More Life. And a Bit of Catch-up

For the record, a root canal is both awful and not bad.

The actual root canal isn't bad, or at least, in my case, it wasn't too awful.  My mouth wasn't too badly infected by it - I came across some root canal horror stories (and of course I went looking for them before my procedure.  Cause apparently I'm mental.) in which the teeth probably ought to have been extracted, and having a bad endodontist rates at the top of 'teeth horror' stories.

I had a great endodontist (if expensive, and the whole 'no dental insurance', I think, hurt more than the getting the root canal).  It takes forever.  I was in the chair for closing on two hours.  I wasn't more than mildly sore aftewards, i.e., I couldn't open my mouth very far afterwards, and had a sore jaw.  Then, the next day, I went to my regular dentist (also, great dentist), had the mold for the crown made (it's going to be ceramic) and got a temporary crown, because that one's not coming until the beginning of February.  As this meant more drilling, I was a bit more sore and exhausted.  And, naturally, the temp came off while I was eating cereal one and a half days later.  Well after the dentist office was closed.  Apparently that's not extremely uncommon, but I've got to get back to the other side of LA now to get it placed back on, and take even more time off work, and that's a bit of a pain.

In other, better, news, I forgot to mention in my last catch-up post what took my life over in November.  Ever heard of NaNoWriMo?  No?

The full name is National Novel Writing Month, and it's basically a challenge to write 50,000 words in one month.  That's 1,667 words per day, or approximate 10,000 bursts on the weekend write-ins to make up for writing only a few hundred words per day on weekdays.  Write-ins are just when a bunch of wrimo's get together and write, and the person in charge of organizing it offers challenges and prizes.  Some people do a whole bunch of planning in the months beforehand, and know every scene for their book.  Others... I know some people who didn't know what they were going to write at all until a few days beforehand.

I'd been working on the idea for my story for about a year or so, but my outline was very vague.  Still, I wrote 50,047 words as of November 29. :)  Printed off a winner's certificate and everything.

It's a Christian allegory (think of a combination of Narnia and Pilgrim's Progress).  It's about a young man, whose name is currently Lysander Kweston, who discovers that everything he knows about his world is a lie, and he goes in search of an amazing, legendary treasure, that he doesn't have solid proof - or proof at all - that it exists.

Although I finished Nanowrimo, there's a huge amount of work to be done on the book before it's actually finished.  There's a bunch of prizes that different companies offer to winners with upcoming expiration dates, so my plan right now is to finish up a ghost story that I've technically been working on for 10 years (it was the first story I started writing) and get it in e-book formatting, and possibly get a papercover of it.  The e-book formatting is a bit more important, because it's easier to self-publish electronically rather than paper.  I do want to try to publish it in the old-fashioned manner, but having the e-formatting will make it more accessible to me to work with, as far as marketing goes.  There's also a contest I can enter it in, which I haven't decided if I'm going to do it or not yet.