NaNoWriMo & Miscellaneous Updates

Well, it's a good thing I was not also participating in NaBloPoMo this year, because my blog posting has taken a serious backseat to novel-writing. However, in the circumstances, I am not berating myself about it.

Last night I actually caught up on my word count for the first time since the month started. (Of course, I haven't written yet today, so now I'm behind again, but that's NaNoWriMo for you.) I'm really liking the story I'm writing. It's turning out to be much more complex than I had realized, and of course I don't have all those complexities planned out, but that is a big part of the fun of writing for me, so it's a good thing. I'm about at the point now where I need to sit down with a stack of index cards and figure out the shape of the thing, and I may get to that this afternoon. Looking forward to it quite a bit. It's my first real stab at alternate history, and I'm finding that aspect of it a blast.

The slipped disc problem has improved considerably in the last few days, although I'm still constrained in what I can undertake. I was able to attend my writing workshop session yesterday morning, which made me very happy since I did not want to miss out on these last two sessions. I went to the mall last night to pick up a birthday card for my brother and came to the realization that my mall-walking limit is about half an hour. Good to know, and it's fortunate that I am in the habit of doing a large part of my Christmas shopping online. I'm doing a little of that today, too.

One side effect of being confined to be for a large part of the past two weeks is that the puppies have managed to infiltrate the house to the point of sleeping on the end of my bed, mostly because it's just easier to keep an eye on them there and I haven't had the energy to keep shooing them away. So if anyone came out of this experience to the good, it's the furrier members of the household.

Something fun: a tweet from Elizabeth Bear today pointed me to these random fractal backgrounds, which are lovely, and poking around the site I found the free program to make your own. You can tile them to fill whatever size background you want. Take a look and try it out; they are really beautiful! Here are a few I got on the first run of the program (it generates 20 every time you run it):

Thanks, Tor.com

As some of you may know, October was Steampunk Month over at Tor.com. The month was jam-packed with interesting blog posts, steampunk tips for DIYers, beautiful free wallpapers, and tons of giveaways. I didn't stumble upon things until at least partway through the month, but then I entered every giveaway after that.

And, I won one!

My copies of Jay Lake's Mainspring and Escapement arrived in the mail today, quite promptly I must say. Also included in the parcel were a Tor bookmark and a handful of buttons, so it made a nice little prize package.

I was especially pleased to win this prize, because I am a big fan of the columns Jay Lake writes (often with Ruth Nestvold) over at IROSF (I always snag this one to proofread when I can!). If you are not familiar with the columns, I recommend you click over and check some out. They are available in the archives, many under the "features" tab, and are easy to find. Sadly, I haven't had an opportunity to read enough of his fiction, so I'm really looking forward to these books. They may even jump the line in my TBR pile, since I just finished reading George Mann's The Affinity Bridge last night and need something new to add to my being-read list.