(R.H. Herron)
Hey, folks. Serious subject now, one I'm not equipped to deal with. But my girl dee ann, sadly, she's equipped. And boy, howdy, is she.
Go read what she says about cancer. She's an expert, and I think her entry shows a part of the disease that we gloss over, way too often. It's not an easy read, but I think it's a necessary one.
Dude, I couldn't sleep last night, thinking about Nanowrimo. That's not like me. But I knew how I wanted it to start, and I kept re-starting it, even in my dreams. I do NOT like writing in my dreams. It's frustrating, to see the words, and then to try to re-read them, and they've suddenly changed.
But I've got 5,011 words down. I have a schedule:
Workdays: 1,000 words a day, written in the morning. I will get up at the ungodly hour of 3:45am. I leave for work at five, and I only take about 15 minutes to get ready, so that gives me an hour. I can easily get a thousand words in an hour, even while half-asleep. At my top speed, I can get two thousand an hour, but that's when I'm ON. And I know when I get home at 7pm that I am DEAD and completely unable to talk, let alone write, so:
Weekends: 5,000 words a day. From 8am-12pm, I'll write (like I did today). Four hours is good for 5,000 words (about twenty pages), including drinking coffee/eating/wandering/cleaning up the dog-vomit breaks. My weekends are always either three or four days long, so that's good for building the word count. My target word count is an arbitrary 76,000 words this month.
I don't know if I can pull it off. But I'm going to try.
Luckily, La's totally into doing NaSoAlMo again, so she's off recording in her room while I'm writing. It's nice.
Now: It's been POURING this morning and I'm loving it. I love rain, especially the very first good rain. I opened the window in front of my desk and Waylon and Willie and I sucked in that good smell of grass, rain, and asphalt.
But now we're tired. I might take a nap. Like this:
Willie and Harriet are lying right next to me, right NOW, doing that. It's even cuter in person.
This was from our walk yesterday, but this is how I feel today. It's a good day. Nap. And then some cooking for the work week, which starts tomorrow.
Huzzah! Nano is here!
Tiny baby Digit curled up with me last night (not being a jerk at all!) as I almost-finished the book sweater. I'm always so pleased when a neckline works out (god bless EZ). Now all I have to do is graft the underarms. I LOVE GRAFTING. Love it. Seriously. Pics soon.
In other news: My sister Christy is a very good writer. Today, I am distracted with very
good things, and can't seem to keep a thought in my pea-sized brain, so
go read about her staunch and worthy adversary.
Good lord! A wonderful person just donated the money that will let Bethany and I both go to the Night of Writing Dangerously!
WOOOOOOOOT! This is how I felt when I found out:
Really. I did that.
Then I realized that both things I had blogged (my reading and the Night of Writing Dangerously) are on the SAME NIGHT.
So I'm going to have a ball. First to the N.O.W.D. with Bethany, where we'll set up our computers and snack and write and listen and play. Then I'll jet over to the reading. I will read and listen and shmooze with knitters. Then I'll jet back to the City for the last hour or two of writing dangerously (doesn't that just sound so romantic?).
So to you, you know who you are (and I don't! It's killing me!), THANK YOU. You made both Bethany's and my Nano November already the best one ever. I can't believe I get a whole night of magic – reading from my first Nano, now a real book (although not published or nothin', we're working on that….) and working on my current one.
You really knocked us out. And we'll toast to you that night. Thank you.
WRITERS WHO KNIT:
This is cool. I'll be part of a reading at Knit-One-One
on November 15th, with Jesse Loesberg and Peggy Vincent. I'll be
reading from my recently completed book. Please come? I haven't given a
reading in years, not since I was in grad school, I think. At least it
will be for knitters. That will ease my nerves.
Saturday, November 15th, 7:30pm, Knit-One-One, 3360 Adeline, Berkeley
T-2
Two days to Nanowrimo! I've been plotting my little brains out. I have a goal of compiling seventy-five to get me comfortably on the way, and I'm up to something over fifty now. Of course, I like plotting along the way, too, and for once in my life I know where a book is going to start AND end, so it should be easier, but you never know. I have three unfinished novels in the drawer that died the death of no-ending, so I'd like to prevent that from happening again.
Sister Bethany is also joining the novel in a month madness again, and she is raising money for the Office of Letters and Light — if anyone would like to donate, please click here:
All money goes the group behind Nano and the Young Writers Program, which is all about promoting writing for writing's sake, anywhere, everywhere, all the time. They are seriously rad. Thanks.
(Also, if she raises two hundred, she gets to go to the Night of Writing Dangerously. If she raises three hundred, she TAKES ME WITH HER. Ahem. I so want to go.)
PS – your recipes for brown rice/quinoa/barley sound so good I'll be cooking up a storm today. Rain tomorrow. Days off for my weekend. Joy.
I swear I have. I've just lost all motivation to blog about the knitting process, not that I ever had that much to begin with. You know I love to spring 'em on you, all completed. Voila!
But I've been designing a sweater, and the cool part is that it's for the book! My main character is a knitter, natch, and through the book she's been knitting and designing a russet man's sweater. It's an unconventional Gansey (narrower chest design, zig-zag on sleeves rather than plain or cabled). I wrote the book, then wrote the pattern to include with submission, and NOW I'm actually knitting it. The pattern I sent with the book is a rough draft — I've still got to figure out the neckline and write the chart and different sizings. For all I know, if you followed the pattern, you'd end up knitting a ranch house.
But isn't that fun? Pattern sold with book? I love it. It's like novels that feature food having the recipes at the end.
I adore how my lust for yarn increases so rapidly this time of year. Unable to think about knitting anything for so long, it feels like coming back into myself every year. (If you look at my Finished gallery, you can see that most of the sweaters are banged out in fall and winter.) I need to cast on some more socks, and finish another sweater for me, and start another one, a stripey one…. Ahhhhh. I like to think about knitting on the couch almost as much as I love BEING on the couch, knitting.
PS – Is there a way in hell to make brown rice not suck? I hate it, hate the stuff. I've tried cooking it in all kinds of broth, cooking it plain, adding spices, adding vegetables and tofu…. I might just be bad at cooking it or it might just be as awful as I think it is. I'm about ready to give up, but if you have a miracle recipe, lay it on me. Puh-leeze.
PPS – Miss Idaho says Too Many Cats Here:
