Blog Party!

Today was my day in a budding author blog party, go and check it out over at  Miss Jack Lewis Baillot's blog, However Improbable.

Here are links to other posts I've done on my various writing projects. So grab a cup of tea, or your other warm comforting beverage of choice, and hang around for awhile, don't forget to let me know what you think! =)

Into the Woods

NaNoWriMo

Poetry

Writings

Words

Yeah!!

<---------------------------------  Check it out!! I won!!!

Good by for another year Mr. Writing Gnome!

Just to clarify, the scary ones represent how I feel about this whole process by the end of the month! And the cute one? Well, he has been jumping on my brain for the past 30 days, forcing me to participate in this insane venture for the past 3 years! He looks innocent enough but he's evil, pure evil I tell you!!

Almost there.....

Hello to all my lovely (and turkey stuffed) peeps out there in the blogiverse! NaNoWriMo has presented quite a few challenges this year in the form of crazy busy days and the rather unfortunate timing of the release of Christopher Poalini's last book in the Inheritance Cycle!

(Awesome series by that way, one of my favorites!)

Yes, it only took me three days to read, but late nights that should have been spent catching up on writing were spent in the company of dragons, Urgals and elves instead!  Fie upon you Poalini!

Ahem, anywhoodle.....I promise to be back to a more regular blogging schedule come December first when I will be joining in Natasha's 12 days of Christmas blog party!

Click on the above picture to check it out, should be fun!!

Ps. Check out the new Christmassy theme to the ol' blog, I love Christmas!

Pss. Only 3 days left of NaNoWriMo.....I think I can, I think I can, I think I can! =)

I won!

Good bye, writing gnomes, see you next year!!

(For those of you not plagued by these happy creatures, they are very innocent looking gardening gnomes that come and jump on my brain and won't stop until 50,000 words have been typed!)

Yes, I came in under the wire, but I have 50,126 words! I'm not quite done and need to add all the recipes, but I reached 50,000 words with 12 hours to spare!!

*Sigh* It's back to normal life now!

Almost.....There.....

I am only 3,000 words away from winning NaNoWriMo! Eegads, this time around has been filled with sooo many days of not writing and then having to catch up! I was going great until my computer ate 5,000 words(Totally my fault, I had a proper warning, but like usual I didn't carefully read the little pop up window!) that put me behind and I have madly been playing catch up ever since!

I will be starting right up with the Christmas fun on Wednesday, so stay tuned!

I did have take sometime to Christmas-fy the blog layout, I love this time of year!=)

NaNoWriMo

The insanity of NaNoWriMo  (for the uninitiated among you, that stands for National Novel Writing Month!) has begun and after not getting started until 9:30pm on the first day and not really getting started before 6pm on any of the other days! I have now caught up and am about 400 words ahead of schedule. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, but I wasn't really liking the idea. I'd even gone so far as to actually plot out what was going too happen and I never do that.


I was nervously anticipating plugging away through a plot I didn't like for a book I wasn't sure I wanted to write. Then at a bible study I have on Sunday nights this opening paragraph popped into my head.

I just did what any first time caterer who had foolishly made the promise that she didn’t have to be paid until she had finished the job would do; what fool made that promise, oh wait that’s right…..me!  I propped the body back up and slowly backed out of the walk in refrigerator. Shutting the door firmly behind me, I set the food down on the counter and took a generous swig from the cooking sherry bottle.  A few more hours wouldn’t make that much difference of a difference to him, right?

What are you talking about? I was to paying excellent attention to the bible study.....

I once again have no plot, which might be a problem considering the nature of the mystery genre, but when have I ever let a silly thing like no plot get in my way? 

All of that to say, like many of my blogging peeps I may not be around a whole lot this month. I've got a mystery to solve! To monitor my progress click on the NaNoWriMo graphic above my picture at the top of the page. Because I know you'll all haunt it, eagerly anticipating my word count tallies for each day!

I managed to resist the swag last year, but this year I could no longer stand it and ordered something. What can I say? (Besides, please ignore the rather scary looking male model in the picture, but that almost goes with saying!!) ;-)

Rejoining the Human Race!

For the last month I have been spending a lot of my free time, wait, did I just say free time? Excuse me while I go and laugh myself into a corner about the concept of free time!....................................
Okay, I'm back now! As I was saying, I've been spending a lot of time here on Blogger, in fact during the week at least 1 hour a day, most week days it was 2-3 hours. Nap time was typing time over at the Poet house! What exactly was I doing here since I seem to have a considerable lack of posts per time spent here typing away? Well, since I don't have my own computer and didn't want my baby(yes my baby if you have a problem with me calling my book that go and, , do something to yourself! And not a lets grab a cookie type thing! ) on the Poets somewhat unreliable lap top.
Besides I wanted it here with me on the weekends so I could work on it here. So, I typed about 85 percent of it here, on Blogger. Then I copy and pasted it into Word when I got home. The spell check is a little loopy, it didn't like the name Nicolas and didn't have the word leapt! I guess my characters moved around rather quickly a lot of the time because I seemed to run into this frustration quite a few times!
If you couldn't tell from the title of the post I will now be joining the realm of the non-NaNoWriMo'ers again. It was a whole different kind of month for me. Just the massive amount of brain juice it took to keep the story going and all down in one month left me running pretty dry! I'm sure the director of the Christmas play I'm in will be happy to have me running on all my cylinders once more!
I had been wanting to write a book since I was a little kid, but I had never gotten around to it. It was one of those one day things. One day I'll write a book, one day I'll learn to play an instrument, one day I'll be 5 foot 6 and only weigh 115 pounds........okay even I don't have a big enough imagination to talk myself into that last one!
Back to the narrative, all of my down time at the Poets house was spent writing and some not so down time, can you say bored kids and nail polish? Oh, yeah! What did we learn today kids? Maybe that nail polish and blush are not interchangeable?
I didn't get much writing done at home because I didn't want to tie up our computer and I don't really have much free time.(There's that funny phrase again!) I work 40 hours a week and still do all that I used to at home. Plus my dad just got a job in NY so I'm coming home to moments like, "Katy! Your home after 10 hours of work! I know that you have to leave again in 40 minutes but can you fix the Internet, right now!?!?!"
Needles to say my life had exploded and I decided to add writing a 50,00 word novel in there because? Maybe I'm masochist, maybe I'm crazy, or maybe the aliens have finally gotten control of my brain. Whatever the reason I stepped up to the challenge and have conquered it! My book had been written, now comes the fun and easy part! Editing is always the fun easy part, right?
Wait........ why are you laughing? Hey! Why are you rolling on the floor in front of your computer, still laughing? I'm getting the impression that I said something amusing, hmm maybe this editing bit won't be as easy as I thought! Oh, well time will tell, but for now the book is going to rest and I will rejoining the normal human race, well as much as I was ever part of the normal human race that is!=)
(Just as a note, my parents are still happily married, my dad had just been out of work for 9 months and a contract job, even one in NY was very welcome. He comes home when he can and it's not a forever! Just wanted to make sure that I didn't start any rumors or anything!)

Crazy!

I was crazy to take on this quest of mine to write a 50,00 word novel in a month! What a busy month for them to choose to hold this event! I've only been caught up on word count three times. Never the less, my word count is up to 38,178! One more week to go and I couldn't be happier with how it's all turning out. We shall see what the end of of this crazy month long journey of mine holds for me and my story!

NaNoWriMo

Can anybody sane with a full schedule of other things to do write a 50,000 plus word novel in one month? That is the question asked by the people running the National Novel Writing Month competition. The challenge? To begin and finish an 50,00 word or more novel in the month of November. The challengers? Anybody with a computer who has ever wanted to write a book. Oh, and is a little on the insane side!

I had heard about this NaNoWriMo for a few years and had never given it much thought besides those people are nuts!! I'd been trying to write a book ever since I was 10! If I hadn't accomplished it in the 13 years since then what on earth would make me think I could do it in one month?

Something must have made me think I could do it, because on October 29 I signed up! Then the next day a pep talk e~mail came and it didn't pep me up one little bit! It did the exact opposite! In I found out that Twilight was only 25,000 words long! Now even if you've never read the book I know you've at least seen it somewhere. That's not exactly a light weight book! So, when I didn't even get started writing until the 3rd I had no hope of catching up to the 1,600ish word count goal. That's daily! So I was about 3,000 words behind schedule.

I sat down to write on that day and wrote for about 2 hours, spell checking as I went because I can't type. Nope, I've tried to learn really I have! Hen pecking very fast is what I do, so spelling mistakes abound in my writing! I went to a word count tool and was astonished to find I'd written about 3,000 words! I was ecstatic, not that I didn't erase half of that the next day because my characters had gone in an entirely different direction then I wanted them to.

But, not only have I caught up, I am a couple hundred words ahead of schedule! Well, at least I was yesterday, with this new dawn another 1,600ish words must roll out of my brain down my hen pecking fingers and onto the computer screen! Here is a link to my author page if you are interested.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/547888

If you are even more interested get back to me at the end of November and if I've managed to come up with anything decent you can request a copy of the next great American novel! To give you an idea of word count this post is 442 words, including this sentance!