It's Only A Month, Right?

I have been sucked in. While there were multiple days during November that I spent no time at the keyboard working on my NaNoWriMo masterpiece, I did enjoy the discipline of thinking about my story and characters. A friend from a previous lifetime (that would be high school) participated in NaBloPoMo last month (National Blog Posting Month) and wrote a blog post every day at Rhubarb Sky. I have been inspired. I will make no guarantees as to the quality of posts for the next 30 days, but I'll do my best when it comes to quantity: 30 more, at least. It's true what Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo says: all we need is a deadline.

I Wrote a Novel, Now What?

I am very happy to say I did it - and with two hours to spare. After pounding out 9000+ words of mediocre fiction I have successfully completed my first NaNoWriMo and quit for the day today at 50,388 words, according to the official word counter. My book still lacks a title, and I'm guessing it's going to take another 20,000 words or so to finish telling the story. BUT - it feels good. And Grant says, "I'm looking forward to having my wife back." Fair enough.

We are newly back in Bozeman after a week in Western Washington with my family. Advent is upon us and there is MUCH to do, like there always is. The discipline of writing has been good for me, though, and a facebook friend from another life participated in National Blog Writing Month during November - a post a day for a month - and it sounds like it might be fun. But maybe I'll wait til January for that...

Now, some sleep...

Procrastination Station

One of the best parts of signing up for National Novel Writing Month, besides actually writing a novel (I hit the 19,000 word mark last night, and hope to be at 25,000 words before I go to bed on Sunday night), is the NaNoWriMo website. It rocks. Just about all of it is accessible to everyone, though to post in the forums you need to register, which also implies you're writing a book. ANYWAY - one of my favorite sections, of course, is the "Procrastination Station." Every day or two, two new links to wonderful websites and opportunities to avoid writing are posted. Yesterday I discovered wordle, and if you haven't seen it yet, go check it out. You can paste in a bunch of text (like your whole novel so far, or a sermon, or anything) and it generates a word cloud based upon it. The most frequently used words are the biggest, on down to pretty small type for the least frequently used words. You can change the font, the color, the orientation of the words. Super fun! Plus, you can use what you create any way you want - I'm thinking there are some uber-groovy t-shirts in our youth group's future!

Here's an example: this is the wordle of the top 150 words from my Consecration Sunday sermon from last year (Grant's preaching at Commitment Sunday this year. Pray for him - it's this week!)

Unseen Endings Indeed

We have had all of four trick-or-treaters tonight, and try as I might to get them to show me a trick, they all looked at me like I was a crazy lady when they said, "Trick-or-treat," and I said, "Hmmm, how about a trick!?" Maybe next year...

Of course this means the three bags of candy I bought are likely to be consumed by yours truly. At least I planned ahead and only bought candy I like: 2 bags of Snickers and 1 Almond Joy. Now if I can just hide them from the man of the house.

I know it's been a long time since I've written anything. I'm proud to report that I'm back on my meds (no, I'm not kidding, it's round 3 of antidepressants in the last 10 years) and "doing the work" a la "What About Bob?"

I'm also proud to report (and slightly shocked at my decision to do this) that I've signed up for National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. I imagine that I'll be doing a lot more blog-writing in the next month as well, when I run a little short on plot! I'll keep you posted. At this point the ending really is unseen...