Bring on NaNoEdMo!

Most writers are familiar with National Novel Writing Month. I say "most" because a writing friend of mine hadn't, but he's Canadian and I'm pretty sure I've worked around a Canadian long enough to get away with the phrase "Those wacky Canadians!" In a nutshell the rules are that you write a novel in the span of a month. Depending on the total word count you want to achieve depends on the number of words you have to type each day. Frankly I think Novella Month would be more achievable, but people have made some pretty good books under such time constraints.

I don't need that though, you know what I need? National Novel Editing Month.

Yes, I manage to procrastinate editing by more writing. I've written an entire manuscript to procrastinate editing the previous one, and you know what happened? I finished it. Now I have two written manuscripts in which neither have been edited.

Editing goes faster though, since the words are already down. You make a few tweaks here and there, maybe add a whole new scene, but it flies right by compared to writing from scratch. Right now The Crystal Witch clocks in at just over 38,000 words, a novella. Luckily the ebook market is more flexible about shorter stories. So, even if I edited a dismal 1,000 words a night (which is the goal I have each night when writing) I would still have it finished in a little more than a month.

More importantly though, Dusted came out all the way back in June 2012, and I don't want to pass the three year mark without publishing something else. What motivated me the most were two things, two authors really.

The first was Kristen Britain, she wrote a book called Green Rider, I already talked about it here, but the focus is how long it took her to write more books in the series. It wasn't that she was busy with other books like some authors, but it must have been some combination of a busy schedule and wanting to perfect it before release. Still, I dutifully read books 1-3, bought book 4 and have never read it (nor, do I think, I will), and now book 5 is out and I'm not even bothering. It took too long for the author between books, and it has taken her literally decades to get to things that were being foreshadowed in the first few books. Yes, you can always go back and reread books, but there are always new authors and stories coming along with promises delivered faster.

Second, and more relevant, is S.D. Tower. Who in the heck is S.D. Tower? This is an author who wrote a halfway decent book ("halfway decent" meaning I read it back in 2003) called The Assassins of Tamurin and then never wrote anything again. A "one hit wonder" except remove "hit"....and "wonder" too I guess.

Point is, I don't want to be like the first author, but I really don't want to be like the second.

So those are my motivations to edit. It won't be pretty and it won't be perfect, and I can't make any promises that I'll have something before the end of 2014, but I'll be working on it.

Let Me Get Sappy For a Moment

For me the holidays have never really meant a lot. Yeah, as a kid it's all the same "OMG stuff!" reaction but, as people get older, they tend to be a bit more family-oriented toward this time of year.


This makes my second winter since moving out of my parents place and, as of September, a full year of living on my own ("On my own" includes parents paying for bills, folding my laundry, washing my dishes, changing a flat tire, and cooking my dinner. Yep, good to be on my own...)

For me "family" doesn't really mean a lot. Whenever extended family visited (or we visited them) I'd be tortured by cousins as they broke my toys (I has toys that lasted 5+ years that only took 30 minutes to break in the hands of a cousin). I have always managed to interact better with adults than kids my own age and I'm glad I finally am one. Heck, I can't wait until I'm 30 so adults won't lump me into the "Stupid Young Adults" category.

You kids wif yer got dern laptops and infinity scarves!

Throw in the usual family drama llama sessions and figure the point I'm trying to make is that Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been a "Why?" thing for me. Had I known it was even a thing, I would have sequestered myself in my bedroom and listened to music with headphones on whenever the family thing happened.

When I got older my family stopped celebrating Christmas. It wasn't that we hated it, or were all bah hum buggery about it. We simply didn't bother. A tree was a pain in the butt to set up and maintain, wrapping paper is annoying, and we already get what we want the other 364 days of the year. Christmas is to me as what Labor Day is to you (except you don't have to hide for 2 months leading up to Labor Day.)

Except this year, it's like my heart melted. Suddenly I want a Christmas tree, something I haven't had in nearly ten years, and I want to put presents under it, and I want to get something special for my parents that says "I know you" and "I love you", and I want to go to their house and spend all day with them and have a huge dinner. We would load the wheelbarrow (or sled, depending on the snow level) full of wood, and I would pet all the cats who miss me (meaning everyone except Sandy), and we would do chores, and it would be lots of fun and as I go to sleep I have the warm fuzzies that only comes from being super duper happy.

Even if I don't accomplish all of that, it does give me an understanding of what real Christmas is.


...But no matter what happens, I will never tolerate Christmas music.

Classes That Should Be Taught at BYU-I

DRV101 - Driving on Icy Roads

DRV 110 - U-Turns are Illegal

DRV 120 - Your Brights Blind Other Drivers, Turn Them Off


EMO101 You're a Grown Up Now

EMO102 Seriously You're A Legal Adult

EMO103 Stop Acting Like a Child

EMO105-A Coping with Anxiety

EMO105-B Coping with Depression

EMO110 Moving Here Won't Solve Your Emotional Problems

EMO120 Helicopter Parents

EMO125 Being an Old Maid at Twenty Years Old


HLTH101 Nobody Cares That Your Mom/Aunt/Roomate is a Nurse

HLTH02 It's Just a Cold

HLTH105 If You're Vomiting It's Not the Flu

HLTH110-A Constipation - Help I Can't Poop

HLTH110-B Diarrhea - Help I Can't Stop Pooping

That Time I was Flash Robbed

Otherwise known as my first Trunk or Treat.

I know we're well past at this point, but if Christmas can sucker-punch me on October 28 then I can punch right back.

Plus, now that it's past October, have you considered adopting a black cat?

So the day started for me actually on October 30th. I worked 12 hour night shift starting at 6PM and had to switch to dayshift as fast as possible (I keep night shift hours even on my time off) so the fastest way possible was to stay awake long after I would have normally gone to bed. I got off at 6 AM, went home, waited for my brother to get up, helped him into his costume (which takes an extra person and 20-30 minutes to put it on), put on mine, and was right back to where I had worked only two hours earlier.

Now, I haven't done anything with Halloween since I was about eight years old. After that we would just buy our own candy and have a Simpsons marathon consisting of VHS tapes we'd recorded episodes on years ago. So it was actually a lot of fun to see people letting their inner child have free reign. There were people dressed up Mario Kart style, including 3 balloons and scooters. Green army men. Enough pirates to form an actual crew and enough witches (self included) for a coven. After getting my fill I headed home, 21 solid hours of being awake under my belt, and took a long nap while playing the "Just one more hour" game for 4-5 hours until my brother got home from work.

It was like having kids except  I actually got sleep.

From there we went to out friendly neighborhood trunk or treat.

Initially it felt like a flash rob, the participants becoming increasingly wild as the sugar in their system hit critical saturation. There were plenty of Elsas this year, and the one girl going as Cinderella was probably mistaken for an Elsa too, but there were a lot of cool ones too. A couple of my favorites were a tiny little Anna with a crochet hat made to look like her hair (complete with white streak) who's name was actually Anna, a Luigi with a ghost vacuum, and a kid in a stack of boxes I had mentally nicknamed Awesome-O.

If you're still young enough to go trick or treating yet watch this cartoon, your parents don't love you.

Now here's where I probably turn into an old coot.

I'm already awake trunk or treats defeat the whole point of the thing and that it has basically broken down into a fast-grab of candy, but what I wasn't expecting was the picky nature of the kids. I had one walk right up, take a good long look at the bowl, and proclaim "nah." And, by the end of the event, our bowl had actually gained different candies. That's right: the children were dumping lesser candies on us.

All I could think was "What the heck?" Back in my day (there's the old coot thing again), when we had to actually walk further than 6 feet for our candy, we appreciated every last bit we got.

I still enjoyed it though. It's been so long since I actually saw children dressed up in costumes that I guess I forgot the whole event of Halloween even existed on that level.



And, on a totally unrelated note do you have any idea how expensive razors are these days?

When You Get Stuck on a Scene

When I write sometimes I just end up getting stuck. Call it Writer's Block, call it your Muse taking a vacation. Doesn't matter how it's said, it basically means you reached a certain point where you can't write any more. This can bring any story to a grinding halt.

Especially when you try to rekindle your inspiration with Cheezburger.

A personal rule I use is that I give myself three days with no writing. I don't force myself to think about it either and instead hope it comes along more organically. It does, especially when I give my brain the opportunity to go on Standby Mode (which I will discuss in the next post). Sometimes I just rehash in my head what I've already written, other times I think too far ahead, and sometimes I work out exactly what I need.

Other times, however, my brain just flat out refuses to cooperate, and my three days are up. What do I do then?

I write anyway.

Sometimes it's my best writing, sometimes it's not. The times that it's not I plow though anyway because, later on down the road during the editing process, I come up with a much better idea or flesh out the one that's already there.

You can give yourself more or less time, depending on circumstances, but I use three days because if I have less I'm distracted with the deadline of getting back to writing. Longer than three days and it starts getting too far from my mind. You want a golden point between the two.

Brain Standby Mode

No, I don't mean burst suppression brought on by events such as hypothermia, I mean spacing out. I call it Standby Mode because I see the brain as a lot like a computer. With no activity it goes into standby mode waiting for outside input to get it working actively again.

As a kid I used to space out a lot. I could do it at the drop of a hat, in a crowded room, or even in the middle of eating. Although not as often, I still space out today.

Just honk if you're behind me and the light turns green.

This is one reason why all your best ideas come when you are falling asleep, or taking a shower. When falling asleep your mind isn't distracted by the input of the day, and when you're not kept awake with other thoughts ("Should I watch Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore tomorrow? They're both on at the same time and I can't decide, aaaaaargh!") your brain is free to roam. The same goes for taking a shower. If you're like me you shower pretty much every day.

And if you don't shower at all you probably smell like a hobo.

After a bazillion times showering it's pretty much a routine. It's so routine, in fact, that your brain doesn't even have to devote a lot of thinking toward it, giving it a chance to wander. A shower is also a bit of a sensory deprivation chamber, since the sound of the bathroom fan and water make white noise so that you can't hear the outside world, and there's not a whole lot for you to see in the shower either.

Unless you've got, like, a super rockin' bod.

So maybe you fall asleep really fast and your skin chafes from taking five showers a day, how do you manage a Brain Standby Mode?

Force it.

It's both easier and harder than it sounds. I imagine it's a bit like meditation, except instead of letting go and emptying your thoughts to achieve nirvana or the like you're merely providing your brain an opportunity.

Basically, you want to unplug from everything. No Internet, no TV, no phone, no people, not even a book. You want to make your brain go from focusing on the outside to turning toward the inside. You want it give it an unchanging environment so that it doesn't have to use all of its power processing what's going on. It's why so many authors having rooms dedicated to writing (Neil Gaiman's writing gazebo being a personal favorite of mine.)

Granted, sometimes if you find your brain spacing off about the wrong things (the car, the house, the kids, what's for dinner, work, etc etc) you have to give your brain a little nudge in the right direction. Think of the last scene you wrote, or think of a different scene, or a scene in the future. Play with some ideas, your characters, go through some scenes in your head you don't plan to have in your book.

If you need to, open up to the last page of what you've written, but don't actually write. Sometimes I find myself doing that. I don't stress that I'm not actually writing though, because I'm working it through in my head.

If anyone saw me staring glassy-eyed into the computer screen and asked what I was doing, however, I would tell them "Writing" because, in my mind, that's technically what I'm doing.

Yet Another Maximum Ride Book!?

If you've read my blog posts in the past you know about my Love / Hate relationship with the Maximum Ride Series by James Patterson. Well just last Monday I discovered this:

From Barnes and Noble:

THE NINTH AND ULTIMATE MAXIMUM RIDE STORY IS HERE! Legions of Max fans won't be disappointed by this encore episode in the beloved series about the incredible adventures of a teenage girl who can fly. As Maximum Ride boldly navigates a post-apocalyptic world, she and her broken flock are roaming the earth, searching for answers to what happened. All will be revealed in this last spectacular "ride"- a brand-new grand finale featuring all of the nonstop action, twists and turns that readers can rely on in a blockbuster Patterson page turner!


You know what I say to that? Bull. Freaking. Crap.

This book says to me "Remember that really crappy ending in book eight? Haha just kidding here's the real-real ending!" Book eight is literally titled Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure. I bet this is Patterson's (or, what I suspect, one of Patterson's many ghost writers) attempt at "fixing" the mess of the Maximum Ride storyline that was already so messed up even as far back as book three. So stop, just stop already.

Am I going to buy it? Yes, but my heart won't be in it. It died reading book four, and went through agonal heart rhythm during books five through eight. I'm going to read through book nine and watch as they take a bad taxidermy job and try to make it look better using a baseball bat.

What the series looks like, and also my current expression.