Jennieworld Today

Once again I’m pushed for time to think of something original to write, so, as ever, I’ve filched ideas from Jo!

On my birthday, the following things happened at various points in history:

Events:

• 1579 - Sir Francis Drake claims a land he calls Nova Albion (modern California) for England.
• 1885 - The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor
• 1991 - Apartheid: The South African Parliament repeals the Population Registration Act, which had required all racial classification of all South Africans at birth. 

Birthdays:

• 1945 - Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London
• 1980 - Venus Williams, American tennis player

Death:

• 1797 - Agha Muhammad Khan, Shah of Persia (b. 1742)

Holiday:

• Iceland’s national day, celebrating independence from Denmark in 1944.

Well, I never knew any of that before!

No, I really mean it! In some ways it feels like three days since I started writing my NaNovel, but in other ways I could quite honestly believe that it has now been November for about three years.

Only four days left to the end of the month, and I’m practically counting down the minutes until I submit my ‘masterpiece’. (Hubby’s counting down the minutes until I rediscover the location of the vacuum cleaner, I think!) I’ve been sitting in front of the computer for about four and a half hours today so far, and have churned out a measly amount of words for my efforts. My characters just don’t want to play. They want to do everything quickly, precisely and without prevaricating or expressing themselves in full and flowery sentences. All of this is VERY BAD NEWS for my word count. And before anybody says anything, I know that I’ve already written enought for two NaNovels, but there is still the matter of Wales’ battle against Oxfordshire and Nottinghamshire in the Word Wars to consider! I WILL NOT GIVE UP until the klaxon sounds at midnight on Thursday! Actually, I’ll probably be giving up a little before then, as my old modem may decide to play silly whatsits with me when I come to try to upload the manuscript for word count verification, plus I have a dance lesson on Thursday evening. So really, I should say that I WILL NOT GIVE UP until seven hours before the Klaxon sounds, so at about 5pm on Thursday afternoon, just to make sure that I manage to submit it in time!

In other news…oh no, silly me, I have no other news, as this novel has taken over my life!

(Please do not adjust your sets - normal service will resume on Friday)

I have been pressing on with my NaNovel since last Wednesday (I had two days holiday after I reached fifty thousand words last Sunday) and now I’m squeezing in a two minute break to write today’s blog entry.

Despite the home made gloves, my poor fingers have been suffering whilst I’ve been typing due to the lack of central heating in the flat. So, towards the end of last week I dug out a little heater which we use to defrost the kids’ bedroom in the height of winter and have had it plugged in next to me as I sit here at my computer. With its help I think that I’m just about avoiding frostbite. In fact, I’m almost feeling comfortable at my desk for the first time in several weeks!

The book is going well still, although I have to admit that the original novelty wore off at about the same point that I passed the fifty thousand word mark. It is proving more of a struggle now to a) chain myself to the keyboard for extended lengths of time and b) focus on the story. My latest distraction is the growing urge to print out the 109 A4 pages which I have so far written. However, I know that it wouldn’t stop there. I would then have to hole punch the pages, find a nice file in which to store the book, make an interesting cover etc etc. After this I would be almost forced to read it, which could have one of two disastrous consequences. Either I would start editing and have no time thereafter to actually write any more of the book, or reading it would have the unhappy result of showing me what a large amount of nauseating bilge I have spent the last two and a half weeks churning out, which would almost certainly stop me writing for good. Therefore, the urge to commit the book to paper and ink at this point MUST BE FOUGHT! However, I have e-mailed what I’ve written so far to my web-based e-mail address - a useful back-up tip passed to me by Owen. This will bring the number of back ups of my novel to five! Not that I’m paranoid or overprotective of my NaNovel in any way!

I’ve finished! I have a brand new ‘winner’ icon on the side of the page, over there (pointing right) which means that all the touching wood and avoiding ladders and black cats for the last couple of weeks has worked, and I am now (almost) officially a NaNoWriMo winner! I’ve just got to keep the book safe until the 26th, when I can upload it and get it verified!

However, I’m only just over half way through the plot of the book, so it looks like there may be a few more words to churn out this month before my story is fully told!

Jo has said some very nice things about me over on her blog recently. I think though, that she needs to remember that I have one major advantage over her (and not that I am a stay at home mum and can therefore divert more of my time into writing). I really believe that, because I have never before done anything like this, and because I haven’t really ever had any ambition to write, that I probably have far fewer inhibitions when writing. I think that, if the quality of the work mattered to me a bit more, I would have been so much more careful and would have spent far more time choosing my words and phrases. Instead of which, I embraced the NaNo philosophy of ‘Quantity, not Quality’ wholeheartedly!

See you at 80,000 words!

…but not in an apocalyptic way! I am at 48537 words, and therefore have only 1463 words left to compose in my NaNovel before I reach my 50000 words target! Woohoo! When I got off to such an unexpectedly strong start, people joked that I would finish by the end of this week, but I don’t for a minute expect that they meant it!

I can see the finishing posts, taste the first vestiges of the dizzying champagne-like air which awaits me after 50000 words, feel the sunny glow of success beginning to warm my skin, hear the not-so-distant cries of ‘bravo!’ and ‘encore!’ which await me from the crowds that have gathered to witness my triumphant romp home…

…The darned computer will probably break down irretrievably in ten minutes and, being too poor to replace it, I will be unable to complete the novel and be forced to cry.

 I’ll update you in 1463 words!

(p.s. I’m extremely superstitious as you may have gathered from previous posts, and so whenever I feel confident about anything, I have an immediate urge to apologise for that and point out that the worst will probably happen anyway. I offer my humble apologies for any confusion this may offer to my readers!)

Darn it! Why doesn’t someone stop me blabbering on and tempting fate! There I was yesterday thinking that everything was tickety-boo, couldn’t stop writing, the words were practically typing themselves, and then what happens? Life, that’s what. Everything is now conspiring against me to try to stop me finishing this. It really would be Sod’s Law if I’ve written 25000 words in the first five days and then I don’t finish, wouldn’t it! Yesterday I just couldn’t concentrate on the novel, with the result that I only wrote a handful of words. Not happy. Then today, I have to spend the evening hunting round Cardiff for a cyberman helmet for my oldest for Christmas (slight exaggeration - I’ve reserved one from Argos, but it’s not in my nearest store so I’ve got a bit of a drive and it will probably wipe out this evening as far as writing goes). It’s the only thing that he is asking for from Father Christmas, and so I really want to make sure it’s there if I can make it so. He’s a really good child, you see, never pesters for new toys when we’re in shops, and always puts things back on the shelf when he’s finished looking at them in the toyshop. Also, he has an unshakable belief that Father Christmas is going to go into Tesco (where he first saw the helmet) in disguise in order to buy one for him! How can I disappoint him! So, I am going to sacrifice my evening of writing pleasure in order to see his little face light up on Christmas morning and to hear those magic words coming from his mouth; “You will be upgraded. Delete! Delete!” (This is what cybermen say, for the uninitiated!)

In conclusion, this gives me just those hours while Jack’s in school to write something, which probably won’t prove very productive anyway as the little one will want at least some attention - they seem to like it when I acknowledge now and then that they’re in the house! And so, I’m never going to write so cocky and confident post again, unless the whole project is finished, printed, backed up in at least three places and I can feel (relatively) safe that nothing much can go wrong.

Anyway, I’m wasting valuable NaNo time here, so I’m going!

(p.s. the cocky and self-confident posts will of course probably be back by the end of the week - this is undoubtedly just a temporary blip!)

/stands up

Hi! I’m Jennie and I have a newly discovered problem. I am a write-oholic!

Levity aside, this is serious! I’m up to 25000 words now in my NaNovel, and I’m completely and utterly obsessed. I can’t concentrate on anything else. Most of my time I’m thinking about where my main character will go next, or snippets of dialogue that I could include, or brand new characters that didn’t appear anywhere in my plan. On the first three days I wrote an average of 7000 words a day, and then because of family commitments I only wrote 4000 words over the weekend. I’m suffering severe withdrawal symptoms! I’m going to have to have a good three hours after the boys have gone to bed tonight to try and catch up to where the story has got to in my head. At least I know that I’m not alone. My mum is writing an unofficial NaNovel, and says that she is also finding it hard to focus on anything which exists more than two feet from the computer, and begrudges having to stop writing to eat!

Ah well, at least I’ll be finished by Friday at this rate!

It has officially begun then. The first day is over, hopefully everyone who is writing has penned that elusive first sentence and the games can now begin.

I was so optimistic by lunchtime yesterday. I’d already written three thousand words and was really looking forward to my hour in the evening before my boys went to bed when I could write a bit more. I spent that hour typing in a frenzy and then disaster struck. At eight o’clock I saved what I had written (as I had been doing every five minutes all day - I’ve been lectured on backing up work before!) and suddenly the screen on my laptop froze. As I was saving my work on a floppy disk to facilitate the transfer from laptop to desktop I went to look at the A:/ drive, and the file wasn’t there. I assumed that this was because I was actually using the file (some sort of widget to stop me opening the same file twice) and so closed down the word processing software I was using. Well, that was the last I saw of the couple of thousand words I must have written in that hour. I tried everything to find the file, to no avail. Then hubby tried everything he could think of. It’s a complete mystery. It just disappeared without a trace.

Anyway, I’m very lucky that I have such a kind and understanding hubby. It was the tenth anniversary of our first date last night, and we had planned just to have a nice indian meal together once the boys had gone to bed. Well, he fetched the meal at eight o’clock, then spent half an hour trying to recover my lost file, then went and had his food while I started retyping the large portion of text which had been lost. I finished in time to watch ‘Torchwood’ at half past nine, ate my dinner in front of that then returned to the computer for another hour before I went to bed. I really don’t want to have to do that again! Anyway, my final word count for yesterday was 7343 words, which I’m very pleased with, given the trauma in the evening! I’m aiming to really blast the word count by tomorrow afternoon as I’ve got a fairly busy weekend planned and I don’t think I’ll have much chance to write as much as I’d like. So I need a good buffer so that I don’t feel discouraged when I start again on Monday.

The first day of NaNo. Did I stay awake and write through half the night? No. I couldn’t keep my eyes open past about 11pm, and so went to bed. Did I get up ridiculously early and type for three hours before anyone else got up? No. As usual, I had to be dragged from my coma-like sleeping state by a very awake husband and two kids at something-after-seven, and then decided that it was far too warm and cosy to get out of bed and actually do anything. Even so, for me I made quite an early start. I sat down with my cereal to try to start the novel. I was very lucky in that a half-decent first line came into my head about a week ago. I’ve been going around chanting this like a mantra so that I wouldn’t forget it (not allowed to commit anything to paper before NaNo started, but can’t see why I couldn’t just memorise the thing! Only joking - I only had the first sentence in my head, but that seemed to lead to another, and to another until…3732 words, baby!! I’ve finished my first chapter, and will now spend the afternoon happily potching with my boys making playdoh, then making things out of said playdoh. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to write a bit more later on, as this weekend seems set to ruin my word count (out on Friday night then visiting family on Saturday and maybe Sunday), so I’m going to aim to get to 5000 by the time I go to bed. Not sure if I’ll have the opportunity, but it seems like a good idea to set myself that goal. And that’s only another 1268 words, which hopefully shouldn’t take too long. 

Any NaNoers who have a look at this blog, please say hi. I think we need to stick together at this time, and provide mutual support and virtual chocolate cake (does anyone know where I can get virtual chocolate cake, BTW?).