Good Knight Confessions

I did it! 50,127 words of my new novel in the month of November. What a wonderful thing NaNoWriMo is. I now know something I didn’t at the start of the month: I am capable of writing 5,000 words in one 8-hour work day. And I love it. This has been the most satisfying experience I’ve had since retiring from the theater stage. Ah, what bliss to feel creative again. The novel will continue to grow through this month until the rough draft is finished. I figure it’s going to need about another 40,000 words before I write the last word of the last page. Then I’ll put it away for a month or two while I get back to work on the other novel that’s been in research/development mode for 2.5 years. I’m going to apply the same rough draft technique to it and then put that one away for a couple months while I work on the first edit of the NaNo novel, from now on known by it new title: Good Knight Confessions. So, yes, I have my work cut out for me, or rather a good map.

Writing prose is much different than writing a play or musical which I’ve done before. I found that in writing Good Knight… I wrote a lot of dialogue. There will be much editing of character motor mouth. But it was good for the word count! I’m continuing to work on the novel and build my daily writing habit which is one of the very best things about NaNoWriMo. So all you would-be-writers out there, mark off next November and get youself signed up on nanowrimo by October of 2009. I’ll be reminding you regularly come September. It was a truly memorable, satisfying, and fun event. Hope you’ll join me next year.

NOTE: because my internal editor is off this month I’m not going to edit this one either. Hopefully you’ll get the gist of what I meant, or thought I meant when I began typing.

upon their shoulders I stand,

my reach is long, my vision much farther

than those that would topple me down.

For what is Samhain, but the chance to look forward through the light of the past. That’s why we honor those that have gone before us on this day when the veil is thin between the worlds. Let that sheer fabric afford you the lessons learned by the thousands of generations that have come before us. Take the risk to climb that mountain of bones and check out the view. You might find it’s different than you thought. Bones don’t lie, don’t have political leanings, don’t give a damn about your petty concerns. They just are and they will always be and someday you’ll add yours to the heap. But not right now. Now is the time for you to put those bones to good use, a perch to stand upon, and honor the accrued knowlege of our puny blip in time.  Go ahead, I dare you!

I love you very much and wouldn’t dream of hurting your feelings but this month is going to be a bit on the wild side due to the National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing a complete novel of at least 50,000 words in the month of November. SO….. if I don’t answer the phone, or the door, and you know I’m home, don’t worry, don’t be hurt, I’ll be out to see the light of day on Dec. 1 and we can play then. I’ll try to remember to put the door hanger on the outside door that says writer at work so you’ll know all is well. And keep in mind I’m a nocturnal creature by nature. All offers of chocolate cookies will be heartily accepted, just leave in a tin on my table in front of the rocker on the front porch ;~)  If you happen to come by and I’m on the porch, I will put my pen away for a bit and will let you know when it’s time for me to go back to work. Count on about a half hour, maybe 45 min.

My novel so far:

I’ve been working on all the pre-write work like structuring, back-story, and outline for the past week. I’m very excited with where this story is going. After generating a list of possible story ideas I chose to go with an old idea from 25 years ago when I was freelancing as a calligrapher. I had done a bit of plotting of it at that time but tossed it all out except the method and then updated the victim and pulled another character out of a more recent story idea. The working title is “In the Balance” and of the murder mystery genre. I’ve had such fun withback-story and character development and I want to start the writing NOW but must wait till November first. You can bet I will be at the keyboard at the stroke of midnight.

Next month is National Novel Writing Month and I’m looking forward to it with great trepidation. Can I really write an entire 50,000 word novel in just one month? Of course, but it’s gonna be pretty bad, in fact I would guess incredibly bad. So I had a light bulb go off in my head. Why not bring the blog up to speed and in November I will post my daily novel offering for the rest of the world to laugh with me. I do reserve the copyright on all things posted on this blog so don’t be tempted. I doubt you’d want to claim what I write in November anyway. So starting November 1st I will upload my days writing in the evening and give you a chance to see how one writer proceeds to go insane. If you’d like to join the rest of us with our November madness visit www.nanowrimo.org and sign up to take part in the official word count. Maybe you’ll upload your novel writings so I can enjoy them as much as you enjoy mine.

The trick to the machine is the seal on the mask. I have a full face mask because I’ve been known to talk, scream, and even sing (all with lovely diction and often at performance volume) while sleeping. With a nasal mask, I open my mouth and the pressure seal is broken and that’s just annoying and noisier than my own vocalizations. So the seal is the secret. My particular mask has a number of small adjustment features and I seem to have happened on the right configuration because I slept better than a baby (can you tell I’ve raised children?). The last adjustments are made after laying my head on the pillow.

Now all I have to figure out is how to sleep during the night.

There is hope on the horizon, though. Recently I had sleep studies (yes, two) done. My rheumatologist suggested it. I have had horrible nightmares for most of my life and they’ve become more proliferate and horrifying since the freeway accident that changed my entire life. More, and better, sleep will help the fibromyalgia as well as the chronic pain stemming from the back injury. Sleep hasn’t been my friend in many years. More on that later. So the sleep study showed I have sleep apnea. Oh, joy!! something else to add to the ever growing list of challenges to face. But there is a machine, oh, glorious machine. CPAP it’s called. I have another name for it, Demon!

My first time with the machine was two nights ago. Not a pleasant experience for either myself or my ever-suffering spouse who had to get up at o-dark-thirty for work. The seal on the mask was leaking and the sound was like being inside a manufacturing facility, said the hubby. Woke me up too! So now I”m sleeping during the day while hubby’s at work. Never had any recognizable sleep patterns anyway. I actually prefer to be awake at night. I like the quiet.

Will it help? Don’t know. Will I persevere and give it a good trial period? Of course. Will I move out of the bedroom into the spare room? Maybe. But I’d lose a lot of closet space. Hmmmm….. don’t know about that.

It’s been some time since I’ve done any serious writing, not to imply anything here will be serious, but this could be a very fun way to sharpen my pen. Yes, old-style nibs need the occasional whet stone. So that is what my intention is, scraping away the burrs of age.

Gonna start slow, just short posts on whatever comes to mind as I figure out this new, to me, medium.