Miss Anna, mystery lover

I am a water scavenger.  I hunt throughout my house and find the opened-but-not-finished bottles my kids got into today.  And I finish them.  They wake up in the morning with no clue what has happened to the bottle they left out yesterday...  They think the water goblins came in again and took them.  MUAHAHAHAHA!

OK, that sounds so much more interesting than it is.  I only said that because I was thirsty and my bottle was empty.  I put it in the recycling bin and found a couple half-finished bottles on the table.  And took them.  Because walking downstairs to the garage to get a brand new one was too hard.

Yes, I said recycle.  You don't?  Earth hater.  Can't talk to you anymore.  (Or something...)

Anyhoo, I was up and discovered an Encyclopedia Brown book on my counter.  Miss Anna (8) has been at it again.  She finished the first one she found in a day and has moved on.  I'm thinking she likes these mystery books and she likes scary stories, so maybe it's time we move her along to some better things.  If Encyclopedia Brown can be devoured in a day's time, maybe she's ready for bigger stuff.  Things written for older audiences.

I debated Nancy Drew a bit, but a boy always comes to save the day in the end, so I'm not so sure I like that idea creeping into my daughter's just-starting-to-notice-boys brain.  She does not need to be saved by some man.  No thanks.

Ideas, anyone?  I really enjoyed Mary Higgens Clark, Agatha Christie, Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, and John Grisham, but I'm trying to remember how old I was when I began reading them.  I'm sure she can read the words and follow the stories, for the most part...  but I may have to read along with her and be sure there are not any scenes little eyes don't need to read.  Hmm.

I'm not one who subscribes to "intended age ranges" on books, I'll put that out there.  If it catches the kid's attention and makes them find a love of reading (and in my daughter's case, writing as well!), I'm all for it.  As long as we're not talking adult material in the hands of a child, of course.  ;)

I do have my limits.

New month, new sales report...

It's always sad, to me, to see the empty screen on my Amazon sales report.  I know it's a new month, but things were looking so pretty over there from last month!  Between all the different things I have up, UK and US sales (still have yet to sell anything in Germany, but that's ok!), I had 107 sales in the month of August.  Not too shabby for little miss no-name, eh?

But, alas, August disappeared and now it's September, and nothing has been purchased since midnight.  So my screen sits sadly blank, and I compulsively refresh to see that first sale come in.  It's pennies per sale, of course, but the point right now is gaining readers, not getting money.  I have an outside job (which I'll be late for if I don't move my fat arse soon!), that pays the bills and gives us the insurance that is so handy to have...  My kids are little destructiod monsters, it seems, and having insurance really helps when they go and give themselves kidney infections or blow up like little balloons because a mosquito found them to be tasty...

Ellipseses are fun.  Ellipses?  Plural of ellipses is ellipses?  Hmm.  (if you are not familiar, that's the three little periods in a row:  ...  I love them so!)

Anyhoo...  Blank screens are sad.

In other news, I'm starting to offer my works as PDF files, sold through Paypal!  So if you don't have a Kindle, want to put it on your computer, or email the file to your ebook of choice, you can now do so!  I made up a couple little quickie paypal buttons, and just need to figure out where to set them up and how to make them all pretty and shiny and stuff.  :)  Keep your eyes peeled.  For now, I have to run or I'll be late.

That job that pays me for being there is kinda handy, and making them angry with me for being late is not such a great idea.  Off I go then!  Happy Thursday!

NaNoWriMo is creeping upon us, slowly...

So, my writery peeps, if you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, I am sad!  National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is the month of November.  You write 1666.66 words per day, or write extra some days to make up for slower other days, for a total of 50,000 words written by the end of the month.  Midnight Nov. 1st, you can start your word count.  It's meant to show you CAN write a novel in a short amount of time.  

Of course, this is just the first draft, and we all know editing takes at least two or three times longer than the first draft.  Which sucks if you get distracted and take forever on the first draft...  but I digress.  The point is, you can prove to yourself how much you really CAN write every day if you put your mind to it.  There is no major awesome thing you win at the end, they won't send you a T-Shirt or a coffee mug or anything in congratulations.  It's just you, patting your own self on your own back, saying, look, I did it!

 <<  See, totally awesome thing to have.  I did it!  The beginning of book 1, The Order of Yuli, the one I'm nearing completion on, was born here.

So!  If you're participating in 2011, do you have your plan?  Do you have a plot, outline, character sketches going, or are you planning to just wing it this year?  I flaked out last year, but I had my reasons...  (Recently reconciling with the estranged spouse, not wanting to take too much time away from family during the up-in-the-air emotional time.  And if I had it to do again, I'd do it the same way.)

Anyway!  So, what's your plan??  Are you going to join me in my crazy writery land?  How do you do such things?

And if you're interested in reading the general idea behind all of this craziness, the lovely person who started NaNo wrote this book.  Check it out!  No Plot?  No Problem!

However, I do find a problem with no plot.  I ended up rambling incessantly (What?!  ME?!) for the first 30k pages without really taking my story anywhere.  Granted, once I figured out what I wanted to do, I have lots of useful things I can work from in those 30k pages...  but a LOT of it will have to go.

If you want other good how-to-write-a-book books, I'd recommend these:  250 Things You Should Know About Writing, and Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey.  They're written by the same guy, and 250 Things is much shorter and more concise, but they're both VERY good.  I'm currently in the midst of the editing section on COAFP, and it's blowing my mind out of the water.  Seriously, I put a lot of thought into what I put on a page, but I've never used spreadsheets before.  Now I'm going to have to start.  It makes sense, I used to do lots of other kinds of writing things out (highschool students and their class schedules so I know who is in what class together, etc)....  but spreadsheets??  Genius!  Even if it means an assload more work.  Ah, well.

Anyway.  If you want to see how crazy this whole idea of spreadsheets can be, Wendig recommended looking up J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter plot spreadsheet.  Holy crap.  She keeps track of every little thing, subplots, month, general theme of each chapter, dream sequences, what's happening with each person during the course of the chapter, how they all intersect, etc.  Seriously amazing.  I knew the books were well planned, and I always wondered if it was planned ahead of time or not...  Anyway, the question with this is...  did she plot it all out before she wrote it, or after, and fixed the things that didn't fit?  Either way, loads of work.  BUT you can absolutely see how well it panned out for her.  Those books really are fantastic reads, and the further into them you get, the better the writing gets.  Rowling is someone to learn from, to be sure.

I leave you with this.  Chew on it for a while.  Wow.

Miss Anna and the ghost story

I was hanging out at a friend's house after work, with the kiddos, and it was getting late.  Anna had a falling out with the little boy there, rushed down the stairs in a fury and demanded we go home.  "Because of him!" She screamed, pointing at the other kid.

I calmed her down, we dealt with the issue that caused the unhappiness, and told her I was not ready to leave yet.  She did not have to go back upstairs, she could stay with the grown ups if she wanted, but I was not going anywhere yet.  She got all flustered and upset, then I offered to find her something to read on my Kindle.

She asked to read one of my stories, so I pulled it up for her.  She read until we left last night, asking periodic questions that impressed my friends, "What does 'subsequently' mean?"...  Mostly, this was impressive because she is 8 and didn't spell it as well, and ask how to say it.  Apparently my answer was also awesome, "As a result of something else happening, something new will happen.  So, you hit your brother and subsequently were sent to your room.  Make sense?"  She nodded and continued on.

She's still not done, but she's spending her free Sunday morning sitting with my Kindle in the living room, trying to finish the story before I abduct the Kindle and head back to work again.

Ah, kids.  What fun!  Also, even if it's a little out of their official reading level, it doesn't mean they won't LOVE it and follow it anyway!  The story she's reading is geared toward high school age, give or take a couple years.

Number Obsessions

Happy Friday, oh, if only it were a really REAL Friday for me.  Alas, I work all weekend.  Not on the words.  Probably not on the words at all, actually, not after this morning.  Work does tend to take over the entire three days of the weekend at the brick and mortar place that pays me regularly and provides insurance for my blow-up-from-bug-bites kid and the occasional random kidney infection.  Oh, insurance how nice you are.  How lovely it would be if you were not a worry...  WishingthiswasCanada says what?

I digress...  Kids go to school today, to Grandma's tonight, while I work tonight and tomorrow morning (yay, close/open!).  This means I have the whole morning/day/until my husband wakes up and gets distracting to get my words OUT!

So, my general goal, of late, has been 1000-3000 words per day.  Yesterday I managed 2100, day before 1800, 1700 before that...  Yeah, I do tend to obsess about the numbers just a WEE little bit.  Sometimes.  Maybe.  (Also, going to start obsessing about regularly posting here, just because.  So get used to it!)

So, let's see if I can hit 3000 words before the hubband wakes up and puts on something lovely and distracting.  You know, something like Big Bang Theory where I find myself guffawing over whimsical ducks and their umbrellas.  No wait, that was yesterday when I nearly fell in the tub...  It was funny when I wasn't falling anymore.

Tubs are slippery.

In Which I Give a Mini Update

Orange juice, check!  Breakfast sandwich from cheap fast food place, check!  Tiny round wanna-be-potato thingies, check!

Ok, I'm up, I'm up!  Stop your nagging!  And the kids DID get to school...  only slightly late.  Nice start to my day, eh?  I'm trying to make up for it with food.

So last night, my assumptions were all proven correct.  I can't drink, not even wine, not even slowly, and get ANY work done.  I had guessed it, but wanted to try it out.  Usually it's my Absolut Citron with Simply Lemonade (Raspberry, please!) and that makes me more fun-drunk than simply laid back.  So last night, I got myself a bottle of Moscato d'Asti from Costco (I love you Costco!), and proceeded with my experiment.

Utter fail.  Nope, can't write.  Was trying to read instead, my new lovely book on writing (because, well, if you can't write, you may as well read about writing, right?  Were there enough "write" sounds in that sentence?  Writey writey write write, right?), Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey....  I had already finished the shorter writing book-thingy by the same most excellent writer dude, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing~  I couldn't read without getting overly tired either.  Damn it.  So I decided to watch a movie instead.  Watch a movie I knew I liked, but had not seen in a while, and pay attention to the STORY behind the visuals.  Let the story take me away...

So I did.  And it was not as awesome a movie as I remember, but I now have a child the age of the one the Main Character lost in an accident, so I got all teary and blubbery anyway.  Ah well, such is life.

Anyway, so the ramble ramble here is all gearing up to why I'm trying to crank out words!  I'm nearing completion on the first draft of a book I've been working on.  I started this one for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, in 2009, and I got to my 50k words and walked away even though it wasn't done.  I'm picking it back up, seeing where it goes, and taking it for a spin.  I'm about 79k words in right now, and have the end mapped out.  Just have to do the leg work!  And then, well, edit it about a gajillion times before I'm willing to let people look at it.  Well, unless you peek at my NaNo page, where I failed hard last year, and read the little excerpt.

So, I'm all quiet-like here, but I promise, I really am working.  ;)  Pinkie swear!

Link to a most brilliant blog posting

This is so me.  It's so brilliantly true, I just can't stand it.  I'm deep within the thralls of #8, and need to smack myself some goblins.  They are mean little buggers!  Anyhoo, if you love to do the writing thing like I do, however sporadically I am able to actually DO it, give this a little look-see.  I am really starting to like this guy's view on things.  :)

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/08/17/the-life-cycle-of-a-novel/