Miscellaneous musings

'Tis the season.
Image courtesy of Javier Gonzalez,
rgbstock.com

Happy Tuesday!

Well, here we are in December. It's hard to believe that another year is nearly over. Now comes the rush of the Christmas season, something I never seem to be prepared for. My panic starts right about now and lasts through Christmas Eve—but I shouldn't let it. I know that somehow everything always gets done. I just have to keep reminding myself... ☺

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, and I'm not entirely sure where they went! One thing that happened is that I didn't complete NaNoWriMo this year. Life (including the very welcome excitement of our expected baby girl!) kind of got in the way. I did, however, get some words down—more than I've written in a while—and I feel good about that accomplishment.

On an even better note, I've taken up a new form of expression: art journaling. If you've read my blog for a while, you know that I love all types of art. Art journaling takes my love of words and combines it with my love of art, and I'm having so much fun with it! I don't consider myself to be an artist at all, but with this type of journaling, the process is more important than the product, and I'm enjoying the process so much. I'm excited to see where this new passion takes me. Who knows? You might see this topic in one of my Sunday inspiration posts sometime soon.

Finally—and for no other reason than it's Tuesday—here's Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone." Wishing you all a fantastic day. ☺


Lyrics here.

Thursday yeas and nays

Beautiful fall!

Happy Thursday, friends.

Thursday always feels like a wild card day to me. It's one of the two days each week when my daughter doesn't go to preschool, and it's also different from most of the other days because I don't have a set schedule to follow. It's almost a free day! As I was thinking about the things I need/want to get done today, I came up with this list of yeas and nays—and I learned that I can always find a lot of good if I take the time to look for it: ☺

♥ Project Runway All-Stars is on tonight. Yea!

♥ I'm way behind on my NaNoWriMo project, but I'm still plodding along. Yea!

♥ I have to write the store list for our weekly grocery shopping trip. Nay.

♥ My daughter and I are going to the library today. Yea!

♥ Yesterday's weather was beautiful, so I took the kids outside to play after school. Today, however, it's gray and rainy—not an outdoor playday at all. Nay.

♥ On the other hand, back home they already have snow, so I guess a little rain is just fine—and the leaves are still pretty. Yea!

♥ I'm almost finished with the book I'm reading, so soon I'll be able to move on to one I've been waiting to read for a while, Ted Kooser's Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Yea!



We can find them if we look: rainbows and silver linings!

♥ Since I cooked so much this week and have tons of leftovers, I don't have to make dinner tonight. Yea!

♥ Mount Laundry is waiting for me downstairs. Nay.

♥ Today is a new day to get things right. Yea!

How about you? What are your Thursday yeas and nays?

Wishing you all a wonderful day. ☺

Friday fun

Happy Friday, friends. I hope you all had a wonderful Halloween. The rain managed to hold off here, and the kids had a great time. ☺

Unfortunately, I was too tired last night to do any work on my NaNoWriMo project. I have a lot of writing to do today in order to reach my daily goal, but I'm pretty optimistic that I'll make it.

So how was your Halloween? And for those of you doing NaNo, how's it going so far? Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. ☺

funnysigns.net



funnysigns.net



funnysigns.net



funnysigns.net



funnysigns.net



funnysigns.net

I've fallen in love with these Cat Week videos from The Ellen Degeneres Show. I dare you not to smile!



Trick or Treat!

Happy Halloween!

Well, it's a dreary, gray day here—and just in time for Halloween. We're supposed to get rain and high winds tonight, which makes me feel bad for all the kids who are looking forward to trick or treating. (Mine included.) Yesterday was absolutely gorgeous—sun, warm temperatures, no wind. It's funny how it always seems to work out this way. I remember very few warm-weather Halloweens from when I was a kid. Usually it rained—or snowed...

Regardless, my husband and I will be taking the kids out tonight, even if we have to shorten our route a bit. Afterward, we'll come home and warm up, and then the kids will eat some candy (a special Halloween tradition!) and go to bed. (Friday is still a school day after all!) As for me, I plan on sitting down at midnight to crank out a few words for NaNoWriMo. Cross your fingers that I'm not exhausted before that!

What are your plans for today and tonight? Whatever you do, I hope you have a wonderful Halloween! ☺


Happy Halloween to all my blogging friends!

And this is why I love Tuesdays...

Happy Tuesday, friends. ☺

I don't know about you, but I love Tuesdays. I love that Tuesday is one of the two days of the week that my daughter doesn't go to preschool. Not only does that mean I get to have more mother-daughter time, but it also means that I don't have to go anywhere unless I want to. I love stay-at-home days!

Another reason I love Tuesday is because it's not Monday.☺ Monday, while technically the second day of the week, always feels like the first day to me, and it always seems to drag...

Tuesday is also great because of songs like this one, which somehow don't sound quite as good to me any other day of the week:


Lyrics here.

"There's no time to lose, I heard her say
Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams
And you will lose your mind.
Ain't life unkind?"

And in light of those lyrics, I love Tuesdays—particularly this Tuesday—because it's a new day to follow my dream. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts on November 1, and I'm all signed up and ready to write. Next year at this time, I'll have a six-month old baby, so who knows if I'll be able to participate then. Instead, to paraphrase the Stones, I'm seizing the day—catching my dreams before they slip away. And that's as good a reason as any to love today. ☺

How about you? What do you love about Tuesdays? Carpe diem, friends!

Wishing you all a beautiful day.

NaNo? Oh, NoNo...



Image courtesy of Petr Kratochvil, publicdomainpictures.net

If you visit my blog with any regularity, you might have noticed that I removed the NaNoWriMo Web Badge from my sidebar today. Sadly, I ended up hitting a brick wall early in the month, and although I was excited about my story, I could never gain any momentum. This is the first year I've failed at NaNo, so I feel a little bummed out about that, but I really like my story idea and will definitely continue writing it on my own time.

To those of you who have already finished or are still going strong: Congratulations! And to everyone else: Happy Tuesday!

Throwing my hat into the ring

 

Today is November 1, and that means it's once again time for National Novel Writing Month. I'd been debating since September about whether I would participate this year, and I finally decided to give it a go. I'm hoping to regain the writing momentum I lost several months ago. Fingers crossed!

As far as my project goes, I've decided on a chick lit idea that's been rolling around in my brain for a few weeks. Time may be an issue—isn't it for everyone?—but I'm excited to get a good start on this novel.

Are you taking part in NaNoWriMo this year? What type of book are you working on, and what are your tips for living life around NaNo? If you're not participating, what are your plans for this month?

The one where it all catches up with me.

I wrote 50,115 words on my writing project in the past two weeks. I was on a roll. My fingers were flying across the keyboard. My creative mind was out of control. I even had a few 5,000-word days last week.

All of that changed today. As of 4 p.m., I've written...*drumroll*... around 300 words.

I've lost my oomph. My creativity. My mojo. Whatever it is, I think that the adrenaline I was running on to complete the NaNoWriMo requirements so quickly is gone now, replaced by fatigue and the inability to pull ideas from my addled brain.

I'll try for more words later tonight after the kids go to sleep and the house is quiet once again. And if that doesn't work, I'm hoping I can just sleep it off.

This too shall pass.

Right? 

:)

NaNo news: I passed 50k!

I've written 50,115 words in the past two weeks. Whew! There are still two more weeks of NaNoWriMo to go, and I'll definitely keep working on my project. Tonight, however, I'm taking a break!

100-word NaNoWriMo update

Today's 100 words:

NaNoWriMo is going well. Yesterday morning I crossed the 25,000-word mark, and I ended the day at 28,500. If I can keep up my pace, I'll finish early, which is good because we might be traveling later in the month.

I've done and "won" NaNo two other years--2003 and 2009--and I've learned that one of the keys to writing 50,000 words is to make sure that you love the project you're working on. It's hard to push through if you don't care about what you're writing. You have to be all in.

Since I wrote this piece this morning, I've passed 30,000 words on my project. Only a little over 19,000 to go!

Current NaNo word count:

28,500!

And now I must go to bed. :)

Another dream

This morning's 100 words:

I had another weird dream last night, although it turned out to be a lot easier to understand than the one I had the night before. This time, my family and I were in a huge house--definitely not ours--and we were getting ready to leave. I was going crazy, though, because I couldn't get my watch, a wind-up wristwatch that my parents had bought me when I was twelve, to stop beeping. It turned out, of course, that my real-life wake-up alarm, my cell phone, had been going off for quite some time.

I guess all these late NaNo nights are starting to make me sleep-deprived--even more so than I was before November started! My current word count is 23,762, but I'm sure I'll attempt a few more before I go to bed tonight. My story is pretty all over the place right now, but I'm excited to have written so many words in such a short period of time.

How's NaNo been going for the rest of you?

NaNo update: day 6

My word count total now stands at 16,009. I'm getting there!

NaNo update, day 5

It's the end of day five now, and I added 4,396 words to my novel today, bringing my word count total to 12,159. I'm exhausted but happy that I've managed to build myself a bit of a surplus in case I have some non-writing days ahead.

And with that, I'm going to sleep. :)

NaNo - and - Where does the time go?

Heh. Inadvertent rhyme up there in the title. :-P

First, my NaNo update: I managed to write nearly 2,100 words today during the time my son was at school and between cooking meals, bringing my word count thus far to 6,003. I may try to get in a few more words tonight, but all in all, I'm happy with my progress.

Second, the passage of time: Other than NaNoWriMo, the thing most on my mind today is how fast the weeks are going by. It really feels like my son started preschool yesterday, and he's been going there for eight weeks now! Time goes way too fast, especially when you don't want it to.

Sorry for the short entry, but it's time to make dinner now, and then I hope to begin responding to the comments I received on this entry. Thanks again to all of you who offered advice!

No you didn't!

Yes. I. Did.

I began a new writing project on the second day of NaNoWriMo, which is better, of course, than switching projects on day twenty or even day ten. After meeting my 2,000-word goal last night, I read my story and decided that, while I think it's a good idea, it just wasn't working the way I wanted it to work. I went to bed discouraged, even entertaining the idea of quitting NaNo altogether. But then this morning I was struck by a plot bunny, and my shiny new NaNo project, a young adult novel I'm really excited about, was born.

So now I'm frantically trying to catch up with the rest of the herd. So far today I've written nearly 1,200 words, and I hope to hit my two-day minimum of 3,334 before I go to bed tonight. If I can get more words, that would be even better; my original plan (before the project switch) was to reach at least 4,000 words by the end of day two.

So if you've got any luck to spare, please send it my way. :)

How are the rest of you NaNoWriMos doing as we near the end of day two?

NaNo, Day 1

This morning's 100 words:

Well, the first night of NaNoWriMo is over, and although I only managed to write for an hour, I'm happy with the 401 words I have so far. My story is going in the direction I had anticipated, but the voice is different than I had thought it would be. The protagonist may be just a little more irreverent than I had planned, but that irreverence seems to work, and I'm glad the words are spilling from my fingertips and finding their way to the page the way that they are. I'm hoping I can reach about 2,000 words today.

After writing for a good portion of the day--between other tasks like making lunches and changing diapers and breaking up kid-fights, of course--I managed another 1,601 words, ending the first day of NaNo at 2,002. (Unless, of course, I decide to write a few more words after I post this entry!) The writing went much more slowly than I had anticipated, and the voice that I wrote about in my 100-words paragraph above didn't really extend through the words I wrote today. The story, too, seems to be taking a different turn from what I had anticipated, which is all right, I guess, but it leaves me feeling a little out of control. However, it is a rough draft, which is something I need to remind myself every so often as I try to fight the perfectionist demon, who demands that I edit as I go. Still, all in all, I'm happy with the word count I've accomplished today--if not with the actual words themselves.

So--story number one in my collection is on its way to being completed (in a first-draft version, of course). Now I wait to see what tomorrow will bring.

For those of you taking on the challenge, how was your first day of NaNoWriMo? Did you meet your word count goal? And is your story taking the shape you'd thought it would, or is it veering off in another (exciting) direction?

Countdown!

I've always kind of hated that NaNoWriMo starts on November 1. I like to use the day before to make changes to my outline and try to fill in plot holes, but Halloween makes that a little difficult--especially since I have two children who are eager to go trick or treating. But I guess that's part of the challenge of NaNo: trying to fit 50,000 words around an already busy schedule to prove that writing is possible, and I (and everyone else who wants to) can find the time for it if it truly is a passion. That, I think, is the real lesson NaNo teaches.

So for all of you taking on the challenge: Good luck! I know that despite my tiredness and the fact that I need to get up at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, I, for one, will be sitting at my computer at midnight, typing away.

Enjoy!

100 words on NaNo prep

I experienced a breakthrough with my NaNoWriMo planning yesterday, one of those eureka moments when suddenly all parts of the story came together and made sense. I still have more planning to do before midnight on November 1, but I'm happy that the story pieces have finally gelled, and I'm looking forward to beginning this project. Whether I'll be able to complete the 50,000 words this year remains a mystery. Normally I would say yes, I'll definitely win, since I won my previous attempts in 2003 and 2010. This year, with my more chaotic life, I'm not as confident.

NaNo plotting update

Ever since deciding a few days ago to participate in NaNoWriMo despite the circumstances, I've been hard at work on plotting. I don't think I've mentioned yet that I'm not planning to do a traditional NaNo this year; that is, I'm not writing what's usually thought of as a novel. Instead, I'm planning to do a series of interconnected short stories. The "interconnected" part is what will keep me from being a NaNo rebel, although I certainly have nothing against people who set their own rules and do NaNo their own way. I fell into that category last year with my memoir, and my main hangout on the NaNo forums was the wonderful rebel lounge.

Anyway, I've gotten most of my story ideas down and have pretty thoroughly outlined two of them. However, I still have a lot of work to do if I'm going to be at least mostly ready before November 1. I think I'm getting close to nail-biting time!

For those of you doing NaNo, how's your planning going? And for those of you NaNo-ers who have blogs, how often do you think you'll post during November? I've been wondering what to do about my own schedule.