Merry Eight Days Til Christmas!

Uh, oh. 

Did you know that Christmas is only eight days away? And, okay, seven shopping days, because our family starts the party on the 24th. Gah! I finally went shopping yesterday, though. Go me. Got--sort of-- done. Granted, I did some shopping online and there will be gift cards. 

Anyway. I spent last week cleaning up my NaNo manuscript. I participated in this Entangled Smackdown thing through the Savvy Authors website. The group I was in, Dead Sexy, won--which means that our imprint (Dead Sexy is the romantic suspense line) scored the most points for showing up and suiting up--and the authors who participated earned the opportunity to compete for the chance to be published by Entangled. 

We got an email last Monday from editor Nina Bruhns that said something along the lines of Hey! Send what you've got, with your beat sheet and a query letter, and one of you will get published.

To which I said to myself, You've got to be freaking kidding me.  Not only is this not finished, the story changes directions sixteen times in the 68,000 words I have written. 

Not to mention how many "that's" and "her eyes looked" and "her fingers felt" there are in there.

But hey...what do I have to lose? Okay, maybe I could get my email automatically added to the Dead Sexy spam list, but otherwise, what do I have to lose? 

I enlisted the help of my friend Laura, who graciously looked for as many overused and misspelled words as she could find (why don't I notice the spellcheck suggestions myself?).  I managed to edit SOME of the manuscript. I put together a beat sheet that explains the story I'll be telling once I've rewritten the thing. Wrote a real live query letter and sent the whole mess off. 

And now I have renewed motivation to get back to work and finish this book! I think I'll be buying a few more gift cards to finish out the Christmas shopping, and see if I can hire an elf to do some wrapping so, I can "wrap" things up on my book. HA HA HA. I crack myself up.

Merry Almost Christmas and Happy Belated Hanukkah, and Joyous Whatever Else You Might Be Celebrating! 

I WON!

Phew.  It's over.  I did it.  At least as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned.  I got my 50K words done over the weekend, added a few thousand more, and pasted it into the word verifyer a few moments ago. 

And while the internal editor is still in her cell in the basement, I'm going to try to finish up...I think I'm about to put the villian, the hero and the heroine all in the same room and let them fight it out...hopefully the right two will be making out at the end. 

So what did YOU do this month? 

Yes, it's That Time of Year, Kids!

And I'm not talking about All Saints Day.  Or three weeks until Thanksgiving.  Or less than two months until Christmas.  It's NaNoWriMo!  Woo Hoo!  Love it, hate it, ignore it or whatever, it's here.

The first year I played, 2010, I "won", which means I managed to type 50,000 words in somewhat organized sentences.  Didn't get too far with that project, but it was a good experience, and it might get ressurected as the second book in my Napier County series (which exists mostly in my mind, but I have the tropes in mind).

Last year, I didn't finish.  Just fizzled.  I can't even remember what project I was working on.  Huh.

Well, this year is different.  I really mean it this time. I plotted.  I Beat Sheeted.  I joined a study group.  Okay, it's not a study group.  It's a very cool thing that Savvyauthors is putting on, in association with Entangled Publishing, called the Entangled Smackdown.  It's part of their NaNoWriMo bootcamp thing.  The Entangled thing is cool, because you get to sign up with one of their imprints (I went with Dead Sexy, the  Romantic Suspense line), and the editors log on and critique your synopses and stuff.  Pretty cool, no?

And then they broke us up into teams--there are five of us on my team, the Dangerous Divas (how cute is that?).  We get points for writing every day, for meeting our goal, for doing little challenges, cheering each other on.  And I'm always up for meeting new virtual people.

So, anyway, that's what's new with me.  Writing.  Happy November!

Wrangling Teenagers

What did you do last weekend?  I took five teen aged girls to a Boy Scout jamboree.  I win.

Actually, it was a lot of fun, and there was minimal drama, but I did come back with a fair amount of plot fodder, should I decide to start writing YA. 

First some background:  I am an associate advisor for a Venture Crew, which is a division of Boy Scouts for older teens, and is Co-Ed.  We do high adventure stuff like whitewater rafting, climbing and rappelling, backpacking...none of which are things that I'm really geared towards, but I'm trying to get in touch with my inner badass and get my 14 YO daughter off the couch, so there you go. 

Anyway.

The Troop that we're associated with graciously allowed us to bulldoze our way along to Peterloon, which means...I don't know what the heck Peterloon means.  But it's an event where 6100 scouts and a few adults go and spend the weekend doing scouty things. 

I ran into exactly two other crews that had girls, and there were only 2-3 girls per crew, so we had the most girls there.  I was a little nervous about keeping track of my girls, so I went a little Victorian Nanny on them, not letting anyone out of my sight without another girl in tow, but I needn't have worried.  The boys in our Crew peed in circles around them, so they were safe, at least from outside attack. 

I did run into a few things that I need to remind them of before the next trip:

1) The cool trick where you can change your bra under your t-shirt is indeed cool, but it still should be done out of the view of 60 boys. 

2) It's never a good idea to put the flashlight down in the middle of the tent before you change clothes, as there is a silhouette thing that happens.

3) You may not sit on the lap of any boy in camp, even if he's not your boyfriend and you don't like him that way.  Really.  And using his knees as a back rest when you aren't sitting on his lap is a no-go, too. 

I can't wait to be briefed on back country feminine hygeine before our next trip...

How Many Swords Can I Throw Myself On Today?

ARGH! 

So, I got to work this morning and realized I've made a huge, expensive, too late to change it MISTAKE.  I ordered the wrong stuff for an experiment, and it's a no-refund kind of a thing.  I said some bad words, then went to fess up to my boss.  Who is a saint.  She is really, really mad at me, but she didn't throw anything at me or fire me, or curse at me (at least not in front of me). 

BUT BEFORE I REALIZED THIS MISTAKE, I did some laundry at home.  Before I was down to my last pair of panties without holes in them.  I thought I was really being a good kid.  Then I took the wet stuff out of the washer, and this is how it went:

Me:  Hey, what's that in the little groove inside the door?

 

Other Me:  Huh.  Looks like you left your lip balm in your pants.

 

Me:  Crap! 

 

Other Me: That's okay, the lid's still on it.  No harm, no foul. But look, there's something else in there.

 

Me:  Crap!  It's my flash drive, which contains the semi-revised first draft of my first ever completed first draft. 

 

Other Me:  Well, that's okay, it's your back up, right?  Right?

 

Me:  Ummm.  Well, yes, but it's the back up for my laptop, which, as we know, erased itself the other day.

 

Other Me:  It might be time to rethink that whole sobriety thing. 

 

So that's how my day is going.  How are things in your neck of the woods? 

 

(The good news is, I just plugged the flash drive into my desktop at work, and my files are still there, and I re-backed them up!)

Getting Geared Up

Hey!  I know, you prolly aren't out there any more, since my brilliant and relevant posts have dropped off so dramatically, but whatevah, here I am today!

I'm getting fired up for this year's NaNoWriMo.  I'm outlining. I joined a Bootcamp group over at Savvy Authors.

 I'm exploring writing software.  Not neccessarily because I think it's gonna make me a more organized, productive writer as such, but like a diet, if I invest money in something and master the learning curve, I'm more likely to power through.  Okay, it doesn't usually work for diets, but it worked for my computerized sewing machine and my iPhone.

Do any of you use special writing software?  If so, what kind and what do you like and dislike about it?

Bueller? Bueller?

Look at me!

While I have been busily procrastinating about revising my WIP, Jessica Lemmon  tagged me in the "Look" blog challenge.

The deal is, I'm supposed to find the first use of the word "look" in my WIP and post the paragraph surrounding it...egads, this is gonna be bad, I just know it (hopefully it won't be "he looked at her with his eyes" or something equally redundant). Okay, going to open the file now.  Here goes:

     Bill shook his head at her, smiling. “No, no, I live here.  Darryl, he’s been runnin’ things since Ruthie died. He had some sort of ‘family emergency’”, Bill told her, making the universal quotation-marks-that-mean-I-don’t-really-believe-what-he-said motion. “I live over on B Dock, slip 6.  That’s my houseboat, the Yellow Rose of Kentucky.

Olivia looked where Bill was pointing, over the brown water of the harbor. There were two long docks, parallel with the shoreline.  One ran alongside the marina office building and had a rusted gas pump sitting forlornly in the sun.  The other was on the other side of the boat ramp.

Okay, that's kind of boring, but it could be worse.  I hope.  I'm sure you all want to know about the Yellow Rose, and let me tell you, she's a beauty:

Like the closer one, the far dock had three more docks extending into the harbor, and there was indeed a houseboat sagging against one of the piers. It was the saddest looking thing she’d ever seen. Not that the other boats scattered about the harbor would qualify for Yachter’s Weekly. The Rose was tilted at such an angle that she feared it must be about to sink. A few bits of yellow paint were visible on the hull and cabin walls, but the main color scheme was more “Rusting Algae Sunset” than “Yellow Rose”. Sadly, it kind of blended in with the rest of the place: falling apart and filthy.  But if there was one thing she was good at, it was dealing with other people’s messes.

Okay, I guess I need to tag someone else...hmmm....

Dawn Alexander, you're up!