Under the Same Sky

On the very last day of M's vacation, we actually got a few things done. We've been fairly slothful all week, which was nice. Evelyn was in the sweetest mood she's been in all week, and also, she slept a lot. She's doing the growth spurt thing. I even have a clean desk! Every single time I get in a super-productive mood, though, I end up with more stuff on my list of things to do than I did before I started. I think I'll just stop trying to get things done. You know what? Now that I think about it, I'm probably less antsy about not doing stuff than I would be if I didn't keep this super list on my desk. Yes, that's it. De-stress your life by being lazy! Hmm.. that reminds me of a bunch of web cartoons that M and I watched a few years ago about an unemployed guy. They were really funny, and I can't remember what it was called. I have asked M, the web comic expert in the household, and he can't remember either and now it is driving us crazy. .... ... ... Google rocks my world! Odd Todd is what I was thinking about. Funny stuff. M is going to be spending all his free time watching the cartoons again now that I brought it up. He is into the whole online comic thing, which is an aspect of his personality that I tend to try to forget about.

Today, a few thoughts circled around my head about my nano book. Wow! My nano book! It's been three and a half years and I have barely touched the thing, or thought about it, and now I am all "ooh, I should write stuff!" I am dedicated, for sure. I have a lot of time right now to sit down and think about what is going wrong in the love lives of two people who have serious character development issues in the first half of the book, and a lack of coherent plot throughout the first two thirds of the book. (It was Nanowrimo. Give me a break, I wrote the thing in less than thirty days and I failed to outline in advance. I know what actually was supposed to happen now. I just didn't then!)

By the way, the insurance issue of Evelyn not being covered was cleared up. Humana apparently keyed someone else's termination for her--lovely. They are still sending me a couple of requests per day for more information about her other possible insurance coverage, or so it seems. I have filled out the form online twice (once after they re-added her) and called them about it. Apparently this is not good enough. I can only guess that it doesn't count because she was not covered at the time I was trying to take care of that, though that doesn't explain why the last online form didn't count. The fact that they're getting snarky about it when it's their fault that they removed her in the first place is beginning to get old, though, so I intend to let them know about it tomorrow. Loudly, if necessary.

I'm feeling very pleased with myself because I wrote a snail-mail letter tonight. My best friend from Augusta (Georgia, not Maine) sends me about five cards a year, and I really suck at sending them back. I got a Thanksgiving card this week, for instance. So now I have the thing written at least.. I just want to find or make a nice card to go with it. Now watch it sit on my desk for two or three weeks before I think "man, this is too old to send now!" and throw it away. :)

We stayed home most of the day again. I'm afraid my aunt is going to be very mad at me for avoiding her, but it hasn't been on purpose. She comes to my grandfather's house every other week, and it just so happens that we've missed her there for the past five times or so. We went to Gatlinburg, I was sick, etc. M has a sore throat and is feeling generally icky, and my head has felt stuffy too. My grandfather is really not supposed to be exposed to illness if he can avoid it at all, so we try to stay away from him when he's sick. It's not worth the risk, and all that.

I'm also in a pretty good mood because our lava lamp works again. It's been unplugged for ages, and then the bulb was bad, and then the bulb broke when unscrewing it, so it had to be removed with pliers, etc etc. It still has a Swedish plug-in thingie on it. Those are so ugly. I don't know why I don't like those round plug things look. Luckily, this is not something that affects my life much, I just thought I'd mention it. I think that Nano made me feel a little guilty about writing heaps of random crap if it wasn't in my book, so now I have compensation issues.

M has nagged me for several months/years about writing more. I was lazy and afraid and procrastinatory, so I'm feeling excellent about getting this book written. We went to eat last night and M kept bragging on me for finishing a book. He says, "We should get you a present." I agree with him on that one, and he pulls his wallet out and rifles through it, as if looking for something to give me. He finally pulls out a square of paper that claims to be a certificate for a laser printer. :) He's so sweet. I told him that he wasn't allowed to use it because he didn't finish his book. I'm not so sweet, am I? I did agree that he could use it just a little bit, though, so it all worked out..

Anyway, that was actually not where I was going with that. M asked me last night when I was going to write book number two. He got much more answer than he had anticipated, for as it turned out, I actually do have a Plan, and I kept on talking for a very long time about this plan. I think he had expected me to say something like "I don't know" or "When I get done editing this one" or something like that, but he got a lot more value for his question-asking buck than that. I am majorly rambling here. Maybe Nano wasn't good for me after all.

So, the writing plan. I'm going to spend December working on a website--you know the one. I'm also going to do some market research and perhaps some short article writing. I have one thing that I'm going to edit, and then I'm going to see if I can find a home for it. I'm not expecting too much else for December, because I'd like to do Christmas things, and I need a break from this book. In January, I'm going to give it its first edit, which will be done by February. In February, book two gets started. In March, book one gets its second rewrite.

Of course, there's a lot of room for changes there, but that's what I'm thinking of right now. I think the important thing right now is that I do have a plan for further writing and I'm not just planning on closing the file and never opening another. Of course, next time I don't think I'll insist on writing so freaking MANY words a day. :)

I just hit the 42k mark this evening. I'm a tad behind, yes, but not very much at all, and I'm still headed in the right direction, so I feel pretty confident that I'll make it on time. I'd love to finish it today, but I don't see myself as the marathon writer sort. :) I've thrown out 2645 painful words today, and while I might write more tonight, I don't think I'll write another 7,903, which is what I need to finish right now. It's pretty cool, because on the fourth day of the month, I had written 7,904. How's that for symmetry? Of course, that might not be the end tally for the day, but it works right now. :) I brought my natural keyboard to the living room today, and it's going much better. I'll be glad to be done, though.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing most of the day, in between keeping up with the zine. I tried to be a little less distracted today, though, because I'm bored with Nano now and want to be done with it. We're going to have to go to WalMart or something tonight, because I can't face the idea of going on Friday. I've checked the paper and there's nothing that I can't live without being featured on sale. I do want to buy a certain someone a fondue pot for $5 but my mom might be going. I wonder if everyone's husband pesters them for fondue pots all the time? No? It's just me? Ahh, well.

I've always pretended to worry that my darling husband is gay. I don't actually think he is, for many reasons, including the way he still occasionally loses track of what I'm saying when he notices my cleavage. I like to tease him about it, though. Let's examine the facts. He dresses well. Very well. He thinks he's slobby now, but he hardly ever goes out in a t-shirt. He used to wear black pants and a jacket when he was out doing the grocery shopping, but I broke him of that. He can color-coordinate, and he irons more than I do. He willingly communicates with me--we have deep talks about our relationship at least twice a month. He dabbles in cross-stitch and he has a more than passing fancy to pickle his own garden vegetables. He shuns long fishing trips with the boys and he gossips with the girls. He would rather watch a romantic comedy than a single game of football. He likes sun-ripened raspberry body wash and jasmine-scented shampoo. He's actually aware of what I'm writing right now and he's not only letting me do it, but he's helping me think of examples to use. In short, I'm used to his flagrant lack of interest in certain typically masculine pursuits, but this sudden fixation with fondue pots is more than I can comprehend.

Anyway, I guess we need to get going. There is strawberry shortcake with my name on it waiting, and I'd like to get the shopping done before it gets too late. Four day weekend for my gay husband--yay!

Morning Ramblings That Didn't Get Posted
It's going to be a long day with writing, I think. I stop every so often and put my word count into today's slot in the tracking spreadsheet to see the new statistics. Today, I updated the thing after the first two words I wrote, as if I didn't know exactly how many words I'd written at that point or how that would affect my statistics. I plan to continue writing when the month is gone, but oh, man, will I be glad when Nano is over. You may bitchslap me and tell me to get back to writing if I stop mentioning my writing goals, though.

Someone just said the sweetest thing to me and it made me want to hug them. And take them out to lunch or something when next I'm traveling through Frankfort. ;)

I have a really full to-do list on the board, but for some reason, I don't feel like I can do any of them. That's so not true. There are a few things that I really can and should get done before the four-day weekend. Actually, now that I think about it, I already have done a few of those things. I should read through it more carefully.

Evening Ramblings
I used to try to get things posted while M was at work, but now that I don't worry about it, these journal entries get written on all day, which means that it sounds weird when I finally do post.

I'm still very worried over this zine project, whereas everyone else seems to have moved on to just excited. I guess that's natural, considering the nature of things. I'll write more about the actual project later on, though I'd say a good number of you have heard references to it all along, both here and in a few other journals. I suppose part of it is just my nature--I worry, and I never worry more than when I'm starting something new. Don't get me wrong, I'm still tremendously excited about it. More excited than worried, even. I'm (ahem) hiring a consultant tonight to help me sort out some details and make some notes on getting started. You don't want to know what I'm paying in consultancy fees, but anything to help the project along... ;) No, seriously, M is a logistical genius (really) with enough of a design background to know where to start with this and he's promised to help me both organize the data I've got and to bitchslap me into line and remind me that I can do this. This is a very good thing, to those of you who are involved. :)

Anyway. I'm getting bored with Nano and would like to write like a banshee now and get this thing over with. (A banshee??) My consultant is doing his homework right now, so this is a good time for me to get my butt in gear and get some horrible words out. I think I know the plan for the entire rest of the book, though, which should help. I usually don't have too much of a problem when I know what's going to happen. My next book will be better planned in advance. ;)

I'm at another down in my novel. I'm not far behind, but I don't want to write any more and I've just about convinced myself not to worry about it too much tonight. I don't work as well on the weekends as during the week, so I think hey, might as well wait until Monday and throw myself at it. I might make myself write another 500 words and then see how I feel. It's another "what happens next" problem.

I'm currently quite excited about a brand new project, although that's not the reason that I'm behind in my novel. Of course, it doesn't help. :) It's an e-zine that we're starting, as suggested by carrieb. There are eight people at the moment tossing ideas at each other and we're having a lot of fun with it so far. At least, I am. :) I'm really beginning to feel like it could be something quite good in the end. I'm sure you'll be updated about this more later on.

The weather is incredible.. about twenty degrees F higher than the average high. It was about 72 today and brilliantly sunny. It's been such a weird year for weather.

Alright. Friends-only thing. I got creeped out, I'm over it. This friends-only experiment made me feel like I have something to be ashamed of or to hide, and I do not. I've given it a few days, but I still feel uncomfortable about it, so even though I hate being wishy-washy about , it's over. My compromise is that I'm going to selectively hide my archives and questionable posts in the future. I'm not going to dwell on this, though.

Oh! One last thing before I try to write again. I mentioned the dogs that my neighbors have. The crazy barking dogs? They haven't been barking at all lately, which is very weird. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that their cage is MUCH bigger than I thought it was. Probably three times as large, so you can stop worrying about the doggies now. :) There's also a neighborhood puppy named Ozzie. It actually belongs to someone, but it runs around outside freely. It's very very friendly and very very stupid. It was really pitiful because it got hit by a car a couple of weeks ago, and my niece was extremely upset. It followed her up to the road when her and my dad were zooming about on the golf cart, and someone hit it. She was sure that it was her fault, so she felt bad. This is a dog that chases cars.. from the front, so it being hit by a car might have been healthy for it in the long run.. it just doesn't see vehicles as a threat. Anyway, it just hurt one of its front legs, and is running around down here again, although it doesn't walk on that leg. It hops along at full speed, but in this awkward little run.. I've been calling it Ozzie Kangaroo. It's so cute.

But it still chases cars. I don't expect it to live too much longer, poor thing.

Oh, the happiness that that number (31,008, for reference when the image changes) inspires in me. I wrote 4,030 words today, which is a little more than double what my daily goal is. We skipped three whole days of writing, and last night I could just force out a thousand. I had decided to write 3,000 today if I could at all. I wrote about a thousand before hitting a bit of a wall.. and then I finally figured out the Big Thing That's Wrong With Marla with help from my totte, which has been holding me up in a major way for the last fifteen thousand words. I've been writing a lot of filler to get to this point, but I'm finally feeling a little more confident in my ability to go back and move things around and rewrite scenes. My characters are actually gaining some personality, and quirky things are happening with them. I like quirky, so that makes me happy. I'm 62% done and I'm feeling confident about the whole thing again. And I'm back on track for November 30 again. Today's writing, in general, has done wonderful things for my statistics.

I also got the lenses in my glasses replaced today, which makes me happy. The anti-glare junk has scratched off twice already, which is vastly annoying and will be more so when they stop replacing it because the warranty is over. I guess that's a year. I don't know. Anyway, it's nice to be able to see things directly in front of me without tilting my head. :)

And furthermore, there was an hour long Good Eats tonight. I'm dying to brine a bird now, but not enough to volunteer to cook the Thanksgiving turkey next week. The turkey is just one of those things you don't want to get started on making, because then you might very well get stuck with it. I am stuck with broccoli casserole, for example, and my poor lucky cousin Rae is stuck with the rolls, for she cannot cook a lick.

Apparently, there is only going to be one Thanksgiving festivity this year. We used to celebrate it with my dad's family on Thursday and my mom's family on Friday. Now my dad's parents go to my uncle's house in Lexington, and we spent two or three years doing nothing on the actual Thanksgiving day. We ate at Shoney's. It was pathetic. Anyway, year before last, Mom decided to do a Thanksgiving event at her house for those of us who aren't doing anything else (read: going to inlaws) on Thursday. I started calling it the Reject Thanksgiving, which Mom and I were both inordinately fond of, especially since it annoyed the crap out of my dad, who kept saying that it was NOT a reject party. It turned out to be quite a nice event, actually. This year, when we asked about Thanksgiving and what would be happening (things are kind of different with the other side of the family now, too, since everyone is all grown up and a couple have to work at various odd times) my Mom piped up and said that it was going to be at her house on Thursday. So it seems that we've successfully stolen a whole holiday. I wonder how that's going to work out, since my aunt has to go to her inlaws, and my uncle gets very testy when she encroaches on his family's time with them.

My poor characters have such stupid conversations when I get pressed for word count, and poor Lane is convinced that I hate her for making her act like such a bitch. This is the second completely worthless conversation they've had (plus one that will need revised for the same problem but is essentially okay) and I can't come up with anything else to come after this so I'm finding it impossible to end the stupid scene and move on. It's very annoying. The words have stopped flowing. Now they're being carved out with a chainsaw, and that isn't exactly the most sophisticated process. I'm forcibly reminding myself that it will be easier to replace those scenes with something worthwhile later. I also seem to be forcibly reminding all of you. Sorry about that.

I just tried to convince M that we should leave for Gatlinburg tomorrow night instead of Saturday morning so we can have three days of writing off instead of just two. Damn him for being clever enough to figure it out. :) We were going to do that to begin with, but we finally decided that it didn't make much sense. It's a four hour drive, and the most straight-forward way of getting there is to go approximately to Lexington and then go south. M works in Lexington, which is one hour from here. He also works tomorrow as usual, so he would have to come home, pick me up, and then we'd have a four hour drive in front of us with no chance of getting there until ten, even if we don't eat dinner. So, not very practical, as we'd be staying the night in a motel room for no good reason. Oh, right, and my car can't leave town because of its wonky transmission, so I can't drive down there and leave from Lexington even if I wanted to. So we're going to get up quite early on Saturday and aim for being there by lunch, which will save us around $60 and a lot of headache.

So, why're we going to Gatlinburg? Sure, it's touristy, but we've already been there three times in three years, so why would we want to go again? It's simple, really. There's a bookstore and a Chinese place we like to frequent. That's also why we don't necessarily need all that much time. :) I wish we could be there on our actual anniversary, though, which is the 18th.

Look at me procrastinate. Didn't I say that I was going to stop doing that today? Eh, well, I also said I was going to write 2,000 words today and look where that's gotten me. :) I'm off to fold clothes, watch Friends and put off writing for another couple of hours. Yay! :)

I got the rain I was wishing for.. it's been pouring all day long, which I'm really enjoying when I'm inside and dry. I had to do errands this morning, though, and so that rather sucked. Also, my car died just as I pulled out on the highway, which was a bit scary. It has a hard time with this much water. I was able to steer it into my parent's driveway and restart it, so it was no big deal, really. I just wish it would stop when M is driving home, but that seems more than unlikely at this point.


Why do I feel like I'm sabotaging my own efforts at writing this book? I don't dislike it after I get started. I don't usually feel unable to write after I've written the first few words. But for some reason, getting started on it is so hard. It's so much better for me if I write in the afternoons before M gets home, but now I've procrastinated until I won't be able to do it all before he gets home. I need to learn discipline. And how to make peanut butter fudge like my aunt does. Grainy, not creamy. Mmmm. I'd give my left pinky toenail for a good batch of fudge about now.

Cooking theorists, anyone? I believe the graininess (and yes, I really do want it somewhat grainy) is caused by too much agitation during the cooking process. Is that right? Stirring too much, thus causing sugar crystals to form? Or is it getting too hot? Anyone know?

Anyway, that was not where I was going with this journal entry. I really can't decide what I think of my book so far. I go back and forth on it. I can see some of its obvious problems, which will of course be fixed in the revisions.. hopefully. M and I haven't read each others books after the fourth day or something, but he kept saying "This is so good!" when he read through it then. I realized last night what the problem was. I think it's that I have well-written crap. (Keeping in mind that it's a first draft, at least.) I mean, my sentences are pretty good in and of themselves, for the most part. My words are varied, my characters have decently realistic dialogue, punctuation is in roughly the right places, very few typos or grammar problems. The problem is that my plot is leaking, my characters are one-dimensional, and there's not enough chemistry to speak of. My problems are structural, and that's what worries me the most. You can always fix run-on sentences, but can I fix it later if my MC is too wussy for the role? Can I add the chemistry back in after it's finished? I think that it's all fixable, but I'm already a little daunted by the task. Maybe I have the endurance to finish a book during this formulaic madness that is November, but do I have the talent to take that book and make something worth reading? I really don't know.

But I'm looking forward to finding out.

I'm gonna write a book.

I actually got up this morning thinking that it was time to get myself back in gear. I've now had three weeks off, and I've had plenty of time to relax and breathe again. Just before I started working at the store this spring, I posted a bunch of goals. One of them was to write, one to work on my techie skills, and one to dedicate more time to learning Swedish. I really meant it, too, but then i started working and had less time (and no energy) for such pursuits. I was dedicating myself to developing a Plan today, and fate melodramatically intervened. Or maybe the melodrama was all in my head. Either way.

Thanks to my link-clicking habits, I've now stumbled on NaNoWriMo via stephbairey. I was skeptical at first but now I'm enthused. So what if I couldn't take 26 pictures in the month of July--I know I can write 50,000 words in November! Surely so! M is also quite excited about the idea.. we both have a few writing plans on the back burner, but it's so hard to get started. Having a deadline is GREAT for me. I procrastinate wildly, but without a deadline, procrastinating turns out to mean procrastinating forever. I did some of my best work in school when I started it the night before.

Go look. Anyone else inspired? Carrie? :) Sounds like something you might like.. we tend to be enthused over similar projects. ;)

In any case, I really am going to try to do this and hopefully not lose sight of the excitement of it all by November. It's such a neat idea. So what if 90% of it is crap? I'll always be able to edit it down.. I've been told that I have a talent for revision. So as long as I have something to work with, I should be fine. :) Nifty. And to think I almost didn't click on the link, habit or not.. The link said "NaNoWriMo" and it's from someone living in Hawaii.. It was a long random word with lots of vowels.. I figured it would be of limited interest to us Mainlanders.. hehe. :)

Hmm.. and now that I think about it.. if I'm going to be spending my time in November writing, I actually have another deadline for this month.. I need to get some of the other little projects I've been thinking on done. Web stuff and such. I'm off to make plans..