Ceridwen’s Cauldron

I was downtown today doing some shopping, so I thought while I was out, I’d pick up the Two Towers extended edition DVD, since we don’t own it yet.

(Yes, I know, the shock and the horror of it all!)

I don’t really have the time to watch it this week, I’m too busy trying to finish my damn novel, but I thought in prepararation for the weekend, I’d buy it and keep it all wrapped up and I could watch it when I had time.

It’s sitting on the coffee table in the living room now, still plastic-wrapped, and I’m in the computer room at the far end of the apartment with my word processor open and my notebook handy, ready to knock out another 3,000 words or so before bedtime.

And the damnned if the thing hasn’t started calling to me….

Ceriiiii……Ceriiiiiii…..watch us….you can write another night….yesssss…..presssssssciousssss……

I hesitate to walk past it to the kitchen to make tea for fear that it will attack me and never let me go.

Ooooh….43 minutes of additional footage….

Must. Resist.

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In this year’s Nanowrimo, I have not once been ahead of my oft-taunted rival of last year Talyesin.

Not once.

Yet as I write this, my word count is 40239, and I have passed Tal. By about 200 words. I may not beat him to the finish line this year. But I was ahead for once! Wahoo! That’s enough for me!

And I only have 10K left to write and let me tell you, the story is starting to write itself.

I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.

G’night.

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I’ve been trying to kick this damn cold or flu or whatever it is by pouring a steady stream of fluids down my throat and sleeping as much as I can. In between this I’ve been trying to catch up on my writing so I can finish this damn novel before November 30 rolls around. My two main modes right now are Sleep and Write. Eat and Drink are secondary, when I remember, when I can get my sorry ass off of whatever chair it’s in.

So I woke up from one of my naps to find sunshine pouring in my window and with no sense whatsoever of what time it might be. “Is it Sunday morning?” I wondered. “Crap. Then I’ve missed a whole day of novel writing.”

But the sun coming in my windows was in fact the sunset, and I suddenly remembered lying down for an afternoon nap since I was so tired and sick. I was very relieved. I’m well-rested, feeling lots better, and I have the evening stretching ahead of me for writing.

And the novel is going a little better now that I have an outline to work from. I wrote almost 2500 words last night. I’m planning to write 3000 more tonight.

28,241 words and counting.

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I’ve been suffering from a horrible dry cough all day, drinking water and tea with honey and eating soup and hoping it will go away.

And it’s all made worse by the fact that I have tutoring tomorrow, so not only do I have to get up and spend my morning out, but I have to use what little creative energy I have to make a lesson plan for tomorrow. Sometimes I can just coast, but I feel like I need to inject a bit of life into the lessons. Lately they’ve been getting repetitive.

I ran out to the grocery store to pick up a few things and thought, on my way back, “You know, if I’m sick, I really shouldn’t be going to tutoring and spending two hours coughing in the general vicinity of my student”. I thought I’d come home and call her to say “forget it”.

There was a message on my phone when I got home. My student is sick too and won’t be able to make it to the lesson tomorrow.

So now I don’t have to cancel. And I can be sick in peace.

Yay. I think.

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I hesitate to say it, because there have been so many turning points thus far for my nanowrimo novel and none of them have been real turning points.

Tonight, after writing about 600 words, I stopped. I had planned to write 5000 but the words weren’t coming and something was wrong. The story refused to move forward.

“This is it,” I thought. “No more story without an outline. Without some sense of where it’s going to end up.”

So I e-mailed t!, of course, because that’s what you do when you’re stuck and need someone to talk through your plot with you. I asked him to call, which he did, sometime around 1am. (This was all right because I’d told him to call early or late as I was planning on staying up until the outline was done)

We talked through my plot with surprisingly few digressions to things like musicals, and bad movies. He gave me some new insight into characters, and listened as I talked things through. He also gave me some great plot ideas that will be worked into the story. I still didn’t have an ending, but I was sure by the end of the conversation I had more than enough for 50,000 words.

So I sat down with my nano notebook and wrote out chapter numbers up to 10. I filled in about three major events for each one. Four for some, but I can always add more chapters later if I find I need them. When I got to chapter 10, the plot still wasn’t wrapped up, so I started making an outline for as far as the plot went.

And halfway through outlining chapter 11 I had an ending. Perhaps a trite ending, perhaps even predictible, it’s hard to tell when you’re outlining. But an ending. One that I feel like the plot is leading itself to.

There are 12 chapters at the moment, wrapping things up in a nice little package. I feel at the moment like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I can breathe a little easier.

Of course, I still have to write 25,000 words in the next 10 days. But that’s only 2500 words a day. And I know where I’m going now. Oh, it’s such a nice feeling!

I’m unsure what I owe t!, but it’s definitely something along the lines of a Really Big Favour.

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I think I may be beginning to like my nanowrimo story. But perhaps it’s the two glasses of Autumn’s dad’s delicious red wine talking.

I also think I may also not even be halfway into the story and almost halfway done my wordcount. (Savvy readers will realize this also happened last year.)

Final word count for tonight: 20,686.

I should be farther along, but if I can crack 25K tomorrow (today, technically, since it’s past midnight as I type this), I’ll be happy, since it’s the midway point of the month.

Allrighty. I’m tired. Off to bed with me.

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I stopped by a bookstore where some friends of mine work today while I was out. I was chatting with one of my friends when she suddenly got an “aha!” look on her face.

“I have something for you, a little surprise,” she said. “Just a minute and I’ll go get it.”

And she disappeared, only to return later with a trading card from one of those collectible card games.

A Legolas trading card. With a picture of Orlando-Bloom-As-Legolas on an iridescent background.

Oh, some of you know me too well! It’s now in my wallet. A treasured posession to carry around with me and swoon over whenever I’m in need of a swoon.

I feel like such a girly-girl. It’s great! I love little for-no-reason gifts like that.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering the answer is no, there is no picture of my husband in my wallet.)

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This is something I came across while doing some freelance research today:

Clean Films. They take the films we all know and love, cut out all the naughty bits, and rent them out to people online. Sort of like Netflix, but censored.

Now, I’d be the first to admit that there’s many a movie that you wouldn’t notice the difference in. But it kinda makes me wonder what films like, oh, Pulp Fiction, would be like without all the violence? The mind boggles.

Apparently there’s a market for this sort of thing. Who knew?

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It’s almost 3am and I’ve just finished writing for the night.

Most recent word count: 19521

I wanted to break the 20K mark tonight but I’ve written myself out. I don’t know where the story is going next and I think it’s best if I leave it for a while.

I feel good about the story so far. There are elements coming in that are working quite nicely. I’ve got some ideas for some mythology/storytelling that I can include (which is more my style, frankly). Still there’s something bothering me about the way this story is coming together that I can’t quite put my finger on. There are several things I don’t like about the book, but I haven’t quite put my finger on what it is I dislike about it so much.

Even once I hit 50K this story is going to be in severe need of editing. And I don’t just mean because it’s a novel I wrote in a month. There’s going to be a whole bunch of re-thinking and I think it’s probably going to be years before I touch this novel again, if I ever do.

How interesting. I’ve never felt this way about a novel before. I don’t think I’m talented enough to write it yet is possibly part of the problem. Or, rather, I know I’m not talented enough to write it yet. There’s no shame in that, and this isn’t about self-deprecation. It’s about knowing that I’m at the beginning of my writing journey, and there’s a lot of room for me to grow and improve.

It’s hard to do that if I don’t finish at least some rough-draft version of the story, though, so that’s why it’s important for me to finish this. I’ll find out things about myself and about the story while I’m writing that I’ll be able to use later, even if the novel itself is no good.

Okay, I’m rambling. Time to go to bed.

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So I had the pleasure of going to Autumn’s yesterday to play dueling laptops.

That is, we each take one side of the room and start typing madly, aiming to increase our Nano wordcounts by sheer virtue of the fact that we can’t get up and go anywhere, or even chat, because the other person is busy typing.

I increased my wordcount by nearly 4,000 words. I was going to do more but by the time we had supper and I got home it was late and I was tired and I ended up going to bed, thinking “I’ll check Talyesin’s word count tomorrow and pass him then.

Of course, not only could I have passed him last night, but Taras has passed me as well, meaning I really have to get the word count up there.

As to the story itself, I hate it and it’s extremely unlikely I will show it to anyone ever, except possibly Autumn, who gave me the original idea. But then, it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be 50,000 words. And then I can get back to writing stuff I actually care about.

I think that’s my problem with Nano this year. I’m doing it for the sake of doing it, not for the story and not to encourage myself to write. In fact, I probably would have managed to start writing again in October after a slow September if it weren’t for the thought in my head “Don’t get involved in anything you’ll have to drop when Nano comes around.”

Was it an excuse? Yeah. Could I have written other stuff in that time with no worries? Yeah. But you know what? It was one more excuse I didn’t need. And now it’s one more thing on my plate I’m not enjoying nearly as much as I think I should be.

I don’t hate the story anymore, but I don’t exactly like it either. It’s become an exercise. Like homework except slightly more fun and with a nice social aspect.

And I still have nearly 36,000 words to go.

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