Christmas Countdown

Did anyone else write the date today and go, "OH CRAP!" ?

I've been back since Sunday, but every night I sit here and can't think of much to say. Or at least anything I want immortalized on the internet for the world to read for all eternity.

Nano was a bust for me. Too much happened every night I got home, then company came, then I was out of town, so yeah... I only managed about 6,000 new words on my WIP. I haven't even looked at it in two weeks. I don't remember what's going on, to be honest. I need to read it again and get back on track. Not tonight. Tonight I'm wore out from a full day's work and an agonizing death march around the mall.

I still have a partial with one agent and a full MS with a publisher who showed interest. We'll see how it all turns out eventually, I suppose. I hope for the best, but the reality is - it's tough out there.

Yesterday I got an unexpected email. My longest fanfic has been nominated for an award. The sentiment is nice, and I really do appreciate it. I won't know the results until the end of December. Voting starts December 10th. What surprised me was that anyone even remembered it. I haven't updated it since July 2008.

Out of curiosity, I signed into fanfic.net and discovered something amazing: people still read my story. It's had over 300 visitors in November, and over 1500 hits. I looked at the history of the last year, and every month is like that -some a little better, some a little less. Altogether, it's had over 195,000 hits. I about fell out of my chair when I saw that last night. Maybe I should go back to fanfic, eh?

I hope everyone is doing well and keeping warm.

Catching Up

It will come as no surprise to some of you that I was at a midnight showing opening night for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or that I was there in costume. Okay, to be honest, I was going to go in costume, but decided I'd be too hot so just wore my Time Turner. I have a Death Eater outfit that I wear to all the midnight book and movie things, but this time I just didn't feel like bothering with it.

While I like all the movies and consider them more works of fanfiction than a translation of text to film (to keep my sanity and my hair), I will say I was very impressed with Deathly Hallows. It was hilarious and amazingly sad, but we knew the latter, right? I was highly impressed with their ability to weave humor into such a dark piece.

******TINY SPOILER ALERT FOR SOMETHING NOT PLOT MOVING*****Unfortunately for me, about half way through the movie, it took the mickey out of me. In my fourth MS (which is an MG), I have the portals to the other world being out of order toilets. There's a scene in DH where they travel by toilet. Now I have to change it or it'll look like I copied the idea. If it's actually IN the books, I don't recall it.

On a side note, I won an Honorable Mention from the Women on Writing website for their Summer 2010 Flash Fiction Contest, judged by agent Kathleen Ortiz:
http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/42-FE1-Summer10Contest.html
It was for a rewritten version of You Are, which I posted several months ago. I won a couple of e-books and a $20.00 Amazon gift card, which is nice.

I hope everyone is doing well. I've been trying for a couple of promotions at work so that's been taking a lot of my energy. No matter how much we love writing, our jobs are what pay the bills, right? On occasion, I'm capable of proper priorities and being responsible like a real adult.

My daughter's in town now and we'll be out of town together for most of this week, so I will go ahead and wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving in case I don't get another chance to post before then.

NaNoWri-not so much

So, Day 1 of NaNo was a bust. I got zero words written. I had a late night at work, then stuff happened afterwards, so it was pretty much NaNot.

Last night I got 1305 words written. It's under the daily expected, but try as I might - I couldn't just keep going. This whole word vomit thing is beyond me. I paused, I plotted, I carefully constructed each sentence, and at one point I even took about ten minutes to decide what a lesser character's name should be.

And you know what? I'm good with that. I know I won't make the 50,000. I knew that going in. I'll be out of town the last week of November. I have company coming on the 17th. I joined NaNo to force myself to do the butt-in-chair on a daily basis. Even if I only write 20,000 new words, that's 20,000 more than I had.

So tonight, when I get home from work after 6pm, I'll do my best to write another 5+ pages of carefully constructed sentences. For those of you who are awesome at the word vomit thing (I'm looking at you, Mia and Emily) more power to you. I won't deny I have literary penis envy.

Have a great Wednesday, y'all!

My 100th Blogpost

I waited until today so my 100th post would be on my favorite holiday, Halloween. or Samhain for some.

Okay, guys. NaNoWriMo. For some of you, it has already started. For me, it's not officially time for 3 1/2 hours. I haven't signed into my account (I know, I suck) to do my updates and connect with people because... okay, I could drone on about real life and whatnot, but the truth is: I'm a forgetful cow who is easily distracted by anything shiny.

Or with awesome special effects.

Trick-or-Treating etiquette is apparently a thing of the past. A group of six kids came to my door. Every single one of them grabbed heaping handfuls of candy out of my bowl and one little bugger grabbed THREE. He just kept coming back as long as I had the door open for the other kids in his group. HIS PARENTS SAID NOTHING.

At least I'm smart enough to just set my kids loose without me so I don't have to excuse their bad behavior or scold them in front of other people. Ah. Blissfully ignorant, me. My other awesome parenting tactic is to cover my ears and say 'lalalalalalalalala' a lot until they give up trying to tell me something I don't want to hear.

This doesn't work as well with bill collectors. Just saying.

On another note, I guess I spoke too soon. I got a partial request for Postmortal today. "PADDLES, STAT!" *beep* *beep* *beep* We'll see if she pulls through.

There's the doorbell again. I wonder if handsmacking is allowed in Trick-or-Treating etiquette...

Flatlined Again

So, I think I'm calling it: Postmortal has died. Which is ironic, considering its content. It's been several weeks since I sent out the last queries, and while I had requests for fulls and partials in the beginning, no one's asked for more in three months and I'm out of agents. My second MS has flatlined, and now joins Lesser Evils in the Abandoned Department.

I'm okay with that. Sure, it stings a bit, but I'll get over it. I've done it before. I've been working on a couple of other things, and maybe one of them will work out. I've definitely felt a severe dip in my gungho-ness, though. I enjoy what I'm working on, and that's all that matters. The love of writing will be there, even if the only people who ever read my work are my family and a few 'readers' I have that read my chapters as I go.

NaNoWriMo is something a lot of us are participating in soon. This will be my first time. I'm going to use it get my butt in gear to finish at least one of the ones I've started. I know this breaks the rules, but I'm not actually competing with anyone but myself. I'm the sort to slowly type up a chapter and edit as I go, with each paragraph and dialogue tag scrutinized before I move forward. I don't turn back until the entire thing is written, then read back through it to make sure the pacing is good and fix something here and there. Just sitting back and letting the words flow is going to be a whole new challenge for me.

So, who all is doing NaNo this year? Have you been outlining and making notes? Or do you just have an idea and are going to see how it goes?

So, I'm a Goober

Today I'm a goober writer for Goober Writer's Anonymous over at Emily's Playhouse.

Who am I kidding? I'm a goober writer every day. Sometimes just a plain ol' goober. I make mistakes. I doubt myself. I feel like an idiot for pursuing a dream instead of being content with 'the day job.' I have some days when I'm excited about what I'm working on, then some days when it feels futile. Time consuming. I have this fear that twenty years from now I'll still be unpublished, and I'll look back at my life and regret I wasn't living it as I could have been.

But that's the risk we're all taking together, isn't it?

I hope everyone has a fabulous Thursday.