Writing

I’m still having a lot of fun writing my novel. I took the first chapter to my writing group last night. They professed to enjoy it, but that may have been more relief that I wasn’t forcing them to read more HTML documents. But I did have fun reading it to them. What’s funny now is that I’ve kind of lost the thread. I think once I get this novel done, I’m going to work out more of a plot arc in advance. I still have the idea for my plot, but I found myself running through it in just a couple chapters, which is well under 50,000 words. Ooops. I think if I get the video project done in the next few days that will give me a better shot at completing the novel. I can write while guests are here over Thanksgiving and not feel guilty that I’m not paying attention to my son. And if I can get the SCA site live this week (maybe Thursday?) that will be yet another chain off my shackles. I’m technically not caught up to my required amount today, but I still feel good about my chances of winning this year for a couple of reasons:

Today was slow going, mostly because I have other things in my life, like work… that I need to do. But I still managed to get out four articles (most pretty short) of non-fiction and another 1700 words on my novel. Stats for November 4, 2013: Novel Migraines for Magic: 12,016 words Non-fiction: 6,713 words Too bad I’m not counting all the words towards winning NaNo, I’d be at almost 19K words right now.

Yesterday was tough. We had a power outage most of the day, and we spent a lot of that time driving around looking for someplace that had power so we could get some lunch and make sure we had enough gas for the generator. The power was out for several miles around us and it took a long time. But I was still able to get my novel up to over 5000 words. The words were just flowing. I was shocked at how fast it was going. The story isn’t moving along like I’d expected, but it sure is fun to write. I only got around 830 words written on my non-fiction project, but I had a lot of fun building the examples and playing with the CSS to write it. But today I really flew. In the morning I worked on my non-fiction, bringing my total there to 5233 words. That was two more articles. I put one live and kept the other back to save for a week or two. I then didn’t get the chance to work on any NaNo until after J went to bed. He was insisting both that my laptop was his laptop, and that I needed to close it so that I could take him to New York City. He has suddenly decided that I need to fly with him on an airplane to NYC. He wants to go there and then call Daddy over FaceTime from there. But eventually he was in bed and I started writing. Three hours, virtually non-stop brought my novel up to 10,242 words! I’m 1/5th done! I’m so excited. This year it really feels like winning is within my reach! Go me!

This year, because I’m stupid, already have way too much to do, and just want to drive myself insane, I’m doing NaNoWriMo. But I’m doing it not once, but twice. My first version is the official version—a novel tentatively titled Magic for Migraines. Here’s my status for that so far: But I’m also doing an unofficial version, attempting to write 50,000 words of non-fiction through the month, as well. I realized that I can write about 1200 words of non-fiction in about an hour, so adding another half hour would give me 1800 words which is more than the daily minimum of 1667 words to win at NaNo. Add to that that this character of Christine has been plaguing my dreams every night. She wants me to tell her story. I figure I have to do it. Status for today, November 1, 2013: Fiction: 2060 words Non-Fiction: 2126 words If you’re doing NaNo this year, lets connect! If you’re not, please hold me accountable. I want to WIN this year. I think I can do it. I’ve already written 4186 words after all!

Today is the last day of the Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt, and I’m partly relieved and partly sad. I’m relieved because DANG! it was a lot of work! But I’m also pleased because I met some great people. I’m hoping I can keep up with them. I met Rie Sheridan Rose The Barnaby Poet, who wrote a guest post on my Bloggers Create! site: It’s a Great Time to Be a Writer. She was very inspiring to me because of all that she’s accomplished, both in her life and in the hunt. [caption id=“attachment_688” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] My Amazon review of How to Twitter[/caption] Another person I met was Stacey Meyers. She wrote a great book for people who don’t know how to use Twitter called How to Twitter: Getting Started with 30 Daily Doables. This was also inspiring to me as I’m working on a couple ebooks but I have yet to be willing to release them on Amazon. It was wonderful to get the chance to see another hunter’s efforts in that area. I really think this hunt has helped me in a lot of ways. I even got a guest post proposal accepted by Firepole Marketing! I’m so glad I did this, even though now I’m really tired.

I’ve always felt that life is never dull, but sometimes I help it along a little too much. What’s funny to me is that over-scheduling seems almost natural, but these days my idea of over-scheduling is much less rigorous than it used to be. I used to schedule myself with 60+ hours of stuff to do in a week. “Sleep is for the weak” was my motto. These days, I like to sleep. I think having a kid helped me realize how much I like to sleep, since he does his best to deprive me of it. Jaryth believes that mornings start sometime between 4 and 6am. I instituted the rule of no TV before 7am and no video games before 8am. This kept the sound down a little until he started watching “The Tigger Movie.” That movie is evil. Evil, I tell you! Firstly, there’s the theme–where Tigger no longer wants to be “the only one” and wants to find his family. Finding his family is fine, but why does that mean he can’t still be special? But what’s really bad is the bouncy song. Jaryth likes to imitate it. He bounces off the walls–yes, he slams himself into the walls and bounces off of them. We got an exercise trampoline which he likes to use to start his super-dooper-alley-ooper bounce on. And since you’re crashing into things you have to make the crashing noises at the same time. Luckily he hasn’t tried bouncing off of sleeping (attempting to) mommy. But that’s not why I’m busy. Some of the things I’m doing right now include:

I’ve been building web pages for over 15 years now, and one thing I know is that the web is not stable. Things happen that cause problems and the more you can do to protect yourself and your work the better. 

So an exchange I had on a forum I read was very interesting. I asked the question “what offline blog editor do you use?” And this prompted several replies. At first I was pleased, as I was hoping to get suggestions for offline editors. Right now I use MarsEdit, but there are some things about it that I don’t really like, so I was wondering if there were other options out there. 

I was reading Leo Babuata’s site Zen Habits for a while now, and one of the things he recommends is the idea of living without goals. This is something I struggle with. I struggle with the idea that I should declutter my life of goals. I could argue that goals are how I’ve achieved what I have in my life. But when I think more closely, the reality is that the goals were a side note. In fact, some of the things I am most happy with or most proud of happened without any goal around them at all. For instance:

I’m doing the proof edit of my book, this is my last chance to fix typos or correct errors.

Naively, I thought there wouldn’t be very many because I’d already had my draft copies (written in Pages and converted to Word) reviewed by me, two tech editors, my acquisitions editor, my development editor, my copy editor, and me again.

HOLY SHIT! was I ever wrong.

You see, whenever the copy editor made a change to one of my headlines, that resulted in crazy stuff happening in the Word conversion. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t seeing it in my copy of the .doc files, but when it would get to the production department, they’d be left with headlines that read such things as:

I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition is getting so good that there are apps being built for cellphones that can identify random strangers from photos (taken as you walk along with your cell phone). The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing we do would be private. I then moved on to another article that talked about how Google(?) was working on an algorithm that could evaluate the writing style of someone online and make a good correlation as to who actually wrote it. Even if the author had posted anonymously or with a pseudonym. The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing that we do online would be private. But is this idea of “privacy” such a good thing? Ultimately, what it really is is the idea that we can go out in public or online and be anonymous. And some people see anonymity as the same as the freedom to do anything they want. And as we saw in London over the past few days, anything they want seems to cover a wide swath of things that most civilized societies consider wrong. Some examples of things anonymous people do: