NaNoWriMo & NaBloPoMo: The wind's shifted.

NaNoWriMo word count: still 0 (it's hard to find time to work on a manuscript right now.)

This morning, I had to step out to run an errand. The first thing that struck me as I stepped out the front door was I could smell snow on the wind. The lower atmosphere is too warm for snow to fall but those clouds are billowing up above. The low tonight is supposed to be 33 deg F. That's just above freezing but I think it might dip into the freezing zone. I don't think we'll wake up to everything blanketed in snow (or ice). But that raw, bitter cold is on it's way in the immediate future.

In some ways this is reassuring. Before climate change kicked into high gear, we'd typically get our first snowfall somewhere between the last week of October and Thanksgiving. The last several years of unusually warm Novembers has had me concerned. I'm a farmer's daughter and I tend to look at the weather patterns from the perspective of how it is going to influence the growing season. It's just something I grew up doing and never really stopped.

We're currently in a serious drought. Whatever precipitation we get would be helpful. Last winter we ended in a drought. It doesn't make sense to say that we were in a drought in winter, but we were. The growing season started late this year because of the flooding and lots of mud that we had in the early spring when planting usually goes on. The summer left us shy of rain and a lot of fields were stunted because of it. When the corn being grown barely comes to your shoulder and in a good year it's taller than you are, it's a rough season.

Surprisingly, there was enough of a harvest that the next town over was still able to hold their annual corn festival like there was no problem. I'm hoping the farmers around were able to get a decent profit off of their corn. It seems like more of that stunted corn was chopped up for silage to be fed to the dairy cattle during the winter than was brought to market to be sold for human consumption. There's a bigger problem than my region's drought, however.

The western and midwestern US have been in extraordinary drought conditions for a couple of years. This is making it hard to grow enough produce, grains, and feed for livestock. As a result, we're operating on a beef shortage for at least the last year. I think the reason why the president is sinking money into the Argentinian economy is because their major export is beef. That's the only logical reason I can come up with.

All these tariffs are hurting the economy here. With bad growing seasons and a major drought spreading slowing across the country, only a fool who is disconnected from where their food comes from would be making these policies. I can only hope and pray for rain or snow. The rest of it falls out where ever the dice land. I'm frustrated that I wasn't well enough to keep a garden this year or do any food preservation. The victory gardens of old are starting to make a comeback as people are doing their best to learn how to preserve their food. People can smell trouble on the wind. It's going to be more than a bad snow storm.

NaNoWriMo &NaBloPoMo: The rules are all made up!

 NaNoWriMo Word Count: 0

 I had a minor freak out yesterday over all of this. It didn't help my migraine any. I panicked that I wasn't going to be able to write again. It had been so long since I had a productive streak on any front that I was afraid that I lost my voice and my ability to tell a story. It wasn't pretty. I ugly cried in the bathroom where no one could hear me for a bit.

 Then a realization hit me. The only one putting pressure on me was myself. It was a rather silly feeling to realize that. I wasn't on a deadline. There wasn't a paycheck waiting for me to meet one. We're not dependent on my writing to pay the bills, keep the lights on, or get groceries. There wasn't anyone stomping their foot and throwing a temper tantrum. It was just my anxiety running riot. It has been doing that a lot over the last year.

I can do my NaBloPoMo posts and work on my NaNoWriMo word count at separate times. I don't need to sit down for 4 hours and write. (Your butt goes numb at about hour 2.5, ask me how I know.) I can write a bit here and there. I just have to schedule and stick to it. There's lots of random downtime in a week that I can use to write a whole lot of words. No need to panic.

NaBloPoMo meme edition with cats!

 I have been stalled on everything. It doesn't help that I've had a migraine for the last 4 freaking days. I blame the weather.

NaNoWriMo & NaBloPoMo meme edition

 

Word count? What is that you speak of?

 Dear Reader,

Here we are at the final day of NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo. Many people are at or real close to the finish line. Others are slogging along, possibly cursing their decision to participate in these challenges. Word count is the big gauge of success and source of stress during this month. Posting across six blogs, I have absolutely no idea what my word count is. It took some stress off my shoulders, but six blogs ... that was a lot of work. It has cemented in my mind that some of these blogs are going to be updated on a weekly basis.  Because updating all of them in one day eats my entire morning of writing time.

The serial stories are stalled right now. The science fiction book is stalled because my notes in pencil are become illegible due to fading. At least I found them. The series of modern fantasy is on hold as I am awaiting contact back from the person who requested the work to be done. We had a gentleman's contract initially based on a virtual handshake. I have four books written and a fifth started. It is time to take that gentleman's contract and put it on paper to make clear what is expected of everyone involved. I'm having difficulty contracting him, because he's in grad school right now and busy as heck.

My fantasy series is on hold because I'm correcting errors in one book and trying to make things work according to my plot map in the other book. Hopefully books six and seven of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar will be out by late spring. In case you are curious, the story arc plotted for the whole series takes place over thirty books. I have snippets and bits of ideas for the other books, but I have to finish what I have on the block first.

The Family that Writes together, leaves Mom to edit.

 Dear Reader,

At the beginning of the month I explained what NaNoWriMo was and invited the boys to participate. First week in, my youngest son announced that he had won and handed me his best effort at a graphic novel. There was a lot of foul humor in it and air horns galore. But, he's 14, can I truly expect anything different. His elder brother finished up a train story he was working on over the last two weeks in between doing school work and watching cat videos.

Now, this week, he is nine pages into a new story about a firefighter named Johnson. So far, Johnson has yeeted himself out a window to save a family of pigs, yeeted himself down a flight of crumbling stairs to get to safety, and let off steam from that difficult fire call by raging at his gaming system on video. I'm not quite sure what is more amusing that my son used the word yeet in all seriousness or gamer rage for an audience to laugh at.

He's been laughing as he is writing. I figure that is a good sign. If you can make yourself laugh at a scene, there's a chance a reader will do the same.

Why NaBloPoMo and not NaNoWriMo?

 Dear Reader,

Most years, I knuckle down and I crank out a novella or two during November. As you can tell, I have been having difficulty writing in my blogs for about a year now, perhaps a little longer. Since I have bursitis in my right arm, I am restricted in my movement and have a fair amount of pain. Oddly enough, my recovery time lines up with my writing goals. I am forced to sit and write across my seven blogs or stare at the wall. 

Yes, I suppose I could attempt my knitting or my crochet. But repetitive movements are painful. And I just have to accept the fact that there is going to be a delay in my work on holiday presents until later in my recovery where moving my arm, even in a slightly repetitive action, is not a source of pain. Typing, however, and writing by hand don't hurt horribly because my arm is stationary as I work.

So, I am doing NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) this year to get myself back into serious writing form. There may be occasional memes if I have no idea what to write. I have to say, maybe there's an upside to this painful bursitis business. 

NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo? Decisions, decisions.

 Dear Reader,

I've been struggling to make up my mind if I am going to do NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo. Some years I have attempted both at the same time. It did not end well. On the novel writing front, I am stalled between being sick and my depression. I don't know if that's going to improve by the time November gets here. I suppose I could grind my way through writing a novel. Or I could cheat and work on finishing two novels that I have in the works.

But I'm leaning towards blogging every day for the month as a way to get myself back into the habit of daily blog posting. I think it will be as much of a grind as working on a novel. But, in all honesty, it is probably better for me to kick start all my blogs and get back to writing in them. If in the course of all that blogging (I have 7 blogs.) I happen to feel the urge to write a novel, I will do it. I just have had mental silence on that front. It's hard to write when you're just staring at a blank wall until drops of blood form on your forehead and you have to stare some more before the words appear on the page.

April is Camp NaNoWriMo: Will I participate?

Current embroidery project

 Dear Reader,

So, April is one of the two sessions of Camp NaNoWriMo. It is the more convenient one because it has 30 days in it like the official NaNoWriMo in November which makes planning word count goals a bit easier. I don't know if I will be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I'm still having lots of anxiety problems and I'm not coping very well. 

It is likely that I will continue pouring a great deal of effort into my therapy writing. I don't feel comfortable about setting word count goals for that. Some days I can manage to write up to 1k but most days I'm lucky if I get a few hundred words out before I start freaking out over the trauma content in it. This business in Ukraine (and it's Ukraine not 'the Ukraine' which was a Soviet propaganda effort to delegitimize Ukraine's status as a nation, I only recently learned this fact, so I'm sharing it) is triggering a lot of stuff that I thought I had dealt with.

I am part of Gen X and I grew up under the threat of the Cold War for most of my youth. My parents had insane things to say about life during that period. They talked about inhumane things that we would 'have' to do to survive, like cannibalism, if Russia dropped The Bomb. I was frequently told my only value would be as meat for the pot, a laborer to keep my brothers alive (stack rocks outside the place they could shelter if a Bomb got dropped and wait for the adults to show up, not go into the shelter myself), or someone that could be traded off as chattel if someone was looking for something out of us.

My parents were not the most stable or in touch with reality at that period of time, to be honest. It was brutal and ugly. A lot of my childhood trauma goes back to that era of my life. With this war in Ukraine happening, I've been having flashbacks and struggling to cope. I don't really know what to do with this stuff that's coming up. I've been doing embroidery to keep me from freaking out. But, it's not working so great.

But all this trauma stuff is making it hard to write fiction. I don't know if I'll participate in Camp NaNoWriMo or if I'm going to skip it this year.

Books Update!

 Dear Reader,

I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I'm up to 41k and my word count goal is 60k. My problem is that I am a little over half through my plot arc for the darn book. I don't think I can wrap it up in 19k. Not a bad problem to have, but it is exasperating.

Book Seven is parked on the editing bench because I have to completely rewrite a few major sections. This is vexing but not as bad as when it looked like I had lost a third of the book (if not more). The plot went off the rails as I was working on it and now I have to trim back the story and try to get the major points of the plot back into line because the next book depends on it. I figure in a month or two, I will be at the line edits stage on this book.

I am in the planning stages of Book Eight. I don't think I am going to get it done next year if this year's shenanigans is any indication of how next year is going to go. The goal I am shooting for is 2023 holiday season as the release date for Book Eight. I don't have a title yet for Book Eight, but I'm not going to worry about that until I have the rough draft done.

Aside from the work that I have been doing on my fiction, a new non-fiction book just dropped this week. It is under my pen name Lady Brythwen Sinclair. It is a devotional guide for people who are devotees of the Norse god Loki. I have several other non-fiction books of a religious nature up on Amazon under that pen name. I also have another blog under that pen name that I'm trying to get back to updating on a daily basis again. 

Here's the link to the devotional if you're curious: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LGWWS9N

And here's a link to the religious blog that I have under my pen name:

http://veiledwitch.blogspot.com/

AW: Morning Pages no. 80?

 It's NaNoWriMo and I've been hyper focused on my book project. As a result I have found myself within striking distance of 30k words but it has been at the expense of things like blogging, housework, and a few other things. So, I'm forcing myself to slow down and only work on it for an hour each day. I want to get my blog writing back in gear. (I feel like these morning pages don't really count as blog writing, just a brain dump/rambling in the morning.) I do have another problem with my blogging right now that goes beyond the issue with my forgetting to do it because I'm sucked into a novel.

My notebook that I was using as a writing focused bullet journal is literally falling apart. I'm having difficulty keeping track of my notes for projects and outlines for blog posts. This is what I get for buying a cheap notebook to really first give the bullet journal an attempt. I am about halfway through my pile of notebooks but I don't have any the right size to use for bullet journaling. I am stumped as to how to solve this problem with out going and buying another notebook. I told Beloved that I wasn't going to go pick up more notebooks until I had used up most of the ones that I have.

I've been trying to incorporate some of this planning into my daily planner but that just makes it a confusing mess. I am trying to come up with content but my brain is stuck in book mode. It's making writing for different topics difficult. I realized that being stuck in book mode is a problem when my kids asked me this morning when I was going to be doing the dishes. On Monday, I added 12 pages to my manuscript. Yesterday, in an effort to restrain myself, it was four. But it was difficult to stop and go work on housework. I want to see how the scenes I've been writing are going to unfold but I have to write them to do that.

The perils of NaNoWriMo. I was going to do NaBloPoMo but I'm close to two weeks behind. I honestly don't know if I can accomplish that. Not with multiple blogs. I don't know what I'm going to do on that front. I may save the NaBloPoMo effort for December and just focus on writing a novel in November. I am seriously contemplating bringing my laptop to Thanksgiving dinner this year so that I can get more work in on the book. The way I see it, it's not too different from sitting there knitting as people are talking about subjects that I have zero interest in. I'm going to consult Beloved and get his thoughts as to if this is beyond the pale. I did bring a NaNoWriMo project to Thanksgiving one year but that was a book I was writing out by hand in a notebook. It wasn't quite as obvious that I was working on something then. A5 sized notebooks are great to hide in a bag of knitting projects.

Camp NaNoWriMo goes on, but my project is finished.

 Dear Reader,

I finished writing and editing my project for Camp NaNoWriMo last night. It's off at the publisher being reviewed before it goes up for sale as an ebook. It's a religious text. A devotional prayer book for people who worship the Norse god Loki. This isn't the first devotional that I've written. I've written others for the goddess of the Filianic/Déanic religion known as Déa. But the Lokean devotional was probably the most challenging of the ones I've written. For one thing, the Lokean community is exceptionally diverse in their practices. What I put together represents but a small fraction of those practices. It is my hope that the little Lokean devotional book brings new devotees of Loki a sense of comfort and a bit of hope that they can engage this oft maligned god with out fear.

There's a big debate between Myth!Loki and Marvel!Loki devotees as to which is superior. The answer is, in my mind, simple. Marvel!Loki is a mask worn by Myth!Loki to reach new devotees in the modern era. Unfortunately, there's a lot of hostility going on between the two groups, encouraged by some shit-stirrers who are trying to make a name for themselves based off the notoriety. It's kinda amusing in a dark way because they're acting in the exactly the same way that Snorri Sturlison portrayed Myth!Loki towards the end of the Prose Edda. I have disagreements and opinions about that but its all for another day and another blog. Long story short, Snorri Sturlison is not a primary source and shouldn't be waved about as one. There's a lot of people who do that forgetting that he was writing approximately 300 years after active practice of the Norse native religion was stamped out. Everything is colored and warped by the passage of time and the lens through which he viewed these holy stories.

That's all I'm going to say on that point, aside from this: always check your sources when you're doing research. The closer you can get to primary sources, the better. If that is one thing I learned in the history classes I took at college, it is primary sources are the best ones for you to work from.

But, Camp NaNoWriMo progresses and I'm going to spend the remainder of the month working on those fics that I was editing before my brain went explody due to my bipolar back towards the beginning of the year. My biggest problem is I can't think of a title for any of the individual books. I've got one for the series that I'm writing, but each book is just a blank for me. I may have to have someone give a few of the books a once over to let me know what they think would be a good title. Who knows. The worst part is, I have to write blurbs and I'm terrible at that. I can write a synopsis for non-fiction but a blurb for fiction makes my brain blue-screen.

Dispatch from Camp NaNoWriMo

 Dear Reader,

This week has been filled with things taking me away from my writing. Somehow, in spite of all this, I have managed to hit the final third mark of the book. Granted it is a short book, but it's been difficult to write with so many distractions about me. We did arts and crafts yesterday. I am now dying wool with the leftover purple tie-dye dye packet. It's a solar dying process. We'll see what shade of purple I'll get out of this. I'm going to be leaving it in the sun for a week and then processing it. It has me thinking about what plants you can use to dye fabric and which ones would be worth something in the world of the Umbrel Chronicles. The thought of someone smuggling madder roots from one place to another sounds like it could make an interesting short story on how they're trying to work around sumptuary laws and such. Something to consider.

Dispatch from Camp NaNoWriMo

 Dear Reader,

They have surrounded the camp and taken work time as hostages. Their demands are many. I have done my best to placate them, but cat videos and meme videos are losing their effectiveness. I share meals with them but they refuse to surrender work time, insisting that I listen to their tales of the place known as 'school'. I have vague memories of such a place. These could perhaps be refugees. I have attempted to bribe them with movies, but the ones they want to watch are pure torture. I can only stand cartoon trains for so long. I'd say send supplies or whiskey but these young men will steal my supplies for writing by hand in secret for their own plotting and I dare not consider what would happen if whiskey entered the equation. Word count is no longer on the table as a target. I now aim for what little stolen moments I can have. Forgive me, they call out "Mom" and summon me again.

Locales: On pause.

 Dear Reader,

I'd love to describe another place in my fantastic little world but I'm currently sucked into a non-fiction work. (I'm writing a devotional for the Lokean community. It's been kind a rough going because the kids are very distracting. I'm reminded why NaNoWriMo in November is always more successful for me. The update on how that's going will be tomorrow.) I will try to get something up for you next week, provided the kids give me a few minutes peace to get it written.

NaNoWriMo Update: Progress looks grim.

 Dear Reader, 

I keep trying to find writing time and it keeps getting eaten by the kids. I have only one page written. I'm stumped on how to go forward. I hope that I can find time to work today and make up for the lost two days. My goal was to write for one hour a day every day on my Camp NaNoWriMo project. The problem is, that always seems to be the time that the kids get into a fight, need my help with something, or do something completely ridiculous that requires me to help clean up a disaster. I don't know if my writing time is jinxed (because it's different on different days) or if it's just the fact that my kids are home from school screwing up my schedule.

I wanted to do blogging yesterday and that completely went sideways. As such, I'm doing two posts today. I really hate the touchpad on my new laptop because it is hyper-sensitive. If you look at it funny, the mouse pointer is off in random directions and things are getting selected for no apparent reason. I'm going to try to run to the local wally world and pick up an optical mouse (because the old one died a week after the old computer did, right as I started using it with this thing). I have a corded mouse but I can't use it because I'm not left handed. All of the USB ports are on the left hand side of this device. It's something I'm trying to get used to. It's not going so well.

But, enough ranting, I'm going to try to steal some writing time while the kids are outside playing. Wish me luck.

Books Update: Camp NaNoWriMo & NaBloPoMo pt ?

 Dear Reader,

July is the second Camp NaNoWriMo of the year. The first is held in April. They're kinda like training for the big event in November, NaNoWriMo itself. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month which is technically in November. The people at NaNoWriMo.com have been organizing this for years and added the two Camps for eager people who want to work on similar projects under similar conditions at other times in the year. I've been participating in NaNoWriMo now for just shy of a decade. Writing 50k words in one month is a challenge but it helps me focus to get work done. Camp NaNoWriMo is something I've tried about three times and was successful once. 

They say madness is attempting the same thing over again and expecting different results, but I'm already certified as insane so it's all good, right? My plan for Camp NaNoWriMo the Second is to work on a religious book that I was attempting to write back in April when my brain was all wonky. Since it is functioning better now, I anticipate greater success. I also am changing my format from writing it out by hand to typing it. I think that will equate to bigger daily word counts and my actually finishing this project by the end of the month.

My plan for NaNoWriMo proper is to write the next book in the Umbrel Chronicles series. I am still editing book seven. Well, that's not quite accurate. Since moving everything to the thumb drive, I've a ton of manuscripts that I am searching through to find book seven so that I can finish working on it. My hope is to have it out for purchase by December. Book eight is not going to be ready until next year some time, provided my brain doesn't go explody again. Being disabled sucks, especially when it gets in the way of your plans.

I am also going to attempt, as I have during NaNoWriMo, to blog every day through the month. My posts are going to be short on some days and of average length on others. I may keep an log of my word count for people at home who want to keep score and track how fast I am writing this Lokean devotional. My unreasonable and excessive goal is to complete the day's writing goals while the kids are at summer school (which starts next Tuesday). That doesn't mean I'm not going to be working starting today. I just am hoping to get the bulk of my writing done while the boys are out of the house and not quite so distracting.

See y'all tomorrow. Now I have some journal work to do before I can bust out my manuscript attempt from April and try to make sense of where I was going with it. Then I can start working on the 'real' manuscript, if the kids let me today.

NaBloPoMo 13? I surrender.

  There's no way that I am going to make up the missing posts for the remainder of this month. Being sick for two weeks with that sinus infection threw everything off. Then I got hyper-focused on writing books. Add to that the chaos of a few days of distance learning, the kids being off from school for a few days, and the typical afternoon/evening chaos when they get home from school ... Well, you can see why I made it to thirteen posts before I hung up my hat on this front.

NaBloPoMo 12: Two fisting coffee and water, come at me, bro!

 I've a full night of sleep. I'm on my second gigantic mug of coffee. I feel like I'm warmed up for working on my novel. Now I have epic music playing on my play list. Seriously, listening to this makes me feel like I've got a horde of vikings at my back cheering me on. If I get organized enough, I may take a break from the novel to write something for my pulpy scifi. I'm leaving my options open for the next blog post for today. But, if you're writing fantasy or urban fantasy, I highly recommend epic music to play in the background. It can make the scene gel in your head as you're working.

NaBloPoMo 11: Music.

 I've been playing this song on repeat since the election. It just feels appropriate. It's also been useful inspirational music for scenes that I've been writing. I have it on my NaNo2020 playlist on Spotify. The biggest scene that Dear God inspired was a massive fight scene where my characters chewed through a stronghold that was lit on fire. It was inspired by a LARP scene that my character was part of a team that did that. It was brutal and chaotic. And it seemed like all the other PCs and NPCs were just throwing everything at the big bad guy and his minions to no effect. Then my PC got the drop on him and put him out of commission. It was a fun game. It's been fun writing in this universe and recreating the LARP scenes out of memory from a different perspective. If I could share excerpts, I would. I'm doing the next best thing by sharing music that I'm writing by.