Night out with Jade

I just spent a wonderful evening with my daughter. This doesn't happen a lot because, #1 she's 12, and #2 we both tend to get on each other's nerves a lot when we're around each other in confined spaces for long periods of time.

Tonight, we went to Hobby Lobby where I spent way too much time looking for things specific to my list (damn not having metal etching solution!) and she only asked for a couple of things and didn't complain about me only getting one of them for her.

Baby steps

My weekend plans, in no particular order:

1. I printed out my "Manuscript: Draft 0" today. Now I have to block some time this weekend to go through it and start my time line. Would probably be a good idea to figure out how to write up the synopsis, but I will probably have a better idea on how that works once I know what I wrote. ;)
2. Painting. Yay! Primer on the new doorways and maybe more...
3. Making my Secret Santa gift. I have a great idea, but I need to figure out what I need, see if I actually have anything already, and then make it.
4. Go clothes shopping with my daughter because she just keeps growing.

Nano Revisited

So, it's been a week and my recap blog post is just now surfacing for my NaNoWriMo experience. I'm sure if I tried, I could give many, many excuses, but you don't want that. What you really want is the nitty-gritty of the past month and a half.

First off, I thought I was completely crazy when I thought about signing up in the middle of October. I had one week to plan before my best friend showed up to help me finish up my wedding reception plans (which you can see a lot of around here). Only one week to take a hazy idea for a story and try to turn it into something worth writing about.

Then there was the week of fun with my friend, our reception. And suddenly, November 1 was upon me.

I had a half-formed idea and a couple of character sheets. So, I started writing.

Now, something you should know about me is that I can be a little stubborn. The challenge was to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wasn't about to let a silly challenge like this beat me.

I knew the week of my reception that I was starting to feel a little under the weather, but I wasn't about to let it hit until after the party. So, I pushed it off, and ignored it, pretending like the weather wasn't changing and I wasn't getting my traditional change of the season cold.

And of course it hit the first week of NaNo. I started off strong, for at least the first few days. And then BAM! Head cold! I had a few slow days after that, obviously.

The next two weeks I spent constantly trying to play catch up. I'd get close, but never close enough.

Not until the Thanksgiving holiday. I was lucky enough to only have a couple of places to go for the holiday which meant I had a lot of time to write.

I caught up and won on the 29th! 50,015 words written in 29 days. Yay!

When the 30th came around, I went to work, said yay a few more times and then when I came home, I sat down at my desk and just kind of went "uh..." because I didn't know what I should do! My brain had turned into mush. Veritable mush, as evidenced by the fact that about ever other sentence that came out of my mouth or was typed out on the computer had typos, mixed up words, gibberish. I decided that I ran out of words, used 'em all up during November.

Now I sit here without words, looking at my, now 41,000 words (I deleted all the crap I'd left in while I was trying to get to 50,000) written of a still half-formed story with so many inconsistencies and plot holes and I wonder, can I turn it into something actually worth reading?

My next steps involve actually going through what I've got and I think I actually have to use sticky notes or something to outline the plot (see, I'm very visual, if you hadn't noticed *glances around the website), and see what I've got.

I'm tempted to outline, just for my own sake, a couple of books from my favorite authors, just to see if I can figure out the story structure. That would be hard though because it's so easy to get sucked into the story that I'd forget what I was doing. ;)

So, I've removed the rubbish, need to re-plot, and then maybe write some more. I think I have a decent idea for a story and I'm interesting in seeing where I can take it.