I won National Novel Writing Month 2018! So far I've written 50335 new words, not all of which are crap. In fact, I rather like some of them. For this iteration of NaNo, I decided to work on the third book in the Girl Clown series (like I have more than one series, heh). I wrote a new beginning, some additional middle, and I'm almost to the end. Like last year, though, there's no crisis.... Read more →
It's April, the weather is crazy (80 degrees today! 40 degrees tomorrow! Thunderstorms on Monday!), and so of course I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. Camp is nice because you can set your own goal: words, hours, minutes, pages... whatever works for you. I chose 30 hours as my goal, but I'm not writing for all of that time. A lot of what I'm doing is figuring out the sequel to the sequel. I know... Read more →
I was idly googling around a few days ago, procrastinating on Camp NaNoWriMo, when I thought I might see what would pop up for "George Matthews Great London Circus." And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a link to Ivan Henry's circus blog. I clicked and there it was -- the route card for 1976, my First of May year in the circus biz. Just looking at it brought a flood of memories...... Read more →
Camp NaNoWriMo, that is. Yeah, once more into the breech, my friends, with good intentions, a red pen, a new laptop, and an old journal full of ideas and scribblings. I have finally gotten a bug up my butt to finish do some solid work on the sequel to Girl Clown. (For now, the title is Circus Daze.) I made a halfhearted attempt last year -- one of my goals for 2016 was "Finish the... Read more →
1. Procrastinating with Nanowrimo. I have not written very much, but I have been thinking deeply about one of the characters in this book. She is going to change; she is too much of a stupid caricature in the current version. I have thought more about her backstory and now I'm puzzling over how she needs to behave and push the story forward. So maybe I'm not really procrastinating -- I'm incubating. 2. Practicing a... Read more →
The little twin girls next door are celebrating their third birthday, so there is quite a lot of excited squealing happening. I'm fine with it; these are little miracle girls. They were born very prematurely, spent their first four months of life in the NICU, and came home to live hooked up to apnea detectors. It's good to see them be lively and loud. So happy birthday to them! It's a glorious fall day here.... Read more →
Even though it was Sunday, I went down to the cafe in my office building to spend some time with a buncha nuts. There were men and women, young and old, conservative and liberal, wacky and serious. I saw some familiar faces, folks I hadn't seen in -- oh God -- two! years, met some new folks, chatted and laughed. Only one event can conjure up such a mixed bag of people: NaNoWriMo, aka National... Read more →
For 10 days now I have been saying, "I will start NaNoWriMo today! I will hunker down and write and write and write and catch up and surpass and finish in a blaze of glory!" Well, not so much. Actually, not at all. But I have finally gotten the checkbook up to date and the bills organized and the most important ones paid on time. But I have visited Mom and listened to her odd... Read more →
I seriously considering skipping NaNoWriMo this year. Whenever I thought about it, or read another email from the NaNoWriters Yahoo! group, or looked at the dust-covered binder containing the still-unfinished neverending sequel, I filled up with a lot of eehh. So I figured that I might as well skip it this year. But in the last week I got excited again. A little idea popped into my head for a very thoughtful, sort of dark... Read more →