Welcome back, Muse. Hope you had a nice three-day weekend in the middle of NaNoWriMo! Not allowed, I’m telling you, not allowed!

We’re back to work today though, and I’m in the process of making something interesting of two once-directionless chapters. Lots of words to make up for…

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 10

14516 words (on track = 16670)

I’m stalled. I show up to my keyboard and I’ve got nothing. I haven’t written anything new since Friday, and instead, the whole weekend I’ve committed a NaNoWriMo no-no, which is stopping to revise! I spent the weekend pulling the events of my part 1 forward a year. It’s interesting. It works. But still, my story progression is stalled in part 2. I need things to happen. I know what kinds of things need to happen, and the tone of what things need to be said, but I’ve got nothing precise.

It’s cold outside. That’s my problem maybe. It’s been about 40 degrees, at the peak of the day, and I haven’t been walking. I always get so many of my ideas flowing when I’m out walking with Dylan. We do a four-mile walk through the neighborhood, him in his stroller with some juice, me just trekking along with my characters rattling away in my head. Man, most of my novel has been conceived on foot.

We just bought Dylan a really warm coat and gloves and hat, and maybe I’ll warm up some apple juice for him or something. But 40 degrees is cold! I don’t want to go out in 40 degrees. I’m whining. You have every right to ignore this post.

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 9

14458 words (on track = 15000)

And I haven’t written much today either…

Just a word-count update today. I have nothing else of significance to say.

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 8

13132 words (on track = 13336)

I was pretty well stumped yesterday, and didn’t get much writing done, and the words I did accomplish were pulled from notes. I spent the day navigating around the massive sinkhole in my story, and I think I’m working it out.

The story is about different things now. The story is about things I never thought I would be writing a book about, but at the same time, I’m also really not surprised either. These are all things I can relate to or have experience with – being a young wife and a feminist at the same time, not wanting to grow up to repeat your parents’ mistakes, and um… “anger management issues” (not sure if I’m brave enough to tackle full-on domestic violence, ack! I’m still deciding.)

My book was not about those things before, and now it is. It will be a better book for it, I think. It will be more precise and less vague and sweeping. And somehow, it’s still based in the same love story that it began from.

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 7

11796 words (on track = 11669)

*** my relation to “anger management issues” is not w/ hubby, by the way! I don’t need any interventions, lol, in case anyone was ready to pick up a phone or something. ***

Last night I was raving to myself about how much I loved my chapter in part five (is that weird? lol), the one I wrote about yesterday, and I actually wrote down in my journal that I loved it so much I would write my whole book around it if I had to. It’s a great chapter. It’s the crisis point for Lexi’s story arc. It’s scary and darkly comical and has some opportunities for gorgeous imagery and writing. I really love it, so much so that I would write the book around it if I had to. And I might have to actually hold myself to that.

That chapter, in part five, isn’t the problem, but something I discovered in part four that leads to it. This thing, in part four, is not just a roadblock, but a massive house-sized sinkhole in the pavement!!! It also happens to be the crisis point in Danny’s story arc, and is not really the kind of thing you can just slot into a story. Lexi’s crisis point already fit the story I had planned for her, and Danny’s doesn’t, really. It’s not far off course, but it’s different.

I keep doing this in my story, writing these hypothetical scenes, way ahead of where I’m presently writing. I think that means I started the story too early.

I can’t even believe how much my story has changed from where I first started, or since changing over to first person even. And I don’t know if the story is different because I’m digging into parts of my characters I couldn’t see before, or if they’re just different characters all together. My main characters, Danny and Lexi, are apparently capable of doing things I never thought they could do – dark things, shameful things, brave things. It’s becoming a whole different story, for real. It’s almost unrecognizable from where I started eight months ago. So much so that I don’t really feel confident I know what the story is about anymore.

I wonder, when does a story stop being so fragile that these earth-shattering scenes could make the whole thing flop? I want to find a story I can stick to and actually finish writing this thing. But there are unlimited number of ways I could write this story, infinite dimensions for these characters to live in. My God, how do people write novels??? It’s so hard!!!

Maybe actually having these two very defined crisis points will help me. Maybe I need to be writing around them, and now everything I write will have direction. All roads lead toward the sinkhole, or something?

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 6

10333 words (on track = 10000)

Dylan is holding a red block, with a green block snapped on top. I wonder what he imagines it is? It might be a car, or a space ship, or a boat… we play this game sometimes.

“What is it?” I ask.

He says, very decidedly, “Green block.” How’s that for imagination?

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 5

9189 words (on track = 8335)

On track and a good deal ahead

I had no idea what I would write yesterday, and oddly, ended up writing a good portion of a chapter, a huge crisis moment for Lexi, all the way ahead in part 5! (I’m only on part 2 at the moment) Which means the scene is only hypothetical at this point, but I do have the next few parts pretty well sketched, so it’s likely to stick I think.

I don’t really feel confident writing these kinds of intense, fearful, high-danger kind of moments. How do you pull those off without being melodramatic? How do you make them believable? That’s the question of the day

Happy Obama Day!!!

And, um, I don’t quite know how to say this, but – he is black, isn’t he? I hope my readers will take this in the spirit of peace and acceptance that it is meant… but I kind of forgot. I’m sure he didn’t forget, and I know black people in our country didn’t forget, but maybe my forgetting means something? That a white suburban twenty-something, just another girl of my generation, went and voted for the best man and skin color didn’t even cross her mind? I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. That’s also a symbol of progress, right? Edging toward the day when none of us will consider it a deciding factor anymore?

Michigan issues:

Medical marijuana wins (62%). I didn’t even know this wasn’t already legal. They interviewed this girl on the news who said making medical marijuana legal will just make it easier to get, and then everybody will be walking around stoned all the time. LOL! People amuse me sometimes. Because, you know, alcohol being legal and everybody just walks around drunk all the time… oh, how will we ever function???

Stem cell research wins (52%). I was a bit torn on this one, about the whole ethical, is it a baby, isn’t it a baby, debate. Finally leaning toward the side of no, it’s probably not a baby. I say probably, because none of us know for sure one way or the other. Hopefully this research will help cure people, and not be used to make bear-elephant-hybrids or whatever. That’s all I’m hoping for.

Good election people! Congrats to my friends and family in Ohio for voting blue!

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 4

6774 written (on track = 6668)

On track and then some. I had a productive day yesterday, but don’t have any idea what I’ll work on today. I guess I’ll just show up and see what spills out.

A couple days ago, hubby and I had a five-hour discussion about what makes a story ordinary vs. interesting. Quirky vs. “pedestrian” (his word ). As a writer, I generally shy away from taking risks. I keep my characters safe. I don’t allow them to make mistakes. I don’t shine my flashlight on their flaws. The conflicts they have, at the moment, are all pretty common.

I’m consciously trying to change these things. It’s hard to do, since as a person in general, I don’t take many risks, keep myself in safe situations, and oh-boy do I ever try and hide (or deny) my flaws!

At first, I was thinking, if my life were a story, nobody would probably want to read it. But wait, no, maybe that’s not quite true?

Everybody has weird and interesting in their life, we just don’t like to talk about it. All those skeletons in our closets, weird habits, the things we like to skip over when we tell people about ourselves. I mean, nobody says, “Hi, I’m Sue, and I’m OCD about bacteria on my kitchen counters.” Or “Hi, I’m Dave, and I like to believe I was born on Neptune.” Or “Hi, I’m Jenny, I like to bite my toenails.” Or “Hi, I’m Chad, and I hit my wife.”

I think I’m afraid if I let my characters do anything too weird, or say anything too mean, or good Lord, have a bad habit (!) that the reader might not like them. But maybe the opposite is true, because keeping them too ordinary makes them forgettable.

If you really, really thought about the people you know, or yourself, I bet you could pick out something weird, or twisted, or deranged, or neurotic, or tragic. Everybody has something. Even me (not that I’m going to admit to anything here). So surely each of my characters have something in their story too. Surely the choices they make can be more original and less predictable. I mean, it’s not even my own life I’m playing with. I don’t even have to live with the consequences of their mistakes, they do!

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 3

4471 written (on track = 5000)

So, I was running slightly behind as of last night, but I’m having a very productive day today. I’m digging into chapter 6 and found a really interesting edge to play with. This is the conversation between Danny and his father that I wrote about before, and about how if all Danny’s father has ever given him is financial support (unavailable kind of parent), does that mean Danny is obligated to give him respect? Or maybe he should give him respect, but might not want to? Well, I don’t know, but that’s what I’m exploring anyway.

*Hubby says, yes. All parents deserve at least some level of inherent respect from their children (unless they’ve crossed a line of being abusive), no matter how absent they are, because without them, you wouldn’t even have life.*

Anybody else want to weigh in on this?

So anyway, Danny’s father is kind of fun to write. He’s such a selfish and smarmy and arrogant bastard He is, actually, the risky kind of character I don’t normally write.

So the first half of yesterday I spent having a five-hour conversation with hubby about what makes a story interesting vs. ordinary (I meant to blog about that today, but I’ll blog about that tomorrow instead, as I have some novel words to catch up on).

I spent the second half of the day crashing my computer with my “acquired” copy of Microsoft Word. No complaints allowed really, you know, understanding the situation of things My only complaint is that Word is so damn expensive. I mean, really, $99 (and that’s on sale from $149!) just to do a little typing???

So today, I want to plug Open Office, which is FREE! Yay for free! And it does everything I needed from the Microsoft Office suite, which is really just some word processing and spreadsheets, and seems to be nearly identical in its capabilities, and even better in some ways. It’s a very nice little setup, and saves my files in .doc and .xls, so screw Microsoft!!!

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 2

2206 words

+1000 words for yesterday, which I doubt, actually. This is probably just a difference in the word count tool between the different softwares. It feels like I only accomplished about half that.

Men: they don’t say what they want or need, don’t say what they’re thinking unless you ask, and not even then sometimes. Instead, they just frump around acting all moody and sorry-for-themselves, because they expected you to read their mind, and then were disappointed when you couldn’t!

That was written out of frustration this morning (frustrated and kissed and made up), but I have to say, this pattern has held true for so many of the men I’ve known. Funny that my two-year-old, who also happens to be little man, has absolutely no problem telling me what he wants and needs. I wonder when it stops?

The most difficult character in my novel happens to be a man. (Danny and Hannah’s father, Nick) I don’t think he is my most difficult character because he is a man, but just because I don’t understand his motives. I think I understand the other men in my novel pretty well, even when they’re being stupid or immature or selfish or petty – I understand where it’s coming from, even if I wouldn’t act that way myself.

So what I’ve done is pushed him away (Nick). I divorced him from his wife, estranged him from his children. I made him as cryptic and unreachable to them as he is to me. Is that a cop-out? Will that work? It’s certainly made things a little more interesting. More complicated. It’s made them all a little sadder, which was needed, I think.

If he were a Sim, I would probably just kill him off, lol.

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 1

1274 words (plus a couple paragraphs in notes for a later chapter)

The scene I’ve been trying and trying to dig into this week is one between Danny and his father, so I hope I’m not stuck! Eeek, stuck on day two, lol