not a writer:

novel stats:
34,100 words (~31%)
105 pages
working on chapter 4 of 13

Only about 2000 words added to the story this week. I haven’t really done much with chapter four yet beyond just the first few pages, since I’m still polishing up chapter three to send out to my writing group this weekend. I’ve spent a lot of time this week researching, learning things I didn’t know about elephants and drugs mostly - though having nothing to do with each other in the story. That would be a weird story, lol.

Did you know that marijuana does not actually kill any brain cells, as much as our high school guidance counselors would have liked us to think it did? Did you know that elephants in captivity devote roughly 45% of their sexual encounters to animals of the same sex? Well, that’s what I learned this week.

My six-word memoir for Kim:

Desperately trying to have coherent thoughts. (I write as my child refuses to take his nap…)

We took Dylan to his first concert last night, Michelle Branch at Detroit’s River Days festival. He was so adorable! He clapped after every song, and in the middle of them, and he sang along, improvising with his own two-year-old lyrics.

I didn’t even know she was playing around here until I saw it on the news earlier in the day. How fateful that just hours after I had posted about my undying devotion to this guitar, and there we were, standing in a small rained-out crowd, watching Michelle Branch play a Gibson Hummingbird. The universe wants me to have one, I can feel it!

Of course, the universe also probably wants us to buy a house and second car first. Oh, priorities…

Two random things. First, is it some kind of biological hardwiring that at not even two years old, my boy child likes to crash his toy trucks into each other?

And second, there is a Google ad at the top of my Gmail page to Meet Vampire Guys: www .GothScene.com Meet Local Vampire Guys Near You. View Profiles 100% Free. Join Now! I just thought I would share that, because you know how hard it is to find a good vampire guy these days.

not a writer:

Novel stats:
32,550 words (~30%)
101 pages
3 chapters down (of 13), and working on ch. 4

Only about 2000 words added to the story this week, but I also worked on the notes for future chapters quite a bit.

Chapter three is drafted! Very shitty first draft, but it’s all there! And I’ve plopped down the intro scene for chapter four! Chapter four is going to be a lot of fun to write, I think. It’s the POV of Samantha, who is one of my favorite characters so far, bold and spunky, but surprisingly sad. It’s the summer after high school graduation and they get into all kinds of trouble

Some fun discoveries this week. On the problem of writing brilliant characters, which I mentioned a while ago. The one I thought was brilliant, the one everyone thinks is brilliant, is actually kind of a fraud! He really isn’t very brilliant at all, which is why I think he’s so determined to make something of himself. What a fun discovery!

That, and I know how the novel ends. At this point, I have pretty much the whole book noted out, and as long as there aren’t any earth-shattering changes to the story, then I think I just wrote what could be the last scene and ending, and I really like it. It’s beautiful and funny and sweet and just a little bit tragic, and pulls everything together in a subtle way, which is just the kind of ending I want.

Still no title though. I thought I had one for a minute, but it’s not quite right.

not a musician:

Playing this week (very badly, if I might add): Babe I’m Gonna Leave You by Led Zeppelin

My child can strum a guitar really well. I promise I wont turn into a stage mom, but it’s really cute. And since he won’t leave mine alone, I think we’re going to buy him a cute little baby guitar for his birthday. The toy-looking ones are cute, but I think he would know it’s not real when I have mine out. But I think he would be disappointed if it didn’t have real strings to strum, so maybe this one? And look, it’s a baby Gibson!

Speaking of, I gave one of the characters in my novel a Gibson Hummingbird and I am desperately jealous of him! Is that weird?

My child is in love with outside lately. He would live outside if he could. He would sleep underneath a bush. He likes to pick up sticks and rocks and leaves and hide them in the seat of his Mickey Mouse bus. He likes to put pieces of bark in his mouth, try to catch ants, and run off farther than he’s allowed. Outside is a magical place.

My son went on his first date last weekend. Aren’t they cute?

Not a writer: An update for last week, lol.

Thanks to last week’s brownout, I have been a very productive writer. We had no TV, no DVDs, no PC to play games on for about five days.

Novel stats:
30,600 words (~28%)
94 pages
3 chapters out of 13 (I think it may be bad luck to have 13 chapters)

Chapter three is not quite wrapped up, but getting there. That will be my goal for the end of this week, to wrap up chapter three. Then comes chapter four! LOL! As if that wasn’t a logical conclusion

I have discovered that the novel is about friendship, among other things. How about that? It keeps surprising me as I write, as I find even more things that this novel is about. Big broad vague things. I never know what to say when people ask me what my novel is about. I say, it’s about a lot of things

Is it annoying to read about the progress of some novel you know nothing about? I never know how much to reveal, how much you guys as readers would want to know.

I woke up in the middle of the night a few nights ago to some idiot screeching tires. It sounded like he was trying to do donuts except that it’s June and he didn’t realize there’s no snow? Anyway, it inspired a scene for chapter four. A scene which I then had to get out of bed and write immediately! So, oddly enough, I thank him for that awful tire screeching at 3:00 a.m.

The internet has made me anti-social. This was a note I wrote down and I don’t remember what I wanted to say about it.

How did people ever manage to write novels before Google or the Wikipedia? Anything you want to know, whenever you want to know it, right there at your fingertips. Or before laptops equipped with iTunes? Any mood you want to be in, done! Flickr gives me pictures of pretty much anything I want to see. Blogs give me the real life experiences of any kind of person I want to read about. And I just spent Dylan’s naptime on Google Maps, looking at satellite images and street-level walking views of city I have almost no chance of visiting for real, but silly enough, chose to set a fat portion of my novel there anyway.

So I have the whole world in my dining room, and that’s pretty cool.