NaNoBlarghMo

I need to finish Ye Damne Novel.

I don’t wanna finish Ye Damne Novel.

Lacking in inspiration for…well, for much of anything, these days, I decided the smartest thing for me to do this year would be to use NaNoWriMo to try to finish up Earth Girl in Exile, the book I started writing last November.

The thing is, over the summer I re-wrote (perhaps more accurately, wrote) the first part of the book (Cat’s exile and transit out of the Solar System), and most of what I wrote last November (her actual life in exile) is in need of some serious rework, which a) is terrifying, considering the amount of rearranging and chopping and cutting and pasting necessary, b) not nearly as exciting as starting a whole new story, and c) really not suited to NaNo.

I have a serious case of general blargh, too, inspired by lack of sunlight and illness and pre-election stress and a whole host of other things, which isn’t helping. I’m not even really inspired to knit or crochet or anything, but I want to be creative. Creative feels good. It’s just that creative is so far from where my brain is right now that it’s really hard.

I also never really had a good, solid plot to begin with for EGE. So I could totally scrap what I’ve got (the exile part, that is) and just start over, except…I have no idea for a better plot.

Godsdamnit all, I used to be creative. I used to have ideas exploding out of my brain and my fingertips. I used to be able to sink into writing and just let the world overtake me. And I love Cat. She is an awesome person in an unusual situation. I just have no idea what to do with her.

Sigh. I need help. Like, majorly, HALP. Or I won’t even make 5k this month, let alone 50k.

 

Can’t Win for Losing

Somehow, it seems, every creative outlet in my life is determined to thwart me.

The collected banes of my existence.

The book I’m reading just Does. Not. Hold. My. Interest. I had high hopes for it – Vikings and Welshmen? Referencing both the Eddas and the Mabinogion? And by a renowned fantasy author? Sure to be a hit. Admittedly I’m only so-so on the Norse, but I adore Wales/Cymru/the Mabinogion/Things Welsh. And yet. And yet. I’m bored. Pryderi help me, I’m so bored. I’m halfway through and I’m not really sure what the plot is, other than various countries have been at war in the past, and maybe some of them are headed towards it again? Also some frankly disturbing depictions of sex, none of it strictly consensual…well, what’s-his-face did just make out with the faerie chick, does that count? Still, if a book has failed to impress me in the first 240 pages, I think I am justified in setting it aside. Even though it frankly hurts me physically to leave a book unfinished…I’m getting irrational desires to destroy this one. Violently.

Then there’s the socks. And the other ones. The brown ones have been hanging around for nearly a year. I finally managed to get some momentum going on them again…only to realize I’d mistakenly knit about 70 rounds with the wrong sized needles. A-frogging I went, but I’m too grumpy to work on them right now. This is supposed to be my first design, but I hate it so much at this point I’m seriously tempted to scrub it. Except I have to finish this pair because I’ve knit 70% of a sock and I’m not losing that much work, godsdamnit!

The blue ones are…an experiment, one which in theory causes less of a headache than the aforementioned design. Except I’m having issues with the heel shaping…issues which are exacerbated by my extremely weird foot shape. So I seem to be producing something that will fit neither my feet nor any normal feet. And all of the frogging and re-knitting has made a) me exceptionally cranky and b) the yarn crunchy and in dire need of some rehab.

Then there’s the Starghan. It had been progressing merrily, but as the circumference increased, it became harder and harder to ignore the fact that I was knitting, not a flat disk, but a hyperplane. Apparently increasing 10 st every other round is too much. It was turning ruffly. So, despite the fact that I’d already knit a good 300 yards or so…I ripped it all out. ALL OF IT. The yarn is currently drying from a bout of rehab, and I’ve cast on again with the yarn I hadn’t yet included (to be fair, this is a blanket, so I was only about 5% done with it. Still, 5% of a blanket is a lot of work.)

And then there’s the novel. Oh, the novel. I’ve been going back and adding scenes and reworking scens and strengthening the plot, etc. Only now that we’ve gotten to the actual exile bit (i.e. the last 80% of the book) it feels childish and doesn’t fit with the new-and-improved beginning and I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. (Mitu, expect a call tomorrow evening. I tried bouncing ideas off of M. but she was on painkillers and doesn’t know the story well enough.)

AND THEN I HAD TO BATTLE MY CAT AND REASSERT MY DOMINANCE. I swear to every god ever invented, and probably a few that haven’t been yet, THE WORLD IS OUT TO GET ME.

On that note, I’m going to rustle up some chocolate and resume work on my (now pitifully small) Starghan.

I offer this post in tribute to the Gods of Frogging. I hope my many frustrations make a pleasing offering, and that They will reserve their attentions from me for a long while to come.

 

SAVE SEYMOUR

And who, you may ask, is Seymour? This is Seymour:

Click for image source and more adorable images!

Actually, this is a picture I found while looking for a picture of an adorable young steampunk boy. His name is not actually Seymour. But I needed an adorable young steampunk boy to make Mitu feel guilty, so for today we’re going to call him Seymour Pigeon.

Yes, Seymour Pigeon. Seymour Pigeon is a character in Mitu‘s novel. I had a hand in his creation, although to be perfectly honest I can’t remember exactly how Seymour Pigeon came to be* a stowaway on the airship upon which Mitu’s protagonists were traveling.

Anyway, Mitu is not a fan of Seymour. I made her put him into the story, but she wants to write him out. Only now she’s discovered that will be difficult since Seymour does actually serve a purpose in one scene.

Now, I can sympathize. Mitu is dealing with the common problem of OH MY WALLABIES THE RANDOM CHARACTERS THEY JUST KEEP SHOWING UP. I’m dealing with this problem, too, though in my case I’m writing a series so maybe these characters will end up being important down the road. But Mitu’s appears to be a one-off, and she’s a bit frustrated with THE RANDOM CHARACTERS THEY JUST KEEP SHOWING UP.

I keep telling her, well, if you’ve got these random characters, use them. Need a random extra body in the next scene? Use Seymour! Need an excuse for character A to stay behind when the rest of the group goes off? Oh noes, Seymour is sick! Need a plot twist to transport them to another continent? Fortunately, Seymour is a magic-user, and since we’ve established he has whooping cough**, he can cough and lose control of his abilities and hey-presto-POOF they’ve traveled to the other continent!

Now, since I helped bring Seymour into being, obviously I’m a little biased. But I still believe Seymour Pigeon deserves to live! So I am calling on you, dear readers (hi FBI!), to help me! SAVE SEYMOUR PIGEON!!!! SAVE SEYMOUR PIGEON!!!!! Leave a comment or spam Mitu or do something similarly silly and help me SAVE SEYMOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

—–

Meanwhile, I’m in the midst of my own minor character crisis. As in, they were eating lunch and Cat’s abuela was speaking in Spanish to irritate Cat’s mother and suddenly Cat’s mother is saying it’s rude to speak Spanish in front of those who don’t speak it and suddenly they’re eating lunch with a hippie and his three children from the Eastern part of Canada and they have names like Sun-through-Clouds and Sage and Snow Hare except the dad’s name is Kevin and his first wife died and Snow Hare is his child by his second marriage and she’s half African oh and she’s deaf because of course she is and WHERE DID YOU PEOPLE COME FROM AND WHY DO I KNOW ALL OF THIS ABOUT YOU???

So, Mitu, I really do feel your pain. Sweet Mother of the Eternal Flaming Hedgehog, do I feel your pain. I am never going to finish this damn thing. I WILL FINISH THIS DAMN THING IF IT KILLS ME. At least Sage has some minor plot significance…and maybe Cat will actually make it back to Earth a few books down the line and I can use the characters again.

*Writers, let this be a lesson: when brainstorming, always use a condom. Otherwise you may end up with a little bundle of novelling joy. 

**We haven’t.

 

Camp NaNo11: Agua Intro

Wrote a new intro as part of my ‘finish up the Monkey Draft’ effort this month. Thought I’d share and see what y’all think. If you picked up a book and this was the first page, would you want to keep reading?

—–

The thing I always miss about Earth is the water.

That’s usually the first thing anybody asks when they find out I’m a Lithie, so I thought I’d just get that out of the way to start with. Cat Tecuatl, Earthling Extraordinaire, misses water.

There’s water on space stations, of course, confined to the plumbing. Other planets have lakes and rivers and vast stretches of ocean teaming with creatures, great and small. But somehow it isn’t the same; even Isala, with oceans over ninety-six percent of its surface area, can’t compare to the Mar de Cortés.

I suppose there’s an added bit of irony there. I grew up in Uto-Azteca, an arid province in the south-center-west of North America. We lived in Albequerque, which is 600 kilometers from the Sea of Cortés and 900 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico. Starting when I was eleven, I lived at a school in Chihuahua which was a little closer- maybe 400 and 700 kilometers, respectively- but it’s not like I was living on a Pacific island or something.

I’m a desert girl at heart, or at least as much as heart as anyone can be these days when everybody lives in environments which are at least semi-artificial. I don’t get claustrophobic living in a tin can space station, though I do sometimes miss the endless stretches of red rock, golden sand, and turquoise sky.

Maybe it was living in the desert that made me love the water so much; nothing more valuable than the one thing you can’t have, right? Even with all the advanced irrigation and water reclamation technologies, I grew up with water rations only slightly more generous than the ones I’ve encountered living on space stations. Thank you, ancestors, for corrupting so much of Earth’s drinkable water supply. Your many-times-great-grandchildren are having a lot of fun with the effects of that particular bit of stupidity.

I was on the swim team at school; we did have swimming pools, although I’m pretty sure the “water” was more Cl₂ than H₂O; we all had to wear breathing filters in the pool room and scrub vigorously after practice. It wasn’t a terribly pleasant experience, but it was a close as I could get, most of the time, to floating in the open ocean.

But nothing, nothing compares to swimming in the ocean. For me, this usually meant el Mar de Cortés– the Sea of Cortez, in between the Baja peninsula and the North American mainland. It was only a two-hour rail trip from my school in Chihuahua to el Mar, as we called it, and I went out there at least every other weekend- more if I could swing it.

Some of my friends are hardcore Spacemonkeys and they talk about spacewalks like they’re a religious experience. “Floating in the Great Sea of the Universe,” they call it. I never needed the Universe; just give me the Big Blue Seas of our Pale Blue Dot. Just a few thousand tons of water on one little planet– is that so much for a girl to ask?

The answer, if you’re wondering, is yes – and no. I didn’t get to keep my lazy Sundays floating in the Pacific. They took my planet away from me, sent me out into the Galaxy and told me never to look back. Sounds like a pretty good trade, right? One lousy planet for the whole Universe.

But I never wanted the Universe. All I wanted was el Mar.

 

NaNo 11: VICTORY!

50,016 words!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ahem. The story is nowhere near over, though I think another 10 or 20k will do it. Oh, great, now I have to make myself keep writing?

Ah, who cares, I won! At 10:30 on Nov 30, but I still did it! I should probably go eat some dinner now…this is the problem with sleeping late, then working, then going to an evening class; you don’t get to start writing until four hours before the FINAL DEADLINE OF DEADLINEY DEATHNESS. Which is totally a thing. Which I may or may not have just made up on the spot.

Anywho. I’m kind of sad because my novel is not finished; that would feel like so much more of an accomplishment. Still, 50k! 50k! 50k!

Okay, food, and book, and sleep. It’s not like I have to get up at 7 AM tomorrow to go talk physics with high schoolers or anything…

 

Three really excellent ways to loose steam at the end of NaNo

1. Experience a three-way collision of hormones, depression, and the severe lack of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere in late November
2. Mourn the departure of your partner-in-crime/friendly writing nemesis/personal novelling motivator
3. Begin reading your writing idol’s newest book, and realize you could never write anything nearly that good

Last year, I made it to 43k, then had a (non-NaNo-related) mental breakdown on the 28th and didn’t write any more. I am DETERMINED to make it this year, and I’m at 46.5k, but considering it’s 11:30 and I have written precisely zero words today…tomorrow may be interesting. In related news, the theme of the week has been “it’s probably a bad sign when you’re counting the days to your next therapy session.” Oh, chronic depression, how I adore you. OH WAIT. NO I DON’T.

So yeah. Limping along here, but I WILL make it to the end. I WILL.

And congrats to Mitu for passing 50k today!

 

NaNo 11: I think my characters are high.

Heading into the home stretch now, and the insanity increases in direct proportion to the number of words I have written each day. Despite a few serious setbacks (including several days on which I wrote nothing at all), I think I’m on track to finally finish.

Having Mitu here over Thanksgiving has been a GREAT help, as we egg each other on. She’s going to beat me because I get tired of writing much faster than she does…but then, she gets distracted much more easily than I do, so maybe it will balance out. At any rate, I passed 39k today, which makes me less than 3k behind! It also means I wrote more than 3k today…and the hysteria is rising.

At one point, I looked at the last sentence I had written. It was as follows:

“I am the pumpkin pirate!”

…Yeah. It was at that point that I turned to Mitu and said, in a hopeless sort of tone, “I think my characters are high.” Then again, Mohinder is prone to ridiculous analogies, so I suppose the declaration wasn’t too out of character, but it certainly made me question MY sanity, if not his.

In other news, I may or may not have taken a 4 AM trip to the ER a few nights ago, and Mitu may or may not have broken our internet. And there may or may not have been an incident with my grandmother and the gravy boat. Unnecessary excitement aside, it’s been great having Mitu here, and I’m sad she will be leaving soon :,(

Now, sleep or NaNo? Sleep or NaNo? Ooh, or television…

Have some wallabies. Because they characterize the general ridonkulousness of the past few days.

 

I’m on a Horse!

…or I was, for about ten minutes earlier today. Today was a good day. So was yesterday, in fact. This, coming from an avowed introvert and near-hermit. Will wonders never cease?

Actually, the past two days are really evidence of why I should force myself out of the house more. Yesterday I had dinner with my co-workers, then spent the evening drinking beer and watching TV, and having slightly hysterical discussions of clam chowder and lab monkeys with M. Today I went out into the country with one of my coworkers. One of the teachers we work with had invited the senior AVID class to her farm, and since we work with the seniors, we were invited too.

Normally the prospect of hours spent socializing makes me want to run and hide. This one did, too, but I made myself go anyway, and I’m really glad I did.

I’ve been feeling down lately, mostly due to my lack of a peer group. Even at work, I was focusing more on the fact that my fellow tutors are all still students than the fact that they are (mostly all) interested in teaching math and science. But over the past two days, I’ve had some really fantastic conversations with them, especially E., and I realize–they are my peers. Not that I was thinking I was somehow ‘better’ than them or they were ‘better’ than me; I was just focusing on the fact that we were in different places in our lives.

But we’re not, so much. We’re in our early 20s, trying to get experience and figure out careers and what we want to do with our lives and which state to get our certification in to maximize our employability. We can share anecdotes about being students or work or relationships. Then the conversation may shift to math pedagogy or China’s attempt to standardize their public education, and we can have a lively, intellectual discussion about that.

Of course, all this socializing has left me exhausted, but it’s a happy exhausted. It was great to see the kids in a different setting, too. (I really need to stop calling them kids–I’m only 5 years older than them…) Playing Uno and watching them rag on each other while playing pool was a lot of fun. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the fact that this particular student never completes assignments, or participates in class, or whatever. But then I see them asking questions about horses and playing with my supervisor’s 5-year-old son, and I get a chance to banter with them over dinner and they invite me to play cards, and I see them in a whole new light.

These are fantastic kids. Sometimes I let a bad day or week of tutorial push that out of my mind, so it’s nice to be reminded why we do this. We do this because these are great kids and great people with potential and drive, who could go on to be amazing members of society. They deserve every opportunity to succeed, and it is a wonderful thing to be able to assist them in some small way.

Also, yay horsies! I never went through the ‘little girls love horses!’ phase, and consequently had never been on a horse before today. It was fun, even if I was painfully reminded of just how extremely bony my behind is…

The kids students got to see another side of me, too. In order to defend myself from the onslaught of hyper teenagers, I found a pad of paper and a pen and started doodling while watching them play pool. I got many complements on my drawing, and many expressions of surprise.

S. insists that I need to pursue a career in fashion design. It’s not a career path I’m seriously interested in, but it’s nice that he sees me doing something I enjoy and have at least some ability for, and his instinct is to encourage me. It’s a sign that the AVID program is doing some good. A lot of our students come from life situations where the message has always been, ‘you can’t do that; you won’t be good enough.’ But four years of constantly being told, ‘you can do this, if you’re willing to work for it’ has changed their outlook. And that is a very good thing.

Incedentaly, I was doodling my NaNo characters. Here is Cat and her love interest, David. Cat is wearing her uniform for Noether Academy; David is a year older at the CASSCorps Academy on Noether, so he has a different uniform. They’re not very fond of each other at first…

Of course, the way things are going, they’ll still hate each other by the end of the novel. Because I am incapable of doing anything short and simple, and this must be a series! Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall…

Colors, because colors are pretty and blue pen is less so:
David: Caucasian, blonde-brown hair, blue-green eyes. Dark green/white jacket and pants over pale gray bodysuit.
Cat: Fair-skinned Hispanic, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Dark brown jacket, dark brown/beige plaid skirt over pale gray bodysuit.

Of course I haven’t written anything for about 48 hours since I’ve being all sociable, and I’m too exhausted to write tonight. (kindly ignore the fact that this blog post is nearly 1000 words) So I’m going to have to scramble to get caught up, but if I can bang out 3k tomorrow and the next day, that will go a long way towards getting me back on track.

 

NaNo 11: Paula Abdul Abducted my Wallaby!

…Okay, she didn’t, really. But I’m finally starting to get back on track with my novel, lack of a plot aside. And the plot isn’t completely nonexistent…it’s just very, very sketchy. Anyway, I managed to bang out about 2700 words today–go me! Why is it I seem to write more on the days when I work than the days I have off?

This first draft is mostly pig poop (I say in homage to the story problem my ex-physics teacher gave his class when I went to visit them yesterday…oh Mr. G, I miss you…) but that’s actually okay. If I can just actually get a completed draft, beginning, middle, and end, then I can edit the bejeezus out of this thing later.

And man, is it going to need it…Cat’s character still isn’t well-defined, and Karen oscillates between motherly and robotic. Which works in a strange way for her, but I’m still not entirely sure what’s happening with Cat’s relationship with her new guardian, or with much of anything or anybody at this point. I’ve introduced most of the important characters by now, at least, though I haven’t gotten to Rebecca/Tomoe/Naima. And Day was supposed to be the Mean Girl antagonist but is proving much less bitchy than I thought she would.

…none of which makes any sense to anybody but me. Wheeeeee!!

In regards to the title, as per Mitu’s suggestion, I have introduced a wallaby–a blind wallaby in a paper bag, in fact–though he is at this point entirely metaphorical. I will try to stick him in wherever I can, though. And Paula Abdul…oh, there’s a long story there, but basically what it boils down to is the fact that the Dare Machine dared me to incorporate the next song I heard into my novel. What the Dare Machine didn’t know was that I’ve been listening to “Straight Up” on a repeating loop for at least five of the past twenty-four hours…and so Day has an inexplicable love of 500-year-old pop music. BECAUSE I SAID SO.

Oh, hell, none of this makes sense anymore. I’m going to go watch B5 and attempt to rescue my brain from wherever NaNo has hidden it.

 

NaNo 11: I knew this was a bad idea

Sigh.

It took me a grand total of 3 days and 4800 words to lose inspiration for my novel. I knew this was going to happen eventually because A) duh and B) I still don’t really have a plot…but I was hoping that as I started writing and doing intro and suchlike that enough of the world would emerge that the obvious conflict would smack me in the face and say, ‘here I am! I’m your plot! Right here!”

Obviously this was a very silly hope. I knew NaNo was going to be harder this year than last (when I only made it to 43k, anyhow) because my idea wasn’t as solid and I wasn’t going to have constant contact with Mitu and my ex to engage my competitive spirit. And I don’t get to sit next to Mitu furiously typing and exchanging bizarre questions about the vocal capabilities of heavenly swans until November 23, which is just too far away.

Mitu, come here, I need you to make the writer’s block go away!

But man, I was not expecting to get bored with my own characters after only three days. Sigh. The plot is still hiding from me. I know it has something to do with telepaths–if you read my blurb, that’s why my protagonist finds herself exiled from Earth–but I don’t know what, exactly.

The other problem is that I find the whole idea of telepaths very…trite. Which is strange, because I’ve read a lot of sci fi with some form of telepathy (Grimspace, Stardoc, Enchantress from the Stars, Gabriel’s Ghost, anything in the Liaden Universe…) and enjoyed it very much. I suppose that is part of the problem; I’m well aware that telepathy is a classic sci fi trope. That doesn’t mean I can’t use it–many tropes can be quite enjoyable if done well, or done in a new and creative way–but it does make me wary.

On the other hand, telepathy seems like the kind of thing that would appeal to the Twilight set (ack, yuck, ptooie!) who are part of my intended audience (I’m so ashamed).

So I have to go with the telepathy. But I’ve been very resistant to it thus far, and I don’t see Cat as being a very strong telepath. There are several reasons for this–one, she’s just not; two, it would give her access to more knowledge than I want her to have; three, it makes it harder for the reader to identify with her. Cat is far from ordinary, but if she becomes too extraordinary for the reader to put her/himself in Cat’s shoes, or even to feel like she is their friend.

The idea I’m toying with thus far is that Cat is a weak telepath. She can sometimes make contact with minds similar to hers–minds which, for whatever reason, broadcast on close to the same wavelength. So she has better luck with people who are closely related to her by blood, or with random individuals who happen to ‘match’ her well.  (One of whom will probably be the love interest, because duh. Also, if it works for Jax/March and Miri/Val Con, it works for Cat/NamelessAttractiveTeenageBoy.)

Honestly, I just don’t see telepathy affecting Cat that much. She’d rather ignore it, being an Earther, and for the most part she can because her abilities are so low-level that she doesn’t even really have to bother with mental shields in a crowd.

Which could lead to conflict eventually–she’s been ignoring her abilities as much as possible, but they do get stronger as she ages, and eventually she has to deal with them. But that doesn’t give me a lot to work with in the meantime…

Eff it all, I’m going to watch B5 and eat ice cream and crochet. Maybe inspiration will strike mid-granny-square.