s serious baby steps.

Our first assignment was to select a handful of pictures from a stack the professor brought in, just anything we liked.  Then we had to write a short story outline from it.

My pictures were a flock of parrots, an aerial shot of a stone ring, a goatherder holding a baby goat (with an oddly long tail), a group of men playing dominoes, and a man resting in the foreground while a group of people apparently dance the conga in the background.  Hmm.  Wish I knew that was going to be the assignment before I picked out my pictures.  But I made it work. <g>

Next week’s assignment is to write the first page of our story.  So as you can see, we are taking tiny little baby steps.  At first I was a little bit put out.  One page?  One lousy page?  I wanna write stories!  But this process is making me take a closer look at how I put together stories.

The professor brought out the old graph that looks like a mountain, with the inciting incidents, climax, et cetera.  And I just thought, oh, man, I don’t put my stories together like that.  I just don’t.  But as we’re going along, I’m seeing the value of picking out tiny little elements and just writing that and nothing else.  I’m enjoying this process of story construction via microscope.  We’ll see what happens with my goatherder and parrot flock.

Speaking of the writing process, I discovered the other day that the very esteemed Steven Pressfield has started doing a series of blog posts on his blog entitled “Writing Wednesdays.” Wonderful, wonderful stuff.  Check it out!

Also, heads up!  NaNoWriMo starts this Sunday!  That’s right, folks.  Mark your calendars…then clear them.  Turn off your phones, ignore your email, and get ready to write.  I’ll be up in the wee hours of the night along with the thousands of other foolhardy fools across the globe racking up the word counts.  This is the year I reach 50,000 words!

"Food Poisoning" by Misoks - deviantART.com

…is my best guess.  I’m waiting for the on-call nurse to call me back and let me know if I need to come in and see a doctor, or if I just need to stay home, close to the toilet, my new best friend.

This bites the big one.  Me hates barfing!  I pride myself on maintaining a pretty minimal barfing record.  I believe the last time I barfed was July 4, 2008, due to early pregnancy symptoms.

Blagh!  Wah!

"Legalize Marijuana" by sainzu - deviantART.com

32 minutes ago, the Associated Press reported the new medical marijuana policy to be issued tomorrow — today! — by the Obama administration:  “Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana…” telling prosecutors that “it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.”  (Ya think?)

Excellent.   🙂

"King Max" by Jon McConnell...my talented brother!

My brother, who is an awesome artist working in the gaming industry, started a blog a few months ago.  He’s been pretty good about posting new art every few days.  He’s really been working hard on new techniques, just getting pieces finished and out there for comment.  I love his take on Max’s crowning in “Where the Wild Things Are.”  Check him out!

My lovely friend Mona, from all the way back in high school, who is also my ass-kicking partner in all things related to writing, just started a new travel/life blog, which includes fantastic pics from all over the world.  I love all her cemetery pics.  I can’t wait to see what else she digs up from her photo archives.  This girl has been everywhere.

Also, I discovered this writer’s blog through an interview posted on NaNoWriMo’s site.  I don’t know her personally, but she’s hysterically funny and incredibly inspiring (she’s going to hit her outrageous goal of 1 million words this year — I am in awe).  Plus, she’s got her first book out right now.  She writes under the name Lauren Gallagher.

How do other moms do it?  I want to know.  Seriously.  I know that there are women out there who are successfully mothering more than one child while keeping a clean house, making dinner, and pursuing their passions.  How?  I really want to know.

Even before the baby came, my house was a mess.  It’s been a mess since we moved in, a perpetual renovation-in-the-works-ancient-house kind of situation.  But even so, dishes have never been done with any sort of regularity in this household.  Since the baby arrived, fuhgeddaboudit.

Apparently, my husband suffers from some sort of periodic short-term amnesia because every once in a while, he’ll ask me, “What are you making for dinner?”  “Ambrosia and duck a l’orange,” I reply smartly.  Come on now!  I can’t even start to think about dinner until after the squirt’s tucked away safely in bed and unconscious, and usually my thoughts lean towards anything that comes in a paper wrapper and can be microwaved in a hurry.  (Mmm, White Castle….)

As for the pursuit of one’s passions, well, I’m doing my best to pursue them (which feels pretty much like chasing my tail).  That means sneaking out of bed at 2:00 in the morning and trying to string words together on a screen through the small opening that is basically as far as my eyelids will open at that time of night.  It means plopping beloved child into beloved husband’s lap and escaping to Starbucks for a couple of hours of uninterrupted thinking/writing time.  It means frantically diving for the computer the minute a nap begins.  It also means balancing a sleeping baby across my lap while typing, trying not to elbow her head, and trying to compose fiction in bed with one leg against a sleeping baby so she feels secure and won’t wake up.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I’m not complaining.  I wanted this baby with all my heart, and I’m so happy she’s here.  I just want solutions.  I read about women with five children and bestselling novel series, and I’m agape.  How?  How do they do it?  Me wants to know!  Is it a magic feather?  (If so, how much is it, and where can I get one?)  Is it iron-clad discipline?  Do they type faster?  Are they smarter?

Anyway, if someone knows the answer, let me know.  In the meantime, my time here at Starbucks is winding to a close.  I know Fat Cat and Puppy will be waiting for me in the window completely through with each other and over the moon to see me coming up the walk.  Damn, but it’s worth it.  🙂

"Robot Chicken" by DarkJak - deviantART.com

I’ve been keeping a file entitled “Crazy People,” with the intention that I’d start sharing some of these stories.  This file is getting pretty big, so I figure there’s no time like the present.  Besides, I’ve been dying to use this picture.

*    *    *

I have an aunt — married into the family, I hasten to add — who is convinced that there’s a covert operation somewhere in China that is manufacturing fake eggs and passing them off as real.  Why she thinks there would be some benefit to a company to expend massive resources to re-engineer and artifically reproduce chicken eggs when there’s these birds called chickens that reproduce quickly and crap eggs out by the…well, dozen is beyond me.

We were at a dinner with my cousin and her new in-laws when my aunt — her mother — leaned forward to warn us in very conspiratorial tones about this dangerous new product on the market.  “Make sure to check the carton,” she said, “to make sure you’re getting natural eggs.”

Okay.  At this point, her daughter let her attention be drawn in the other direction — almost gave herself whiplash, poor thing — while I decided I needed to check my plate for fleas.

Why?  Because we all know you can’t argue with a crazy person.  But even the best of us all fall peril to the siren of possibility.

So I got to sit there and watch my mother draw herself — hell, she dove in headfirst! — into an argument with my aunt about why there are no such things as artificial eggs and how she’s probably smoking too many Chinese herbs.  My aunt’s butt-headed refusal to surrender to reality and logic completely dumbfounded my mother, whose level of incredulity was becoming a bit tangible and uncomfortable for the rest of us.

They both looked to the rest of us for support.  My mom’s face was a picture-perfect example of “WTF?!”  My aunt’s expression was one of, “Poor thing.  You’ll soon be saying, ‘I told you so.'”

That’s when good sense returned to my mom, who stabbed her chopsticks into a plate of noodles in front of my other (sane) aunt and remarked on how lovely the food was.

Good times.

*    *    *

Postscript:  Just to make sure it’s my aunt who’s the crazy one and not us, I Googled “faked eggs,” and apparently it’s an old story that’s been floating around the Net for the last few years, a recent urban legend.  Whew!

Why I'm so happy.

I am 36 years old today.

Usually, I treat every birthday like new year’s, trying to figure out where I’m going wrong, what I need to work on, where I want to go, and how to do it faster.  But this year…not so much.

This year, I am happy.  I feel so grateful and fortunate and lucky for my first 36 years on Earth, and I’m especially happy for the people in my life.  When I stop to count my blessings, I realize just how wonderful this life is, what a gift I’ve been given.

Of course, I’m hoping for a couple more sets of 36 years.  I’m a bit greedy that way. <g>  (That’s right. I want to be old and rotten when I kick the bucket.)

Anyway, here’s to birthdays!  Yay!