Noisy

Pow! Slam! Crunch! Ka-bam!

These are the sounds of me trying to bash this novel into something that makes sense. I don't know if it's working, but I'm writing the final scenes. I don't want to validate it on the NaNoWriMo site until I get to the end, so I'm holding out a little longer.

End in sight

The end of the month and therefore the end of NaNoWriMo 2006 is in sight--the end of the novel? Well, maybe. The 50k is within my grasp, but those two little elusive words, "The End"--I don't know. I'm still hopeful. I've done the month without getting to type those words, and I've done the month with them, and "with" is much better. Onward!

Unsuccessful

I made it until about 9:30 tonight without complaining, but when I came home from my writer's group and found that the state of homework and bedtime preparations left something to be desired--I admit it, I complained. Mostly internally, but still. It was all good up to that point. I will try again tomorrow.

Perhaps this IS harder than I thought!

The Gripe Challenge

I've just read something that I found rather astounding. In the Dec./Jan issue of homemakers magazine, there's an article titled, "The Gift of Gratitude." Here's what amazed me:

Over the past 34 years, Hal Urban, an American author, speaker and high school teacher, has challenged 200,000 people to go 24 hours without griping, even to themselves. Only seven have ever pulled it off.

Seven? Can it really be that difficult to go 24 hours without complaining? I don't think I'm much of a complainer, so I'm going to test it. I'm going to try and be aware of what I'm saying and doing for the next 24 hours, to see if I can go that long without a gripe.

NaNoWriMo Tattoos

This year NaNoWriMo Headquarters sent out temporary tattoos as swag to be handed out at meetups and write-ins. I distributed mine to my Wrimos at our last meetup, and declared that I was saving mine until I reached 40 thousand words. Then I would put it on to celebrate that milestone and wear it while I got through the last ten thousand words, since it says, "50k or Bust." I reached 40k last night, so this morning:


Here it is!

Assorted musings

The day did not start off well as I slammed my toe into a furniture leg shortly after getting up this morning and thought I broke it (the toe, that is). There was quite a sickening crack when it happened and the pain just bloomed. I've had it wrapped all day and kept up the Tylenol, tried to take it easy, etcetera. I just unwrapped it to have a look and wow, is it purple! If not broken, it came pretty close.

Fortunately, as long as the painkillers were active it didn't interfere with my writing, so my word count is healthy even if my toe is not.

I learned a new word this week on the NaNoWriMo forums: "squick." While there seem to be a number of theories about the possibly unsavoury origins of the word, I am mainly enamored with its use as follows, from the Double-Tongued Dictionary: squick v. to disturb, unsettle, make uneasy; to cause disgust or revulsion; to gross (someone) out; to freak (someone) out. Also noun, something which causes disgust, revulsion, or uneasiness, or the disgust, revulsion, or uneasiness itself. Also squick (someone) out.

In the past two days I've started reading two books: Saturday by Ian McEwan and Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson. Perhaps it's an odd thing to do to even attempt to compare them, since one is serious "literary" fiction, and one is YA speculative fiction. But I must say that it is going to be an epic struggle to continue reading Saturday; by page 18 all that has happened is the main character wakes up in the middle of the night, opens his window, and thinks about things. I'm beginning to feel rather trapped with this character--the way a creature with one leg trapped in a hunter's snare must make the decision whether to gnaw its own leg off in order to get away. The writing is pretentious and the character, whom I expect is supposed to appear remarkably self-aware, comes across as being tediously self-absorbed instead. On the other hand, Tanglewreck is wonderfully written and delightful.

Well, there. I went ahead and compared them anyway. Sometimes I just can't control myself.

A Tip for Getting Unstuck

It's Week Two of NaNoWrimo, and I, my daughter, and my niece were all feeling a bit stuck in our novels. So tonight we had a novel-unsticking session.

We sat down at the kitchen table, each with a pile of index cards in our choice of colour. I told the girls to take one card and just write down one thing that they knew was going to happen in their novel before the end, or even at the end. I did the same.

Next I told them to take a second card and write one of the following: something that happened either just before or just after the first thing they wrote, or just another event that would happen sometime before the end of the novel.

We kept up that way, one thing at a time, one card at a time. If someone couldn't think of something, we threw out ideas for each other until something clicked. Our goal was to get ten cards each.

Once we reached that goal of ten cards each, we laid them out in the order we envisioned the events happening in our novels. There was some shuffling about of cards as we considered our options.

Then I told the girls to read their cards in order, and try to think of what events might be needed to fill in or link one card to the next. If something was needed, we filled out extra cards and put them in their places. This actually took the bulk of the time, but we worked quickly. Once we were finally satisfied, we numbered the cards in order and arranged our stacks. Now they're ready for the next writing session. Hopefully it should mean the end of getting stuck. I told the girls that if they still felt stuck after one of the cards, to jump some space in their novel and jump to another card with an event they felt ready to write.

Personally, I'm not much of one for outlining and this may be as in-depth as any outline of mine will ever get. But there's something comforting in having that little stack of cards waiting to prompt me the next time my wheels are spinning.

NaNoWriMo Update

Things are going well so far. I'm 29% of the way to 50k, according to the cool widget on my desktop (that's 14,473 words). My characters are set up and already dealing with problems. One small flaw in my plan is that I've realized that while it's fine to write an adventure-style story with no plan or outline, it's a little harder to write a mystery that way. Last night I was brainstorming a few things in my notebook and I wrote "CLUES! NEED CLUES!" So I guess that's my task for today, in addition to the word count. Work out some clues.

Today's kitchen mistake: Freezing pumpkin

So we had these two quite large pumpkins sitting in our backyard, grown by a friend, that didn't get carved for Halloween. Every time I walked past them I felt guilty that they would probably just sit there until they rotted and had to be thrown in the composter. Coming from a farm family background, I have an ingrained urge to preserve or freeze the bounty of the yard and garden, which I normally manage to suppress except for my annual jam rituals. These pumpkins, however, seemed particularly reproachful, just sitting there in the grass beside the back step as the autumn leaves piled up around them.

This morning I thought, with the whole day pretty much free ahead of me, I should take an hour or so first thing this morning and get one of them prepared and frozen. I struggled it into the kitchen, worrying that it was too heavy and I would throw my back out, but I managed to sit it in the sink. Well, it was actually too big to go IN the sink, so it was more balanced OVER the sink. I found instructions on the internet, at the National Center for Home Food Preservation website, which sounded very simple:

Preparation – Select full-colored mature pumpkin with fine texture. Wash, cut into cooking-size sections and remove seeds.

Cook until soft in boiling water, in steam, in a pressure cooker or in an oven. Remove pulp from rind and mash. To cool, place pan containing pumpkin in cold water and stir occasionally. Package, leaving ½-inch headspace. Seal and freeze.

Easy peasy. I began cutting the pumpkin into cooking-size sections. Or rather, I began hacking the pumpkin into whatever size chunks I could manage, using the pumpkin carving knife which the kids had used to craft their jack-o-lanterns and a huge breadknife by turns. It actually looked kind of interesting in the light of the kitchen window so I took some pictures.





My biggest pot held only the first eight or so chunks, but I thought it probably wouldn't take long to cook, and I'd be on to the second batch in no time. Wrong. Twenty minutes later it was just starting to get soft. About now I realized that this was going to take much longer than I'd anticipated. Back to the internet, where I found more instructions for cooking the pumpkin in the microwave. I hacked off another huge chunk and set the timer for the recommended seven minutes per pound. That would speed things up! Meanwhile I began sorting through the discarded pulp and picking out the seeds to roast for snacks.

The chunk in the microwave took twenty-one minutes to be soft enough to scrape off the rind. Disappointing, to say the least. But now I had a routine; fill the pot, put a chunk in the microwave, sort seeds while they cooked. When the first lot was done, I discovered the next joy: squeezing the water out of the cooked pulp. And let me tell you, it's a LOT of water. I had to go next door and borrow some cheesecloth from my mother and spend a lot of time mashing and squeezing the water out. Then I could finally get it into the freezer bags. By this time I had about two-thirds of the pumpkin hacked up. The counters, sink, floor, and most of me were covered with piles of discarded pulp, bits of stringy pumpkin flesh, pithy shards of rind, and slimy seeds.



At this point I called my mother. She suggested cooking the rest of the pumpkin in the oven to save time and effort. The remaining piece was too big to fit on any of my cookie sheets, so I wrapped it in tinfoil, set it on two cookie sheets placed side by side, and maneuvered it into the oven at 350 degrees for what my mother (and my internet sources) estimated would be about 30 minutes. I kept going with the rest of it in the pot and the microwave.

A full hour later, after much testing with a fork and despairing that it would ever be cooked, I pulled the last huge section out of the oven and unwrapped it. It was not done. I hacked it up into four smaller sections and finished them off in the microwave one at a time.



By this time I had used a large pot, three cookie sheets, two bowls, three plates, a colander, a masher, four knives, three spoons, two forks, and three lots of cheesecloth. It took me four and a half hours, and I have 20 cups of pureed pumpkin in the freezer. It had better be the tastiest pumpkin ever.



My advice for anyone planning to preserve some pumpkin:

1. Don't bother.

I'm ordering pizza for supper.

NaNoWriMo and being an ML

This is my third year as a Municipal Liaison for NaNoWriMo, and it's been my busiest in that capacity yet. I did the live radio interview on the first of November. Yesterday the producer called me with the idea that they'd like to track our progress on their website, so I sent out the word to my Wrimos and rounded up some who'd like to participate. I also got an email from Sue at NovaScotiaCanada.ca requesting an email interview about NNWM for their site. Which I was happy to do! But whew! It's only the third day and I feel like I've already spent more time being an ML this year than I did the last two years combined. And I have only a tiny region. I don't know how some of the folks in the larger areas manage!

Luckily, my word count hasn't suffered--at least not yet. Let's all knock a little wood on that one.

Today I also managed to get a submission sent out, so I can stop worrying that I will miss the deadline on it. I'm going to try to finish up The Scriptorium over the weekend and get it online. I'm glad I have so much of the issue ready in advance, and just have to fill in a few articles.

And I got groceries tonight--hurrah! We'll be able to eat for another week. It's annoying how everyone wants things like meals to continue throughout November. Don't they know I'm writing a novel? ;-)

Update

Finally got the kids settled, got to my office, and made my words for the day. I have no idea really where this is going, but so far it's interesting!

November 1

It's currently 9:40 pm on the first day of NaNoWriMo 2006, and so far I have a first sentence, scribbled by hand in a notebook. Oddly enough, it's mostly because of NaNoWriMo that I have nothing written.

Huh?

Well, I did a live radio interview about NaNoWriMo this morning on our local CBC station. Of course, the interview was scheduled for exactly the time when I would normally be hustling my kids out the door to school, and because I just couldn't work out anything else, I let them stay home. After the interview of course my daughter wanted to get started on her novel and needed some help setting up, etc. Then my son (6) had the writing fever and wanted desperately to work some more on a story he's been writing for a while. This means he dictates to me, and I type. So that was pretty much the morning, if you throw in a little necessary housekeeping and annoying things like showers.

This afternoon my good friend Nancy came over so we could hash over our (woefully lacking) plans for our novels. Just before she got here I scribbled that first line. Various other NaNo-related things like more typing for my son, fixing my daughter's desktop, and actually opening a file (but not writing anything in it) for my novel took the rest of the afternoon.

The rest of the day's been more of the same, including a phone call from my sister who's fretting about her novel already, getting my niece started on hers since her computer isn't working and she had to come over and borrow one of ours, and reinstalling the word processor on the laptop so that my daughter could finish her own word count for the day.

Now they're so full of Halloween treats they can't fall asleep, which means they don't want me to go downstairs to my office. I thought I could write the first few pages at the comfort of my desk, but I guess I'm stuck here in the kitchen and I might as well make the best of it. I'll open the file and try to get started. Because now that I've yakked my head off about NaNoWriMo on live radio, I can't very well afford to fail this year, now, can I?