Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 76

Word counts

If I count blog posts, book reviews, a thing I wrote to a friend, AND story words, I easily broke 2000 words yesterday. If I just count story words, it was more like 200. Eep.

But I had a ridiculously nice day and that counts for something, too. I had a very productive morning, a great yoga class, bought veggies at the farmer’s market, went grocery shopping, made chicken soup, read a JD Robb, had a lovely time swimming and playing with the dogs — with the thought that it was only going to be sunny for twenty minutes so I HAD to take advantage even though I needed to write, but then when it stayed sunny, I stayed swimming… Yeah. It was a little summer vacation day in November. And bad me that I didn’t get much story writing done, but good me that I took the opportunity to savor the moment.

Of course, if I don’t stop savoring moments, I’m going to wind up broke and homeless and hungry and it will be hard to savor that, but I’m not going to bother with regrets or worry today. Not when I could be spending my time more productively.

I think there was more I was going to write about — maybe my indecision about posting book reviews to Goodreads? I’m going through a little internal debate about whether I want to keep my book reviews with my blog and/or create a book review blog, because I’m not sure I want them to be as public as they are on Goodreads. Not that a blog’s not public, but I write my book reviews mostly so I can remember what I thought about a book and so that I can keep track of my reading, not because I think they’re useful for other people. But as I discovered last year, in the year of many blogs, it’s sort of a pain to have a lot of blogs — I wind up not writing anywhere and getting topics mixed up and feeling like it’s more effort than it’s worth. I think I use Goodreads mostly because it’s so easy to find the book name and information. In other words, because I’m lazy. Anyway, I’ve got a mental debate going on with that. Oh, yeah, and some people think authors aren’t supposed to write book reviews, which is sort of a problem, too. Or at least it adds to the mental debate.

Regardless, yesterday I wrote three or four book reviews on Goodreads, instead of working on my own story, which was probably not the best use of my time, but I wanted to remember that I’d read those books and yes, I would have forgotten. It put my total of books read and recorded on Goodreads over 100 for the year, which I found somehow oddly gratifying. It reminded me of 6th grade, when we got popcorn parties when the class as a whole read 500 books, which was the only time in my childhood when my peers seemed to approve of my reading. I won’t give myself a popcorn party, though, since popcorn is definitely not on my approved foods list.

I got the feedback from the sessions I did at FWA yesterday. Despite the number of presentations I’ve given in my life, it was the first time I’ve gotten feedback from the official feedback type forms, which was kind of cool. Ahead of time, I suspected that feedback would be a lot like reviews — you can’t please all the people all the time, your mileage may vary, take them with a grain of salt, etc. But I was surprised at how touched I was by the nice comments. I think it was because I was using my real name. They just felt much more personal then reviews do. It made me think that I’d like to publish a book under my real name someday, but then I realized that meaner comments would also feel more personal so maybe not.

And somehow I have wasted far more time than I intended to thinking about Goodreads and FWA evaluations so its time to move on. Today’s goal: words, words, words, of course. But this time, story words, I hope!

NaJoMo

This month, in addition to being National Novel Writing Month, is also National Journal Writing Month, which I didn’t know until Carol mentioned it in the comments. And actually, when I went to look it up, I discovered that the National Journal Writing site wanted October to be the month; the National Blogging Post Month — aka NaBloPoMo — are using November. Whatever. Some people are writing or posting a journal/blog post every month and I didn’t know that before, but now that I do — yay, that’s a bandwagon I can jump on. So in addition to trying to make National Novel Writing Month numbers this month, I’m going to try to post a blog post every day. I suspect the latter will be easier than the former.

Yesterday, I finished the day with 1085 words. I’m okay with that. I’m slightly less okay with the fact that they were words for the same chapter that I’d written the previous day. I just couldn’t not delete. The previous day’s words… they didn’t work. It was lots of disjointed conversation, much of which could have carried the dialogue tag “explained”. The dialogue guy at the Florida Writer’s Association Conference suggested that all dialogue that should use “explained” as its verb be rethought and yeah, I rethought. My chapter had potential for energy, but it lost all that energy in discussions that related to world-building. Who spoke in what language, who understood what language, what different types of ghosts there were… yawn.

In context, the loss of energy was very literal, if opposite in its effects. Energetic ghosts suck the warmth out of the air. That would mean that they slow down the molecules in the air. My ghosts were not effectively stealing the warmth, but they were definitely slowing down the action. In yesterday’s chapter, they did a much better job of making it cold, and without slowing everything down. (I’m amused by the different meanings/uses of energy, but I suspect I’m not making sense here — sorry!)

Word count wise, I decided not to freak myself out. I’m including the words from both days in my count. I wrote them and I could include them in one long terrible scene for the NaNo word count purposes without feeling any sense of dishonesty, if I wasn’t worried about my novel being awful. It does mean that I’m already behind. Not going to worry about that, though. There’s plenty of time to catch up and maybe I’ll find the current today and have it whisk me along.

Meanwhile, it turns out that October 30th was not the last swim day of the year. Yesterday, in the peak of my frustration, unable to figure out how to fix the scene, I went outside, decided it was warm enough, and spent a very pleasant, very lovely hour or so floating in the pool. I am fairly sure I’ve never swum in November before but it was exceedingly nice. I’m grateful for the day.

In the evening, I went and hung out with my niece at the library. We went to Denny’s for dinner and Denny’s has added gluten-free indicators to its menu. I was so pleased that I ate gluten-free french fries with ketchup, disregarding the fact that nightshades cause joint inflammation which cause pain. Last night, when I was trying to sleep and my hands were throbbing, I thought it was still worth it, but this morning, when I tried to get out of bed, wow, not so much. Joint pain was at “not sure I can walk right now” levels and even as I type, part of me is aware of how much I hurt. It feels like I did an intense workout yesterday, but since I didn’t, I’m blaming the french fries. Alas. But I mostly write this as a reminder to myself — don’t be stupid. Potatoes aren’t worth it.

Today’s goals: words, words, words. Getting out of this chapter and back to Noah’s POV. Going to yoga if I can loosen up enough that I think it won’t be more pain than it’s worth. Walking the dogs and making my bed and eating only AIP-approved foods. All good goals! I’m hoping for a good day, despite its rocky start. Good luck to my fellow NaNo and NaJo ‘ers — I hope you find the current!

Day 3

Yesterday’s writing was… well, abysmal. Lots of ideas, but I couldn’t put them into any kind of coherent order and I kept going off into weird sidetracks and getting stuck. Imagine being lost in the woods, where every path circles back to the same clearing where you started. Yep, that was my writing yesterday. Seriously, seriously annoying. But I went to evening yoga and it was great. I think evening yoga is just a little bit harder than daytime yoga, and apparently I’m at the place where that feels good. When I got home, I tried to make some order out of the words that I’d written including ruthlessly deleting all the ones that I truly hated. It’s a bad NaNo strategy but it felt great.

I had some shred of story thought in the middle of the night, something about why I’m going wrong, but I can’t quite grab it now. I think it had something to do with kayaking. Like I’m getting caught in the weeds, and I need to remember to steer toward the current? In the middle of the night, it felt profound and revelatory but then I went back to sleep.

I like what I’ve grasped of it, though. Today I’m going to try to steer toward the current. Aiming for 2K words to make up for yesterday’s lack. It can be done!

Morning gloom

My new kitchen cupboards–not so new anymore, it’s been almost a year–are wonderful in many ways, most notably in providing storage galore. But they’re a deep maple color and the longer I live with them, the more I realize that the room feels darker than it used to. On a day like today, when the sky is gray and the air feels heavy with humidity, the kitchen feels like a place to eat gruel and dry toast.

I didn’t, of course. Salad with sadly frozen greens, which I assume provide the same nutritional value, but are decidedly unappealing. I need to remember not to put defrosting food on top of the salad green box — it never turns out well. Anyway, I’m trying to think of ways in which I could brighten my kitchen, without doing anything over-dramatic, like painting the cupboards. Maybe painting the walls? They’re white at the moment, but maybe if they were a sunnier color, maybe a pastel yellow? I could put higher watt bulbs in the light fixtures, I suppose, but I don’t want to add glare, I just want to make the room feel cheerful. I should check Pinterest and see what people have filed under cheerful kitchens.

I won’t be making changes today, though. Yesterday, I counted my word count as 1930 words. That was true, but it ignored the fact that I also deleted a bunch of words from Saturday, so my overall word count was not nearly so high. Still, NaNo started yesterday, so I figured I should treat it as a blank slate. Along the way of my writing yesterday, I started making a list of all the revisions that I’m going to need to make in Grace as a result of words that I’m writing now. It got frighteningly long quite quickly, but that’s okay. Yesterday’s chapter, which was in Dillon’s voice, felt like I was finally hitting that place where the characters start to act on their own initiative and the words start to spill out. It’s worth all the revisions if it helps me find the flow again. Of course, that’s easy to say today because I have no intention of starting these revisions until much, much later, but so it goes.

I don’t think I have, at this point in my writing journey anyway, stock characters the way prolific authors often do, but the character who was stealing the stage yesterday reminded me of Rachel from A Gift of Thought. She’s definitely not Rachel — she is much, much angrier — but I didn’t know this character mattered at all. For a long way in the story, she was just “crying girl” but lately she’s been fighting for space. A bunch of the revisions will belong to her, because it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that she’s important and that she should have been introduced a lot earlier. I like the way that’s unfolding. Inspiration, not just me making stuff up? But I really hope to finish this book someday, so I’d better get back to it!

If you’re doing NaNo, good luck today. More words!

Bacon & Eggs

I ate bacon & eggs for breakfast, followed by all the gluten-free chocolate in the house. That was probably a mistake. My logic was that I ought to get rid of it and I was never going to have the willpower to throw it out, so I might as well just finish it off quickly, but I actually do feel queasy now. For the last four days, though, I’ve been using Halloween as an excuse to eat stuff I shouldn’t eat — rice and potato starch, sugar and eggs, milk and delicious, delicious pumpkin spice lattes. At least being done with the chocolate means I won’t have temptation lurking in my kitchen anymore. I might decide to have one more pumpkin spice latte, later, just because if I’m already in the midst of a food reaction, I might as well enjoy my suffering. That is, of course, the reason I’ll spend the next five days feeling crappy, but done is done.

I felt really sad this morning. I don’t think I’ve ever spent Halloween alone before. It’s not as if its a particularly special holiday but there are times when I notice my solitude more than others and yesterday was definitely a peak solitude day. Not helped by the fact that my words weren’t going well. In the early morning, still half asleep, I finally figured out that I should draft out everything that I need to have take place in the conversation I’m writing and then organize it and then write it, because everything I wrote yesterday was just a chaotic mess. I did that first thing this morning, then started writing again, and if I don’t worry about the fact that I deleted a bunch of yesterday’s words, then I was at 400 words written today before 7AM. Except 7AM was actually 6AM, and it turned out that I was up obsessing at 4:30 instead of 5:30, and I’m not sure why that’s so much worse, but it is.

I am taking NaNoWriMo as permission to write run-on sentences apparently.

Word count for the day, as of this moment, including blog post, organizational materials, and actual story: 1136. I should view this as a great start, but it’s not yet 10AM and all I really want is to go back to bed. Apparently the caffeine from all that chocolate is not enough to keep me awake.

Swimming and yoga

It’s probably global warming and I should probably feel bad about the damage we’re doing to the planet and how we’re all going to die in droughts and super-storms in the next hundred years — actually I do feel bad about that — but it doesn’t prevent me from appreciating the fact that yesterday was such a lovely day that I stuck my feet in the pool. And the water was cool, but not so cold I couldn’t at least put my bathing suit on and maybe go in a little deeper. And once partway in, it was so nice to have the sun on my shoulders and so fun to have the dogs running around happily, that yeah, I really went swimming. Head under, laps back and forth, aimless floating, the whole thing. It was amazingly nice and not really cold at all. October 30th — it’s the latest I’ve gone swimming by probably at least a month. And so worth it. A couple times I’ve tried off-season swimming and it’s been a brisk dip, a refreshing chill, scurry to dry off, kind of thing, but this was not that. This was glorious appreciation of golden warmth and luxurious floating.

In the evening, I was out and — long story short, because I don’t have a lot of time — I was upset and sad, and I realized that I was wearing yoga-appropriate clothes and that 7PM yoga would start in about twenty minutes. So I went to evening yoga.

I cried. I cried so much that I had to get up and get a cloth to wipe my face because I was going to start choking on my snot. Many tears. It felt so incredibly healthy. Lisa, the yoga teacher that I personally think has a direct and two-way line to God in her head (or maybe her heart?), warned us at the beginning of class that it was Friday and sometimes the music on Friday was a little freaky, and then class started. The first song in reminded me of something from the Internet, specifically one of the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos. I think it might have been Trip the Light, but I could be wrong about that. But I was not really listening, it was background music, and I was stretching and trying to be in the moment.

But the next song was one that slowly made me think of my mom. I didn’t recognize it at first, but it started getting more and more of my attention, until I realized that it was Judy Collins and that my mom used to play it on the piano. I probably hadn’t heard it since then. And then I heard a few more of the words and realized it was Rainbow Connection. My mom and rainbows have a profound connection to me and to have that song, playing at that moment, when I was that mood, after that week… the tears started gushing.

Stretch, stretch, more yoga, and then the song was John Mayer with “Daughters” and eventually Led Zeppelin and “Stairway to Heaven.” I swear it felt my mother wrote the playlist to tell me she was with me and that I wasn’t alone. And yes, I’m all weepy again, but it isn’t bad crying. It was music that made me feel not just less alone, but loved.

Writing yesterday — well, I broke 1K in total words, but story words was probably closer to 900 total. But it was good work and a good day, and today will be even better. Much fun stuff is happening in my story. I have a character, Sophia, who is just taking over in really unexpected ways. She was supposed to be just a crying girl, but apparently she’s quite stubborn now that she’s stopped crying.

Goal for today: words. Lots of them!

Seven minute blog post

Reminder to self: don’t read reviews. I know this and then I forget it. Back in May, I made a version of A Lonely Magic with fewer swear words and it’s the one that’s posted on Amazon now. I checked Author Central today, because I like to check the review count now and then, and the top review was complaining about the swear words in A Lonely Magic. Perfectly nicely, and I don’t mean to complain about the review itself. I appreciate everyone who bothers to write reviews. Certainly the fact that Wedding Guests only has five reviews is far more demoralizing than any one-star ever written.

But I thought, well, okay, I could make her or him a version of ALM with no swear words whatsoever and I opened up the file and started deleting swear words. And then I reached one where there is simply no substitute. There is no other word that could possibly be substituted for “fuck” and convey the same meaning and tone. So I stopped myself and thought, “What am I doing?” At a certain point, Fen’s voice is just gone. She becomes just another bland heroine. And why? The world is filled with objectionable words that Fen doesn’t use–racist terms and names for body parts and derogatory words for people with disabilities. At this point, the story contains 35 uses of fuck, 51 uses of shit, 50 uses of damn, and 76 uses of hell. 212 swear words out of 70,000+ words. If that’s really a problem, then okay, it’s a problem, and I need to let those readers go.

And the good thing about reaching that “fuck” that was unreplaceable was that I also realized that I was making a huge mistake. I don’t want the readers who can’t handle 212 swear words, because Fen’s sexual history, past and present, should not be right for those readers. I fully intend to take Fen to a place where sex is important to her, but she’s starting in a place where she shrugs off casual sex. And yes, I think that’s because she’s been damaged by her past and I want her to get to a (IMO) healthier place where she believes in love, but she’s not there now. And a reader who can’t handle fuck should also not be reading about a heroine who thinks sex is trivial. Or at least I don’t think so. Those swear words are protection for readers who should stay idealistic. Not all readers are the right readers, and I’m not going to change ALM to appeal to everyone, because not everyone should be reading it.

Oops, and my time is up, I need to be leaving the house ten minutes ago. Eleven minutes ago! Sorry, Lynda.

But great writing yesterday, over 2000 words, and I’m planning on the same for today. Many, many words!

Dialogue and processing

My dialogue experiment was pretty much a failure, because as soon as I started writing, I slipped into Grace’s POV and there I stayed. However, today, I am almost positive that I’m going to write a scene from Dillon’s POV (if I finish up the Grace scene) and I’m looking forward to that to a surprising degree. I like Dillon and his voice feels all bubbly in my brain, like he’s been restraining himself but is ever-so-ready to talk now. We’ll see what happens later, I guess.

I’ve also decided to go back — not yet, but when I’m done with my first draft — and give Rose a POV scene at the beginning. I spent months working on that scene before I decided to throw it out, but with my new freewheeling POV ideas, I want to add it back. It gives me a chance to introduce the ghosts so that the reader isn’t always trying to figure out who they are. I think I’ll wind up needing to completely rewrite it from what I had before, and it will still be the same struggle — too many characters! — but that’s okay.

The big decision in relation to that scene that I was incapable of making before is that it might be Rose’s only POV scene. I kept getting stuck because I felt like the POV characters had to be the main characters of the book, and if I gave Rose a POV scene, then she should have POV scenes throughout. That made the story feel unbalanced to me, because Noah and Grace were getting sidelined to the ghosts. My new resolve to do whatever works for me is very freeing.

This morning when I was ready to sit down to breakfast (mixed greens with white, red, and purple radishes, plus cucumber, kalamata olives, half an avocado, and roast beef — the radishes were exciting), I wanted to read, and I knew exactly what I wanted to read, it was that book I hadn’t finished. And then I woke up a little more and realized that I actually hadn’t finished writing the book I wanted to read. It was a great feeling, though. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve had that craving to know how my own story turns out.

Word count yesterday was 1496 on the story, plus 596 on a blog post. And yes, I’m counting blog posts in my word counts, because they help me get my fingers moving. Goal for today: to beat yesterday’s story word count. To reach NaNo numbers (and yes, I know it hasn’t started yet), the minimum daily goal is 1666. If I reach that today, it’ll be the first time since February 2014 that I’ve done so. But I can do it. No self-doubt allowed.

My rumination exercise has been working remarkably well. Whenever I catch myself drifting into thoughts of the past (not just of the Apple interviews, but of all the things that the interviews brought up), I stop myself and think, “You’re having a thought about X. What’s the emotion that goes with it? Are you trying to control a feeling?” Half the time I’ve moved on to some other thought before I work the feeling out (so typical of me) but it’s still a really interesting exercise. It feels like I’m actually processing stuff, not just endlessly spinning it around in my head.

I just looked up ‘processing’ because it’s a word we use a lot, but does it have an actual therapeutic meaning? Not according to the dictionary. But I found this at Simply Psychology:

(1) information made available by the environment is processed by a series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, short-term memory);

(2) these processing systems transform or alter the information in systematic ways;

It’s obviously not the right meaning, but it defines processing as an act of altering or transforming information. Yes, that’s what happens when I pull back from what I’m thinking about and consider it as a thought that my brain is giving me for a reason and then try to decipher the reason. The act of trying to understand my thought transforms it. It stops being a trap that I can’t get out of and starts being a signal.

Of course, I haven’t really figured out what to do with the signals I’m getting yet, but sometimes it seems sufficient to realize, “oh, yes, I’m sad about this,” and give myself permission to feel sad instead of trying to rewrite history in my head.

Okay, this turned into a long blog post when I actually just meant to write about my dialogue experiment, so time to get back to the real writing. Words, words, more words, but good words, I hope. No, good words, I believe. Time for some optimism!

POV struggles

One of the struggles I’ve had throughout the writing of A Gift of Grace is deciding which character’s point-of-view to be in. A lot of the early chapters were written from the ghosts’ points-of-view (Rose and Dillon) but it was making the love story aspect really difficult. I wound up tossing all those scenes, despite some fun stuff and nice writing in them, because I felt like the book should be Noah and Grace’s story, not Rose and Dillon’s story. Now the book alternates between Grace and Noah, absolutely consistently, and point-of-view is maintained rigidly. There is no head-hopping in my story.

That said, at FWA, I listened to Marie Bostwick speak about character creation and listened to her read excerpts from her work. At the end of her session, one of the questions she was asked was about point-of-view and about the fact that she’d shifted points-of-view in the excerpts she was reading without scene breaks or clear divisions. Her response was that yeah, she ignored the rules about point-of-view switches because her readers didn’t care. She said that if you do it well enough, you can get away with anything.

I also read a blog post from Rachel Aaron recently on one of her Writing Wednesdays about choosing POV, and she said:

When I’m deciding on a POV character, my most important considerations are 1) who’s got the most interesting viewpoint, and 2) information control.

(The link on her name leads to the exact post if you want to read more.)

The scene I’m writing today has a lot going on. It should be fun. But by a lot going on, I mean A LOT. Anyone and everyone’s viewpoint might be the most interesting. I had a great line to end the scene with that only worked from Grace’s viewpoint. Then I had the inspiration* to use Dillon’s viewpoint, which I haven’t used before, but hey, if his perspective is the most interesting, why not? Then I realized that some of the emotional impact is probably best from Noah’s point-of-view. Gah! Decisions, decisions.

*I didn’t change that clause to ‘felt inspired’, although I was tempted as soon as I reread, because it is a perfect example of a hidden verb. A hidden verb is when you turn a perfectly good verb, like inspired, into a noun instead, ie inspiration. Hidden verbs should be pulled out of hiding whenever possible!

I still haven’t decided whose point of view to use, but instead I came up with a plan: I’m going to write all the dialogue first. Not descriptions, because those should change based on POV. Noah’s non-native perspective on kayaking in FL should be different than Dillon’s perspective since he hasn’t been able to go kayaking for years, which should be different than Grace’s perspective as someone who goes kayaking every week, so I can’t write those parts until I know whose voice I’m in. But the dialogue, without in-depth tags, should be the same experience for everyone. And once I have that dialogue written — once I know who says what and how — maybe I’ll have a much clearer idea about whose head would be the most fun to be in.

This is, of course, a very anti-NaNoWriMo way to write. It means writing, revising, writing, revising, which is a stupid way to try to get 50,000 words written in a month. But the good news for me is that it’s still October, so they don’t count as NaNo words anyway. Yay!

So yeah, that’s the writing plan for today. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works!

Crazy cat dream

I dreamed last night that I owned a van and a big orange cat. I think maybe I was homeless and living in the van with the cat, but for some reason I needed to leave it alone temporarily. I was worried about it but a mysterious friend said that she’d have her cat take care of it. In the dream, that made perfect sense.

It also made sense that I owned a cat despite being seriously allergic. There is no way that a cat and I could share a van as living space. I would literally die when my airways closed off in my sleep. Dreams are weird.

Back to the dream, I returned to the van to find a tiger guarding my cat, defending it from a cougar. The tiger stood in front of the open van door, huge and orange and sleek, the way that tigers are, and when the cougar — beige and muscular — crouched as if to jump in the van, the tiger did that nonchalant tiger thwack with its front paw, sending the cougar scurrying away.

I was so grateful to the tiger. I was also afraid of it. It was a tiger. In my van! It was huge!! I couldn’t bring myself to get any closer and then all of a sudden, I was standing in the road, and big cats — the tiger, a snow leopard, a lioness, maybe a couple of others (but not the cougar) were all gamboling around with a bunch of little cats, including mine. I was horribly worried that they would get hit by cars and killed and I knew we had to gather them up and get them to safety. But I was also worried that they would kill me. How do you gather up gigantic predators?

And then I woke up.

I had a couple other weird dreams that I wanted to remember, but they’re gone now, lost to the morning routine and the dog walking thoughts and the stupid ruminations that I haven’t quite let go of (even though I’m now reminding myself that I’m having a thought when I catch myself drifting in that direction.) But I didn’t want to forget the tiger. It felt so symbolic, so significant. Definitely one of those dreams where you think “this means something important” but then you’re forced to admit that you have no idea what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

Ooh, another weird dream remembered, or at least a bit of it. Some kind of adventure, Agents of SHIELD style, but it ended when one of the people in the adventure, possibly a Simmons like character, was shot and fell to the ground. Two of the team chased after the shooters, but three of us stopped by the girl. I put my hands over the injury, pressing as hard as I could, knowing how much it must hurt her, but the blood just kept pouring forth. I was calling for help, 911, a doctor, something to stop the bleeding, anything, but the blood just kept coming. It was surprisingly warm, which I suppose is logical but had never really struck me as an idea before (and makes me want to go find a thermometer and see what 98 degree water feels like) and it felt clingy, like it would never come off of what it touched. And I couldn’t stop it. It was no time and endless time and then the blood stopped because it was all out of her. I felt like I had failed and I also felt really angry, like this is not how the story is supposed to go. This character cannot die. This is the wrong direction. These writers suck.

I guess those writers are my subconscious. My subconscious sucks.

It was not a particularly restful night.

***

For future reference for myself, it’s looking very much like the last swimming day of 2015 was October 15. That’s the latest it’s ever been, which is nice after the horribly rainy summer where it was always thundering. But the dogs and I miss it already. Zelda keeps trying to convince me that I want to go in the water and you know, I really don’t, but Bartleby is almost worse. He can’t seem to understand why I only want to sit on the porch instead of taking him swimming. And he is completely opposed to me sitting and writing on the porch. He seems to think that if I’m going to sit there, it is my job to provide him with a lap to sit in and hands to pet him.

Word count yesterday existed. Word count today is definitely going to do the same. NaNoWriMo starts in five days and this year, I’m making it to 50K words. I just wasted twenty minutes looking for a good quote about determination and failing to find one, so here’s my own: one word at a time, one minute at a time, one day at a time, that’s all it takes.