Tomorrow It Will Be November!

November first means the start of National Novel Writing Month. I have two tiny seeds for short stories. I plan to start with a thumbnail sketch then expand out into the story itself. Whatever story occurs to me when I get up in the morning will be first.

I've mentioned before that I'm a pantser. That generated the first story seed. Auto spell check keeps trying to change "pantser" to "panther." So at least one story will have a panther. I haven't decided if it will be an animal or human panther. Or perhaps both.


Update on my tech fail:

The zombie modem has been retired.  :-((  It was a good little modem that also has wireless capabilities. Now I have two boxes (modem and router) where there used to be one.

I have new earbuds. Music is in stereo again.

The iPod is hanging in there. Not sure when I'll have time to pick up another one.

Good luck to everybody starting the adventure that is NaNo. Keep in touch! I'll try to do that, too.

Rambles when I should be heading to work

A snowflake landed on my windshield yesterday.  Spotting the first flake of the season isn't quite as thrilling as the first robin or first butterfly.  Quite the opposite, actually.

Techfail:
The iPod won't hold a charge.
One earbud is dead and the other faint.
Last night half-way through my on-line class the modem died.
Well, pretended to die.  This morning it's fine.

I have a zombie modem.

That Writing Time of Year

November will be here in twelve days!  And that means National Novel Writing Month.  It's what November is FOR after all.  Right?

This will be my ninth year participating and my fourth year rebelling.  I'll be writing short stories AND ignoring word count.  (I want to focus on practicing the new stuff from the workshop and not be distracted by that pesky word count.)  I've made no plans beyond that.  Totally winging it.

My NaNo signature this year: "When you break rules, break 'em good and hard." (Spoken by Nanny Ogg in Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.)

Why do I keep doing this?  It's a wonderful way to improve your writing.  I consider it a marathon of a writing practice.  No matter what the word count on that first morning of December, I have a story that didn't exist on Halloween.  I also had the pleasure of writing along with others from all over the world.

Many of the folks who read my blog are WriMo veterans.  If you're one of the people who isn't and have considered writing a novel "some day," perhaps this is the year you try.  Come join us!

Field Trip

I have my new laptop on its first field trip.  We are at Barnes & Noble.  I'm having coffee.  Laptop is having WiFi.  I will take a picture and add it in later.  (I haven't mastered The Cloud yet, or else I think the picture I just took with my phone would magically appear on my laptop and I could copy it here.  Someday I'll be living in that future!)

EDIT:  Here's the picture.  Yeah, corporate America gets my money.  But sometime in October Laptop will get decorated with Digger stickers - I supported Ursula Vernon's Kickstarter.  Not ALL my money goes to corporations.

In other news, the short story workshop I'm taking is half over.  We have started working on plot.  Ya' know, plot is definitely not one of my strong points.  I'm a natural pantser (also called a discovery writer).  This is why I need this class - to get better at plot and other areas of writing.  The homework due last night was five - yes, FIVE - plots.  I turned mine in at about 11:45 PM.  The deadline was midnight.

If you're so inclined, consider taking a class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal.  Here's a post from her website from July this year about what she teaches.  If you read her blog or follow her on Twitter you'll see the announcements for future classes.  Most definitely worth the effort.

New Computer

I spent All The Money and now have a MacBook Air.  It still feels strange, like it's really someone else's.  And you will never know how many typos I've made so far in just these three sentences because the keyboard Is Not Yet Mine.

No pictures today because I haven't played with that yet.

I have been using AppleWorks for almost all my document needs since about 1995.  Yeah, really.  There is no more AppleWorks; it was replaced with Pages.  At some point I added Pages to my old G5, futzed with it and decided I wasn't ready to learn yet another word processing program.  Somewhere along the line I forgot I even owned it.  Right now I'm very grateful to my past self for installing it, even if I didn't actually learn it.

Through Google I found a 2011 article in MacWorld explaining how to convert all your AppleWorks files to Pages.  All At Once!  So I am not facing software hell and the prospect of copying every document individually into another program.  Hooray for Macs!  There is still the possibility that all the formatting won't be saved, but that seems minor at this point.  I will do several documents individually to see how it goes before opting for a global change.

However, I have to learn another word processing program.  Several people I spoke to at work (all under 25) have never used anything but Word.  I can't even remember all the programs I've used.  Some of you may remember Word Perfect.  I know at least one person who still uses it!  Anyway, I currently use three.  AppleWorks, soon to be replaced by Pages, so they count as one.  Open Office at home for when I need a dot doc.  And Word at work.  They all do quite well at the basic tasks, but will use different terms for the same action and hide it in different areas of the menu.

In other news, the short story workshop is awesome and we'll be discussing our first critiques tomorrow night.  Maybe I'll share how that goes; maybe not.  Don't want to embarrass anybody.

Writing, Short and Long

The Asylum (on-line writing group I'm in) met this evening.  We didn't cover anything important; it was a chat kind of meeting.  November is coming up fast.  For us that means National Novel Writing Month.  I considered not participating this year, but my buddies won't hear of it.  So I'll be a rebel and work on short stories, because ... 

For eight weeks, starting in September, I'll be taking Mary Robinette Kowal's Writing on the Fast Track short story workshop.  I'm excited and a bit scared.  We already have our first assignment!  When the workshop's over I plan on practicing what I learn.  It would be foolish to turn around and write a novel instead.

I will be busy.  Don't know if blog posts will happen very often.  But I'll be thinking about ya'  ;-)