General Update - Again!

I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted a blog!

I did complete the 50K words for Nanowrimo, as a side note.  Also, the play I was in - The Crucible - went well.  It was the usual round of 'you-have-no-life' for a few months, and then outright plain crunch time during the actual shows.  It's a bit funny, but as much fun as I had being in the play (and I'd missed acting a lot), it was a bit of a relief when the play ended.  It seems ridiculous, but it's amazing how much it takes out of you to do acting.

In other news, I've moved!  I'm now living as far out of the city as possible (though still am stuck in the city, sadly), and am in a mountainous valley.  It's a much smaller city than I've ever lived in, which is nice.  I'm also driving a lot less, as I can easily walk to a bus that drops me off a couple hundred feet from my work entrance.  No more forty-five minute drive for a five-mile trip to the train station!

In more craft-related news, I've started working on more crocheting projects, in part due to the fact that I have a one-hour commute one way on the bus, and it's easy to crochet on the bus (as opposed to all of my other crafts).  I came across a pattern for a small clutch, eyeglasses case, hearts, and more (the clutch and glasses case will be in my etsy store soon.  3-d stuffed hearts to follow!).  Hearts are actually hard to find patterns for.  Or, more accurately, to find patterns that are simple to do and look like hearts.  I finally found one that's a basic single-crochet.  Although in the process of looking and trying out designs, I did end up re-learning how to make a granny square.

Re-learning how to stitch in the round turned out to be quite helpful, as I ran across a pattern (on Red Heart, which sells patterns as well as yarn) for a lace masquerade mask.  It's incredibly detailed work, and unless people are willing to drop fifty dollars or so for it, I don't think I'll end up selling it, but the pictures of the masks are beautiful and so far, with a quarter of the mask finished, it's lovely and intricate.  I'll post a picture when I finish. :)

New News!

Couple pieces of exciting news:

        Re-opened my Etsy store!

        Nanowrimo's started!

Nanowrimo:

I'm currently at just over 7,000 words out of 50,000.  For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is a challange in which one writes 50,000 words during the month of November (hence, National Novel Writing Month).  In theory, writers work on one story that stars with nothing more than an idea, or - perhaps - some planing and plotting that was worked out in the months or so before.  The original challenge (about 20 years ago) said that writers had to be working on a totally new project (it also had a different word count goal).

In practice, a lot of people use this to work on stories that they've already started.  Some of them use this time to do something else entirely - it's called being a NaNo Rebel.  I'm working on a few projects, but the primary one is one that I've mentioned before on my blog during Camp WriMo's - small mini (or not so mini) challenges where you pick your end goal, whether words or hours.  It's a fantasy story with a humorous element where the narrator has gone missing, and the main characters - including the villain - are left on their own to write the story.

The biggest idea for Nanowrimo is NO EDITING.  Wrote a scene you don't like?  A) Why are you re-reading?  This isn't the time for that, and B) Re-write it - but don't delete it.  Both versions will go towards your total word count!  Afterwards, when you're editing your novel (hopefully with the end goal of publishing) you can take your pick of the versions, or even create a new one.

Since Nano starts on November first (midnight), any get-togethers naturally start on Halloween, so, yay! - excuse for costumes! Here’s a picture of what I wore:

In celebration of starting another Nano month, I’m doing a promotion of my book Glimpses on Amazon – from today through November 8, download it free! (See sidebar for a link.) And leave me a review! :)

In other news, and adding to the crazy business of my life this past week, I was asked to make some

cakes for my church’s seventh anniversary (and the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, when Martin Luther posted the infamous ninety-five thesis’s). Specifically, I was asked to make cake for 250 people, which is a lot of cake. Plus they were also having other deserts at the picnic, so I ended up making cake for only 200 people. Here’s the results:

 

Came out nice, I think. The frosting is a type of whip cream (so no having to spend forever trying to smooth the frosting out) and on the sides of the rectangle cakes, I pressed on rock candy pieces.

I was going to place little swirls of the frosting on the top of the sides of the cakes, but apparently thirty-three cups of frosting only just covers five cakes. :)

For my last bit of exciting news, my Etsy store (etsy.com/woolranch) re-opened on October 28^th. Here’s a sample of some of my items up for sale (as well as what you can see in the sidebar):

 

Besides what I’ve been selling for years (books, bookmarks, crocheted items, earrings) I’m including items made with my embroidery machine and bead loom. I’ll explain the last in more detail next time. :)

Word Count: 7,414/50,000

Regularly-Scheduled Life

I'm finally getting to be back in my regular schedule this weekend, although after missing a couple weeks of dancing led to me actually having to take a nap after class (instead of just considering doing so).

I did spend a few hours beforehand wandering around the mall with a friend before, but I don't think that wore me down that much :).

Part of my regular weekend schedule is going to my bi-weekly writer's group on Sunday afternoons.  I might've mentioned them before, but we first met doing NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and someone decided to keep it up.  It was initially just monthly, and we've expanded in the last year or so to twice a month.  It's been a great way for me to keep up on my writing, and I have to admit that some months, the only time I do any writing at all is during those three hour sessions.

I'm currently working on a short story challenge for a contest.  I've got until the end of June to finish it.  The way this challenge works is there's about a dozen art pieces (paintings and photos), and you pick one to write a story of 2000-5000 words inspired by the artwork.  Sounds fairly simple (I've done the same thing, for poetry, in a writing class), until I looked at the artwork and realized that all the pieces are modern, real-world, non-quirky images.

I don't write reality; it's not really my thing.  I gave it a go with a couple of different pictures, but finally decided that I'm a fantasy writer (and abstract-y), I'd write fantasy.  So the story ended up being a mix of fantasy and reality, with the main character losing the ability to tell the difference between the two.  It's only a couple of sentences from being fully written (I haven't decided if I want the ending to be 'strange' or 'horror'), and then I'll have quite a bit of work to do for re-writing and editing it.  It kind of reads like I threw up on the page, at the moment (apologies for the visual :).  But really, it does!).   It's all a bit out of order, I think I'm leaving out certain important details, and there's very little dialogue.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I think, but it's something for me to consider.

I realized recently that a lot of my writing style is based off the older books I read growing up, like random philosophers (Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville), long lists of fairy tales and mythology, Frankenstein, Dracula, etcetera.  Books with very little dialogue.  I suppose the fairy tales saved me from habitually using paragraph-long sentences.   At any rate, it wasn't until I wrote a scene some years ago with five people talking in the same conversation that I actually learned how to write dialogue.  My first story - in it's current incarnation as Nightmare (one of the short stories in my book) - is an example of how I wrote before I figured out dialogue.

Ready, Set...

Camp Nanowrimo officially started!

My project's called 'For Want of a Narrator', and (as I think I've mentioned previously) since it's a project that I worked on last year in Camp Nanowrimo, I have a word goal of only 5000 words per day.  Which, in 30 days, is only 167 words per day (if I write everyday).  In theory, it'll be enough to finish the story.

Here's the synopsis:

An epic tale of good versus evil, an evil overlord, a brave hero, minions and fair ladies - interrupted by the abrupt disappearance of the narrator. What are the characters to do, except to pick up the story-telling themselves?

It's meant to be an absurd funny story, and, though I don't particularly do humor too well, I think it works.  If you've read 'Glimpses', you know I can do absurd, so I feel pretty confident for that part of it.  Admittedly, I've never had someone else read what I've written so far, but since I can make myself laugh with what I've got, there's a chance I can make a reader laugh (similar logic to me writing horror.  If I can't at least get a shiver when reading a piece of horror I've written, it's not going to scare anybody else.).  I'm even playing around with putting some romance in, though only as an aside, applying the "Write what you know" theory, and, well, I don't know romance.

(No, that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

The 'epic tale' is a bit on the cliche side, and it's meant to be.  The only 'twist' is that the main characters step out of the story narration and discuss what scenes they're going to do, whether they should re-do a scene, and whether a scene should be ignored, all while staying in their prescribed alignments of good or evil.  Because, hey, whether the evil overlord is in his castle or outside of the story narration, he's still an evil overlord.

I really like these characters, and I think there's a lot of potential with the story, but I suppose only time will

See you in a week!  (With, hopefully, a word count of at least 1,334)


Word Count:184

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.