author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So... yeah. NaNoEdMo. Um. We're going to have to revisit this concept in April, I think. See you then...

OK, I admit it. I am not, thus far, a very good blogger. Given the panic of getting the novel finished, there was no time to blog. But I would be a singularly abyssmal blogger if I did not at least journal the final days of the month and my pulled-out-of-my-backside win. At the very least, I should show off my "Winner!" .jpg, right?

So. Saturday I stayed up all night. Remember how I was going to stay up all night on Samhain and write straight until dawn? Apparently I wasn't serious enough. It takes a real fear of failure for me to get serious and fight the sleepies. That fear didn't really hit until Saturday morning. Even on Friday night I failed to pound out my quota, even with a quota of 7K per day! And Saturday I rather sabotaged, even considering the mixed blessing of a cancelled flying lesson (winds in excess of 28 knots at JeffCo).

I sabotaged it in a really yummy way, though. I went to the Redstone Meadery and tasted pretty much everything they had. That included the 2001 Reserve, best decribed as "the Port of mead." Then I went home and had a mead-induced nap. Word count at the time: 38,000. In trouble? Oh yeah.

So I got back to work around 8:00 and I stayed up all night, averaging about 1,000 words an hour but not necessarily many hours in a row. And I don't do that well. It helped that the rest of the household was up most the night too.

By 7:00 I had the novel up to its major crisis point and the sleepies were really starting to hit, so I went across the street to Vic's for a change of scenery and a bit more caffeine. I asked the barrista, "So what would you recommend for someone who's been up all night and isn't done yet?" He suggested something called a "depth charge." This turned out to be a shot of espresso dumped into a cup of coffee, and it was nasty. A bunch of sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla powder seemed to help. That, and a glass of orange juice, because I try to accompany my drugs with actual food.

I got the climactic penultimate scene written while at the cafe. There came a point where I was crying like a baby while typing it out, and I'm sure the gal at the table next to mine thought I was a basket case. It's usually a good sign that the story, however awkwardly told, is worth telling, so I was starting to get really excited.

I went back home to write the end of the novel. I cried some more. The surviving characters cried some more, and laughed a little too. I wrote the last line, checked my word count, and really started crying.

Barely more than 46,000 words.

Shit!

The rest of the day was spent frantically pulling extra scenes out of, like I said, my backside. And for the last 2K I wasn't even writing story anymore but background material and brainstorming.

But I did finish. And in time to watch Adult Swim, too. So, Yay! Chalk me up another NaNoWriMo win. One more rough draft to go into my compost drawer until such time as I'm ready for a revision... in... I dunno, how about March?

We had a great turn out for this week's Boulder meet-up. Lots of chess, lots of Go, lots of chocolate, lots of noise. I got about 1100 words done in the midst of all this. It's starting to break up now (5:16 - and four of us have been here since noon thirty).

The plan for tonight is an Adult Swim marathon (a new Space Ghost Coast To Coast! "Tectonic plates have shifted" since the last time that happened!) and enough food to fool you into thinking Thanksgiving had come a week early. Bridget made pumpkin cheesecake with a gingersnap crust last night (I've had a slice - it's divine) and with the leftover pumpkin I'm going to make muffins. There will also be a field roast (vegetarian version of a roast beef, apparently), a veggie tray, and candied yams.

Sounds like fun, huh? Well, if A) you know where I live, and B) we're currently on speaking terms, you should drop by and join the party and help justify the lack of writing that will happen.

Laundry will happen, though. Laundry, but not writing. That ain't right. Something will have to be done about that.

This has nothing to do with writing, but a lot to do with one reason for the deplorable pace of the writing.

Saturday, I passed the FAA Private Pilot Knowledge exam. Not only passed, but aced. Got all 60 questions right. The proctor sort of goggled at the computer screen, then stuck out his hand for me to shake. Every third sentence out of him until I left was "Congratulations." My flight instructor said none of his students has done that well before. So you can imagine how delighted I am. Yeah! Girl power!

The only one not surprised by this outcome is my Mom. As far as she's concerned, it's just one more test, and with few exceptions I've always been an A+ student. I'm glad she wasn't worried. Me, all I have to do is look at the Gleim study guide's chapter on Federal Aviation Regulations to be astounded at how much crap I've managed to cram into my head.

What worries me is, how long can I keep it in there? I don't know whether in two weeks my checkride examiner will take it easy on the oral exam, seeing that 100% score, or whether he'll be suspicious and grill me hard to make sure I didn't cheat! My plan is to keep using the Sporty's "Study Buddy" and practice tests every other day or so until I've pretty much memorized the entire question base.

But it won't take up hours of could-have-been-writing time, at least!

No, of course that bar hasn't moved 3,250 words to the right. Yes, I know I'm in deep ca-ca. Indeed. Look, don't bother me and my nice fuzzy coat of comforting denial. I am in pain right now, all around the collarbone, and the creases under my eyes are sticky with tears, and it's all Aeire's fault.

Still don't get it? Try reading this one. Yeah. That one's pretty good. Hmm. So's this other one.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a three-hour nap to take.

So, there's seven of us here now, and things are getting a little bit noisy. Sgmoo is exhorting me to go register NaNoProMo.org, for National Novel Procrastination Month - "I mean, you're online. Get on top of it!" I demurred, preferring to put it off until next month.

The topic has since moved on to the logistics of writing an entire novel of maniacal laughter, and how many words it would come to, and how you would spell them.

I had intended to get some writing done here, but I've hit a difficult part, and the Boulder Meet-up is distracting. It's certainly easier to think about spelling maniacal laughter and analyzing the cocoa content of chocolate chips from Whole Foods than it is to figure out how my main character plausibly discovers the nature of his highly unlikely problem.

Meanwhile, I Am Clever. Again. When I update my word count here, it also updates my word count on nanowrimo.org, along with my novel's title and the excerpt I'm displaying. Cool, huh? I may even make my novel excerpt visible from here. Stay Tuned.

Look! Pretties!

OK. I am a clever little Vortex. See, there's this slick word-count bar at the top of the page, it's made of two itty-bitty divs all dressed up in CSS to go out and meet the nice people, and there's an unimposing Log In link at the bottom of the page that I can click so I can enter humungo long-ass run-on sentences like this one right on the web page, there are links I can use to edit existing blog entries or just delete them entirely...

All right, genius. What's missing?

Yeah. That nicely decorated word count hasn't moved all day, has it?

Guess I'd better save developing the random quote administrative tool for later...and write now.

For going to sleep at 4:30 am, I sure managed to wake up at 7:00 am. How disappointing. I was hoping for long, vivid dreams until early afternoon.

My housemate is brewing coffee. You can smell it in every room. My husband, who was awake longer than I playing Neverwinter Nights, is still snoring. The cats, now fed, are conspiring to keep me from getting up again. Today can afford to be a leisurely day; I'll write another couple hundred words and then try to get this blog finished up in ways you can see and in other ways that only I will notice.

Did I say dawn? Silly me.

Yeah. I did. I said, "I'll start writing at midnight and keep going straight until dawn!" Uh-uh. No way. At least, not likely.

The first scene of the novel is coming along very slowly; this is for a number of reasons. One has to do with the usual difficulty I find in pulling an all-nighter. Another has to do with my madly optimistic plan to type it all in Dvorak. I keep remembering the title to Holly Lisle's article about switching from QWERTY to Dvorak: "With Fingers Struck Dumb" or something like that. I've been practicing a little over the past few weeks, but still it takes enough concentration that I get sleepier even quicker.

And then there's my usual block where after having thought and thought and thought about a story for weeks, actually writing-it-down is a daunting task. It's like there's no way the words I put on the page will ever convey the movie going on in my head. (Maybe I should be a screenwriter instead of a novelist.)

On top of all this, I'm raging hungry. This from staying up as late as I have. I'd cheer for it - nothing like uncomfortable sensations to keep you awake, right? - but generally when starving-hungry and dead-tired get into a fight in my body, dead-tired wins.

It's lovely outside. I took a walk to keep myself awake around 2:00 MT, and the frost all over Boulder is 1/4-inch thick in places. Leaves, grass, and pine needles feel like plastic doll furniture. We'll see how much of the ice has escaped melting when I wake up again...