Robynettely

"These towns around here are pretty safe, but they are infested with eager cops."

... in the service of NaNoWriMo this year. Because otherwise I may be screwed by the alignment of the days of the week. I have just realized that my grand plan to take Nov 1 off and get a head start is a massive fail, as November is also United Way month at my office, and I'm the campaign chair, and I should probably attend the kickoff event I haven't planned yet. Stupid, stupid do-gooding, it gets in the way of the writing, too. Also, my immediate family thinks NaNoWriMo is a bad idea, because "What will you get out of it?" they asked. Well, another first draft, for one thing. (As if I need more of those?) And a sense of community.

Last year NaNoWriMo was a breeze. I had a really fast start and was always ahead of the game. There was a reason for that: last November started on a Saturday. My system last year was to write 500 words each day M-F, then 5000 each on Saturday and Sunday, which was 12500 words per week, or 50,000 words over November. Friday at midnight I started by writing 2000 words. Saturday I wrote 5000, and Sunday I wrote 5000. So by the end of that first weekend I already had 12000 words, which meant that when I did 500 words per day on the weekdays, I didn’t feel like I was falling behind. If you write 1667 words per day, you wind up with 11,669 in a week, or 50,000 in 30 days. This year, November starts on a Monday. I will have 2500 words by Friday, and be 9000 words behind already. Psychologically, this will of course be devastating. I don’t know if I’ll be able to surmount it, but I also don’t know if I can write more than 500 words in a workday. Maybe I should take November 1 as a vacation da...

I must hear it every day: At work: "There's a disconnect between what marketing wants and what R&D is prepared to deliver." At Karate: "Your arm and your hip have some sort of disconnect." In yesterday's newspaper: " there’s a “serious disconnect” between citizens and city hall." I hate this tawdry, overused word, and I dread the day I catch myself using it in a sentence. In other news, I have to decide whether to do NaNoWriMo this year. I want to write the parrot novel, but I'm afraid I don't have the skills for such stunt-writing.

"Unicorn". Waiting to be sent to market #7. Came back over a month ago. Not good. "Dolphin". Still at market #1. Apparently these stories won't sell themselves, so I need to devote a time/date to this.

"The Rabbits". Short story. This month I made it through the second draft. I want to get this on OWW, but it needs at least one more draft. It’s down from 14,000 to just over 10,000 words, so it would have to go up in two parts. I’d like to get rid of another 2500 words before I get it critted, but I’d still put it up in two parts... better for the critters, and I have plenty of points to use. Karate Zombies. I have now read the first four chapters. I’m rewriting the first chapter. I would love to get this on OWW. I even did envelope calculations: I have 47 points right now. I have 24 chapters. If I put up one chapter at a time (2-3K words at a time, a good length for the ‘shop) at 4 points each, I’d have to do 49 more reviews. If I could put up one chapter per week, that would be such a great structure for me to work within. The Water Leopard. 1st short story draft complete. Need to type it up. Don’t think it’s very good. “Succubus”. Short story. This became my page-a-da...

“A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. Started this at the cottage, because I found it in the shed. I don’t think I ever had to read it before, but as I told my dentist, you can’t go wrong with Dickens. “The Flooded Earth” by Peter D. Ward. I got this out of the library because I read some favourable references to it online, probably in Salon and the Toronto Star, and also because I love true future disaster books. It took me less than a week to read, but I had some problems with it. Like for example, my mind would wander because of the excess of compound complex sentences. There were like two simple sentences per page! He was trying to cram as much information into each sentence as he could, and that’s good, but I would lose track of the subject, or the sentences wouldn’t lead smoothly into each other. It was sort of like reading a really long essay by a precocious high schooler, sometimes. He was very passionate about the content, but sometimes he’d go on a crazy tangent. Like,...