TeamME

I did it! I finished my book. Huzzah!

So, for a third year (out of four), I am signing up for NaNoWriMo. Why? Because I am going for a trifecta of sorts (I totally sat out last year, this year will be my hat trick). I have the starts of a story, no characters or character names, and a dolphin so far. We are keeping our plans somewhat low key, and Mike is (relunctantly) behind me, so I think we are good to go. Weeee!

Life has been hectic. I have been working on two presentations for work, one I am giving to the sponsor and the other that someone else is giving. I get to travel for the first time for work to give my presentation. It is kind of exciting, except I am flying into DC, taking the subway to a building, giving the presentation in the same building, then immediately leaving for the airport via the subway. I don’t think I actually have to go outside, so I may not even bring a coat. Take that cold weather!

I have decided against NaNoWriMo this year. With Rachel visiting and the craziness of this month, I don’t want to tempt fate by making next month just as crazy. I will be writting a technical document, though, so wish me luck on that. It (hopefully) won’t have any wacky twists, but predictable is something I could use right now.

I wore my ‘I can’t believe I made it’ nanowrimo t-shirt to Panera Bread on Tuesday, and the manager commented on it. This caused Mike to ask if I was thinking about doing it this year. I haven’t really thought about it. Rachel’s visiting for about 5 days, and I would rather spend time with her, but that still leaves 25 days. I don’t really have a story idea. I guess it is too early to know. Any thoughts?

Yay! So I finished my book tonight, Life on Hold, coming in with a total word count of 50,257 words. I pulled out the good stuff and wrote 13,769 words in the last three days so I could celebrate with Mike. We drank a whole bottle of sparkling cider and watched some funny machinima.

– Details –
Ending this year was more quickly wrapping up loose ends and less ending the story. I mean, I ended the story where I wanted to, but I skipped over a bunch of stuff, just mentioned it, before getting to the part I wanted to write about. Last year I had conflict until the very end (or at least until the last day of writing). This year, I had gotten past a good portion of the conflict early on (around 43,000 words), which made writing today slow and unwieldily. But this experience was more of a growing experience than before. Last year, it was all about the word count, and I kicked out a pretty good story. This year, I tried a few different literary tricks (which probably failed horribly), and the story was definitely more depressing (I killed a character I like 6 different ways). I lost focus on creating a scene around 20,000, so I spent the last ten thousand really working on that.

All in all, a good experience. Thanks to Mike for being “better than bad” (song is stuck in my head). He did an amazing job keeping me on task and without him, I would have puttered out around 15,000 words. The only downside is that whenever I pause in typing, I press ctrl-s, which is uncool on websites.

Yesterday, I got my word count above the daily amount for the first time in ten days. That means I spent half of the whole time behind. I blame my presentation, which I totally rocked, but my writing suffered since most of my brain power was going to that. On the plus side, skies are brighter and days are warmer. Or maybe that is just the weather. Whatever, everything is slightly better when I am beating my self-imposed deadlines.

I am a sucker for insurance policies. I realized I had a problem when I got the insurance for my cell phone. I am happy to say that I got over that, and when I got my new phone, I did not get the policy.

That being said, I am thinking of backing up the novel I am working on. So far, I haven’t really had too many problems with losing documents on my laptop (other than when the power cord jiggles), but with my new laptop, I just want to be sure. I think the plan is to get a little usb drive that I can put stuff on. That would be nice, seeing how I made it through 1/6 of the novel so far (8,333+ words). I really don’t want to loose that stuff.

The novel is progressing well, although I am not sure exactly where it is going yet. The downside is that the premise is kind of depressing, so it isn’t as much fun to write as last year’s, where I was shooting for a pretty happy ending. This year is more a learning experience. On a statistical note, I am behind from last year’s numbers, but I am think I am going to be more slow and steady this year.

So, since I added NaNoWriMo as a category, I now feel obligated to do it. I think there may be zombies, but that depends on how the writing goes, where my plot stops, and how many words I have under my belt before that happens.

On the other hand, I think I am insane to actually contemplate doing this. I think I am just having a bad day. Mike’s out of town, in the sunny, non-hurricane-effected part of Florida. I keep getting errors everytime I use an online financial program, so I am now a month behind in keeping up with my chapters, and the problem seems unidentifable, so it doesn’t look like it will resolve itself anytime soon. Feuding alumnae chapters are making my head hurt. The new laptop, while super cool, with a battery, doesn’t have all the capabilities of the old one on it yet. The radio dj kept commenting on how Wilma was drenching the northeast, when this is just a nor’eastern making havoc with rain instead of snow. And walking into work today, I was drenched when my umbrella flipped, so I looked like a mess when I got in, then had to dry off in a room where the temperature was close to 60F. I totally feel like Alexander.

So, I am thinking about doing NaNoWriMo again. Last year, I wasn’t very busy, and I enjoyed the experience. I liked visiting warm locales in my flannel pajamas (I set the first half of the story in Aruba), and it was a very interesting to explore the thought process needed to keep the story moving along. Having to explain why I did it to my family was hard, but in the end, they weren’t unsupportive. Mike was amazingly supportive throughout the whole process. In the end, I had written a novel (which I have read through twice) and I got to talk about it with my cousin Emily (who also finished a novel), which was really quite fun.

This year, my time is a little more committed. I have a group talk to give on November 18th, which isn’t anywhere near as big as the talk I gave in May, and I have signed up to volunteer more of my time. I feel like with enough candy and soda, I could do it again. I kind of have a premise set up in my head, but nothing too elaborate. Feelings from the crowd?