Lessons from NaNoWriMo

I don't have a lot of time to post, as I need to get cracking on my NaNoWriMo novel, but I'd thought I'd list some interesting strategies I've learned while trying to write 2000 words a day:

1. It is perfectly acceptable to plagiarize yourself. If you character wants to talk about something you've already written about in your blog, copy and paste it into the novel, rearrange the words a little bit, and voilà! 66 words!
2. It is perfectly acceptable to plagiarize quote someone else. Hey, maybe your character likes poetry, so quote the last stanza of a poem and lookee! Another 65 words!
3. It is perfectly acceptable to use horrible crutch words that you would otherwise search for with an eagle-eye and prune ruthlessly, like an overzealous topiary gardener. If you use words like "so" "just" or "little" ten times in one paragraph, who cares! That's ten extra words! (Besides, since my novel is told in first person, those words are my characters' crutches, not mine.)
4. It is perfectly acceptable to play with structural quirks to build word count. As I mentioned before, my character is telling her story in encyclopedia format. She gives a kind-of real definition, then writes a couple paragraphs explaining what the subject means to her. I'm prefacing each of these explanations with the phrase: "Editor's note." I may delete those if I decide to revise, as they may be unnecessary; but for now, I start each day by listing 6 to 8 words to define, each followed by the phrase "Editor's note." That's an extra 12 to 16 words, even before I've started engaging my brain.

After four days, I have over 8000 words, which is the kind of progress I'd hoped for. Even better, I'm having a lot of fun writing those 8000 words, which means I'm getting something out of the whole NaNoWriMo experience. We'll see if I feel the same way at the end of the month, after I've probably fallen behind and feel horribly pressured to reach 50,000 words by the 30th, but for now, the experiment is going well.

This is only a test...

... had this been an actual blog post, you would have been notified by your emergency broadcast system. Or something like that. I know my posts have been few and far between over the last month, but I've been very busy. This year I've invoiced ten times more assignments than last year, and there was another deadline last week, so I was busy focusing on that rather than the blog.

I'm currently between assignments (November's hasn't arrived yet, although I'm already booked for December, January, and half of February), but there's something else taking up my writing time: NaNoWriMo! For those of you unfamiliar with this weird acronym, it stands for "National Novel Writing Month." The idea is that for everyone who ever thought, "Gee, I should write a novel," to take the month of November and scribble down a 50,000 word novel. (Which is very short for novel, but not so much for the kids/YA genre, which is what I'm working in.)

Now, I'm not one of those who has never finished a novel—I have two finished (and revised at least once or twice), and a third that is three-quarters written and all the way plotted. But I have found it difficult to find time for writing fiction, among all the extra assignments I've taken this year, so I see NaNoWriMo as a chance to get back in the fiction habit, as it were. If I were to write every day in November, I would need to write around 1733 words a day; since I know I'll have days when I can't write (chaperoning band nationals next week, and during Thanksgiving), I'm aiming for at least 2000 on the days I do write. So far I've got 3750 for the first two days, which isn't on target but is better than I thought I'd do since I played a concert on the 1st and I spent half of yesterday working on sign lists for the marching band craft fair.

So you can see I may not have as much time this month to write in the blog; NaNoWriMo is blatant permission for me to write meaningless blather, which mitigates the need for the blog. But I'll pop in with some posts here and there; keep posting weeking travel photos; and maybe occasionally write an actual blog post, even when I'm writing about not blogging, as I've done today. I will be reviving Janespotting soon, having checked out Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (!) from the library, so look for that when I have a few spare minutes. But for now, I'm off to write a crappy novel! Wish me luck!

Photo of the Week--11/2/09

Ah, Ireland. For good reason it's called the "Emerald Isle," what with all the grass and moss and lovely natural things. Out in the countryside there weren't any pigeons for Boy to chase; instead he took this opportunity during our visit to Achill Island, off the west coast, to goof off for the camera. More likely he was just glad for a chance to get out of the little lime green car we drove all around the country ... for some reason, that car is one of the few things he remembers from our early travels. Maybe because it was a very, very ugly green ... unlike the beautiful green landscape here.

Photo of the Week--10/26/09

And here's the next in the continuing series, "Boy Terrorizes the Pigeons of Europe," taken during a 1999 weekend trip to Paris. It was spring, the weather was nice, and there were plenty of flowers at the Tuileries Gardens. It was there we found more fat, sassy pigeons in need of exercise. If you look closely at the far left of the photo, you'll see one forced to move by the prospect of Boy approaching.

The Quilt Files, Episode 15

...or, I finally finished! I've talked before about planning ahead for a wedding quilt; when you have a lot of lead time, you can try a complicated pattern and take advantage of the birthday discount at my favorite fabric shop, Viking Sewing Center. This time it was my niece who got married, but she and her future husband didn't set a date for the wedding right away. Never mind; it would eventually happen, so I trundled out to Viking with a pattern and an idea that she liked pinks and purples. I found nine different batiks in various patterns of pink, purple, and navy, and transposed them into the "Stars in the Meadow" pattern I'd bought with the thought of trying one day. This was the result:

As you can see, this pattern is a bit more complicated than anything I had tried before: the half-triangle squares weren't new, but the blocks made up of one kite-shaped piece and two large right triangles were another matter, especially since you had to cut them from a not-quite-kite- or -triangle-shaped templates before sewing them together. The other unique aspect of this quilt, I discovered as I pieced the first couple rows, was that those large right triangles, grouped around the posts with squares and half-triangles of the same fabric, seemed to create a large, almost-round medallion. If you pick out those medallions in the picture, you can see that some are pink, some are lavender, and some are a light maroon. These all came from the same batik fabric; it took lots of targeted cutting and piecing to keep the medallions the same color. So I didn't cut out all the fabric before I started piecing; I did a row at a time and cut extra pieces as I went along.

It made for slow going, and by the time the wedding date was finally announced I didn't have a lot of time to finish the quilt. I didn't do any quilting in the ditch, but instead did a series of diagonal lines through the triangles, along with straight lines in one of the borders. It took longer than I thought it would, but I managed to deliver the quilt within three months of the wedding, which meets most etiquette guidelines I've seen. And I did deliver it, although I was very tempted to keep it ... but I still have many of the lovely fabrics left, so I'm sure I'll make something for myself with some of the wonderful scraps I have in my stash.

Photo of the Week--10/19/09

In April 1999 we took a trip to Barcelona, Spain; it was only a few years after the city hosted the Summer Olympics, so the facilities were superb in this already beautiful city. We spent a long weekend wandering around, enjoying the unique architecture and the wondrous food. Here we were at the Palau Real Major, where Ferdinand and Isabella received Columbus in 1493, after his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere. This shot has a lovely view of the palace, the tower (called the Mirador dei Rei Martí), and the Plaça del Rei (the courtyard below). And here you can see a genuine smile from Boy, even if we did have to tickle it out of him.

Wordless definitions: Standoff

I took this picture because I heard a low growling coming from the dining room and saw this little tableau: Clio (big fat orange cat) treed by Callie (skinny brown cat) and growling because she felt intimidated. This is the funniest cat dynamic; 11-pound Clio routinely wins fights with Gigi, who is close in size, but let barely-7-pound Callie stake her ground and Clio will back down, growling all the way.

Of course, because I entered the room Callie nonchalantly looked away, as if to say, "What, me cause trouble?" Clio stopped growling, but she didn't look away from Callie ... she knows that cat is psycho.