Done.

I won't pretend it wasn't hard. I lost a good week and a half, almost two to unforeseen circumstances. What that amounted to was a three day run of marathon writing to finish up finally with 807 words over the 50K mark for NaNoWriMo.

I'll wait till later before I go back to see how bad it all is. Truth is I don't want to know yet. The story, while complete for the by the competition's standards, has a ways to go before it's actually complete and ready for me to back track over for revision.

But, it's done and I'll go back to my 2000 word per day count goals. Something more akin to a 10K run versus a marathon. And I'll be more attentive to the other things in my life. This blog for one, and cleaning up all those dog rugs my shedding pup has been leaving behind in my house.

Nice seeing you again, folks!

December 1st.

• Coffee overflowed onto stove-top from espresso pot.
• Planned clean-up: Dec. 1st.
• Dog poop piling up in the backyard.
• Planned clean-up: Dec. 1st
• Halloween decorations still on front lawn.
• Planned pick-up: Dec. 1st
• Dishes piling up in sink.
• Planned clean-up: When I run out of clean ones.
• Patches of dog hair appearing on carpet from a late-shedding dog.
• Planned vacuum: Dec. 1st

The point of all this? Nothing gets done until NaNoWriMo is done.

• Blog updates.
• Dec…oh, bloody hell. What am I doing here?

Nano, 4 days on

Okay, so I'm definitely on the Nano journey. And, yes, I'm on it with a boat load of baggage in tow. But that's okay. I'm still determined to get this thing done and I fully expect to have the banner "NaNoWriMo Winner 2013" splat across this blog come December 1st.

I'm also excited to be doing my first Nanowrimo Write-In tomorrow with some fellow Gulf Coasters also competing in the event. We're heading over to a local coffee shop in Ocean Springs, MS, tomorrow afternoon. It'll be fun to meet some of the other crazies participating this year.

Off topic, I thought I should say something about my last couple posts. Truth be told, I don't know who comes by to read this blog. I expect more spam bots than real people, but you never know. That said, I can't say whether or not my ramblings of late over my dog, Candy (her name came with her and she was too old to change it), are appropriate for an "author blog", but here's my take...

For now, writing is my hobby. I'm not making a living at it (can barely even take my wife out for the occasional pizza, in fact, on my paltry writer's income), and my audience isn't such that I worry over making high-vis missteps when posting entries or comments. I just don't carry that kind of weight in the virtual world. So really this blog is also something of a hobby and I'll treat it as such and worry about giving it a 'professional' gleam if my stuff really ever takes off.

These days, though, I need the catharsis that comes with venting to the great unknown. It is - believe it or not - a little therapeutic. In another life I would never have considered such an act. So security minded and privacy focused was I that even the thought of letting go a magazine I'd gotten in the mail with my name and address labeled on it was a sin to burn in hell for (if you believe in such a thing). Actually, I still do rip off those labels, but you get the drift. I've loosened up a bit and am more willing to put things out there.

I've come to realize that no one really gives a shit about me enough to worry about a little whining over my woes. So there. Maybe if I had something in the bank worth stealing my identity over, or were famous enough to draw people in so much that they hung on my every syllable it'd be a different story. But until I win the lottery or sell a million books, here I am, World. Deal with it.

Distractions

Nanowrimo's right around the corner, and already distractions are setting in. And not the good kind.

Today, for instance, I should be refining my plot lines, zeroing in on my characters' voices, and thinking about the long game that'll get me to the end of November in style, but instead all my thoughts are with my pup, Candy. We're going to see an Internal Medicine specialist in Louisiana about some issues she's been having lately that the local vet cannot diagnose fully. That said, there's a pretty good chance the little girl has cancer.

It's a tough situation to deal with. My wife and I are suckers for the hard luck cases at the animal shelter, and Candy was just such a case. When we found her we were only going to visit to show one of the previous caretakers of another of our rescues, Mace, how far he'd come. And that's when Candy and my wife made eye contact.

Candy had been at the Humane Society for almost six months. That's a long time by their standards, as most dogs are not given the chance to adopt out over that period of time before space requirements mean they must be euthanized. Candy's a small dog, though, so perhaps the limited space requirements to store her helped...that and the fact that small dogs tend to adopt out better than larger breeds. But she had several strikes against her, beginning with her age. She was 10.5 years old, and hardly anyone wants to start off a new life with an animal nearing the end of theirs, especially when there were already several medical issues apparent. She was missing spots of fur, she has a collapsing trachea, and her entire lower vertebrae are essentially arthritically fused with a few of her discs already collapsed.

After managing to pull ourselves away from her that day, we went home and discussed the possibility of adding a third pup to our cadre. We'd recently lost our 16 year old dog, Ewok, a couple months prior and were set on not putting another into the fold for some time. Candy went home with us the following week.

Over the next few months we nursed her back to health and dealt with some of her personality quirks, the worst being her food aggressiveness. But when you invite someone in from the shelter as old as Candy was then, you have to understand that her first decade of life is an unknown to you. Was she abused? Were there other, bigger dogs who used to compete with her for her food? We didn't know, so patience and consistency became our guiding principles.

And they worked. Two years later, and Candy is not the dog she once was. She's more confident, and with a healthy diet and a course of Glucosamine and MSM she was moving almost like a puppy again. She was a happy dog.

But over the last couple months her appetite has waned. I've tried all variations of dog food, then began cooking food for her, and still she lost almost 30% of her body weight. I'm syringe feeding her now, and she's taking it well. Turns out she's severely anemic, and after an ultrasound and some blood panels, we've seen some disquieting things going on with her spleen and especially her liver.

So, today Candy and I are driving an hour and a half away to go see a specialist and (I hope) to see if her condition is treatable or at the very least manageable. Maybe it's not cancer, but we don't know. Nothing in her medical story so far is following the textbooks, my vet says, and usually that points to cancer since that particular disease tends to rock the boat when it comes to picking its own path.

And that's where my thoughts lay at the moment. Not with writing, or plotting or even Nanowrimo, which begins this Friday. But with a little black dog who has endeared herself to our family with a distinctive personality all her own.

Wish us luck.

I've committed myself, but not to the looney bin.

Okay, I've taken the initial plunge into NaNoWriMo and committed myself to a book I intend to knock out over the course of November. By 'committed', I mean that I've officially listed the title and a synopsis of what it is about on my Nano profile. But to save you folks some time I'll go ahead and post it here.

The book is called Hollowtown, and it is the first in a series I plan to write called The Lost Fleet. The series title will make more sense once the books are laid down, but I think it's going to be a fun one to do. It's science fiction, so the genre is not something I've published in before, but I am a big fan of it.

Good old Jolly Jack will have to wait a bit longer, I'm afraid, before his reappearance. I just can't do that kind of book for Nano. Too much historical research slows the writing process down.

So here's the synopsis:

A multi-generational fleet of ships launched almost three centuries ago nears its destination, a star system nearly sixty light years from Earth. But the ships and crew complements that presently make up the fleet hardly resemble those that set out on the journey generations ago. This was especially so after communications with Earth ceased some two hundred years prior. Since then the population has grown beyond what the fleet can support and rebellions have risen time and again, all within the confines of a nest of ships linked together out of a shared necessity to survive as they traverse the vast lonely voids of interstellar space. 

A history and culture all its own has taken shape in the Fleet, slowly developing into a rigid caste system made up of essential crew members at the top and all others at the bottom. They, those deemed non-essential, are the outliers living among the fringe ships of the fleet. And among them two brothers, orphans who against all odds have somehow managed to eke out an existence in a place called Hollowtown are about to embark on their own journeys of sorts. Ones that will eventually lead them on a collision course that may put the entire Fleet at risk.

I'll definitely need to work on a good tagline, but as a blurb this one gets the job done well enough for now. Believe it or not, book blurbs are almost as hard to come up with as the book itself is to write. (Yes, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.) A good blurb -- usually that thing you read on the back cover of a book you're considering buying -- has a lot of responsibility riding on its shoulders.

Think about it. You may have the best damned story in the world written in between the front and back covers of your book, but if the cover art and blurb combination fail to grab a potential reader's attention enough to open it up the world will never know the truth.

So, yeah, I'll be revisiting the blurb again before publication.

Nano-Prep

Sounds cool, right? Like some kind of sci-fi lingo. But it’s not. And it is.

It’s my list of to-do’s in preparation for November’s Nanowrimo event. Since my intended attempt for this year’s event will be in the science fiction genre, nano-prep sort of is a sci-fi term…at least to my mind. And since my parents and I are probably the only people who visit this blog on a recurrent basis (Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!), I can call it what I want and get away with it. So, there you go.

Alright. Today is October 4^th. That means Nanowrimo kicks off in T-minus 27 days. The clock is ticking, folks. So what’s a Nanowrimo newbie to do so that he’s not overcome with the magnificent magnitude of this undertaking from day 1?

He prepares ahead of time, that’s what. Here’s my plan:

1. Prepare for the routine. I’ve been working on this for the past couple weeks now, trying to write at a specified time every day so that I’m in the habit of it when November hits.
2. Output. Output. Output. Nanowrimo is about knocking out copious amounts of text in a relatively short space of time. Consider that November is a 30 day month. Doing the math, that works out to 1,667 words per day to reach my goal of 50K words. Not too bad, right? But wait a minute. We’ve got a holiday mixed in there, good old turkey day. Given the time I’ll have to put into that one (we’ve done a block thing the last couple years), I might as well mark Thanksgiving off as a loss. And probably the day before it too (usually a heavy prep day). Next up I have a film festival that happens the week before Thanksgiving. There’s another four days gone. Now we’re up to nearly 2000 words a day. Still not bad, you say? Well, get the f--k off my porch then. We’re done talking.
3. Outline. The good folks at Nanowrimo have rules for the contest. One is that you cannot begin the actual telling of the story, that is the writing of it, until the first hour of the first day of the event. But they highly encourage preparatory outlining of your story. That’s because it’s damned hard to punch out content when you don’t know where you’re going when it has to be done so quickly. So outlining I have begun, and outlining I continue to do.
4. Health. This is really a lifestyle thing and not something I’m doing for Nanowrimo exclusively.  But sometimes doing what’s good for your health – eating right, and exercising properly and routinely – require extraordinary forms of motivation when your mind just wants to sleep in an extra hour or chomp down that greasy Philly cheesesteak for lunch. Keeping fit gives me energy. The soreness in my muscles keeps me awake (if not a little grumpy). And eating right by reducing my carb intake and training my body to work off of its ample (hopefully not for long) fat reserves means I don’t bonk from sugar lows. Writing this, by the way, makes me want to devote an entire series of posts to nutrition and fitness, topics I’m keenly interested in...but I'm going off topic.
5. Clear the Clutter! This is probably the most impactful thing for me to do right now. One of the greatest hurdles I face as a self-diagnosed Adult ADD person (I took a psych course in college…get off my back) is dealing with distractions while I take a seat to write. Much of the creative process occurs inside your head, but your body and brain are constantly processing all the external stimuli around you while you work. What this translates into for me is a lot of tangents that take me away from the stuff I should be doing.

Of course, I should note that one of those tangents recently led me to this discovery about clearing the clutter. I’ve recognized for a while that I’m easily distracted from my work. I've determined that much of those distractions come from the clutter in my life. I'm surrounded by the collection of material possessions that I at one point in time decided were worth acquiring and, later, holding on to despite not having used many of said items in years. Every time I sit down to write I’m surrounded by my own cluttered mess of a life.

So what did I do out of my frustration? I started Googling. And that turned me on to the world of minimalism. Now, I don’t profess to become a true minimalist, but I do admire some of its tenants and I intend to institute them as well. In fact, I’ve already begun.

I think the good folks down at the donations receiving area at Goodwill cringe whenever they see my car pulling up with more loads of stuff. My local library has started turning me away with my book donations (so to Goodwill they go – I can’t stand the idea of trashing a book). The rest, the stuff I think I can make a buck off of, I’ll eventually sell. I think I’ll have to post more on this movement in my life as it progresses, because I think it’s something I’m learning a lot from and the lessons are worth passing on.

So there you have it. My 5 Step plan to “winning” Nanowrimo. Wish me luck!

What's that "thing" over there?

Some of you may have noticed that strange object in the upper lefthand quadrant of my webpage. You know, the thing that says "NaNoWriMo Word Count" and has a big old empty white bar underneath with the words "0/50000 words 0% done" under it.

What is NaNoWriMo, you ask? Well, funny you did, because I happen to have an answer for you.

It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's a 'competition' among writers to complete a 50,000 plus word first draft of a novel in one month; the month of November. I put the word competition in quotes because I mean it in the loosest sense of the word. In reality, it's more of a goal since all you really win is a virtual pat on the back from the event organizers and the other authors competing in the trenches with you if you surpass the benchmark.

I've known about this thing for two years now, but this will be my first year competing in it. The reason is that I've always found the number daunting: 50,000 words in one month? And not just any month. But November? You know...the one with a big old holiday at the end of it and typically vacation travel plans weaved in as well? Yeah, that one. The thought of bringing together 50,000 words into some sort of coherent mass is certainly an undertaking not to take lightly. Hence my reservations in previous years.

When you break it down to a daily word count, though, it seems less of an impossibility. It works out to somewhere on the order of 1667 words per day. Definitely doable. If you take out Thanksgiving. And vacation travel. And sleep. Maybe a couple meals per day too. And, oh yes, editing too. Yes, no editing allowed. The general rule of thumb is to puke your guts onto the keyboard and don't look back until December has rolled around on the day planner.

Since the world I've written in thus far has been the real world, and a historical one at that, it has required a great deal of research to bring those stories to life. But I won't have time for such research during NaNoWriMo, so I've come up with a plan...

I'm swapping genres.

That's right. The real world's a bitch to keep up with, but if I write in an artificial reality there's less real reality to keep up with. This is gonna be fun! I'm actually getting giddy as a type this. I've had an idea for a science fiction piece for a long time. And I mean a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time. It came to me when I was a kid watching old Twilight Zone episodes with my Dad back in North Carolina. For now, I won't explain any further, but suffice to say the idea's had plenty of time to ferment and I think I'm ready to bottle this batch of brew up and see what it tastes like.

So, come November expect to see that Word Counter come to life. And if it doesn't then I also expect to see my email box flooded with vitriolic scorn meant to spur me into action, lest I fail in achieving my goal.

YOU, lady and gentleman, are here to keep me accountable to the cause. My goal, my mission in November is to turn that white bar blue.

Wish me luck, and in keeping with the sci-fi theme, if you are strong in it, would you do me a solid and say: "Mike, may the Force be with you!"

[P.S.: If you're interested in competing also, check out the link to NaNoWriMo here.]