A Million Words

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.   At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.   For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps,  an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies .  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious. Then I ...

Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.   It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over.  We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.   At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep.  She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic.  Her favorite teethers are mobile phones.  She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range.  In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room.  She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.  She's a very sociable baby, but with all the ...

It's over, and I came in a winner, pulling past 50,000 words yesterday afternoon.  I didn't really think I'd make it for a while there, but I had signed up for the regional word war, and that gave me the motivational boost to stick with it and recover my losses.   In the end, I'd say it wasn't actually that hard to write 50,000 words in a month, but they were 50,000 reckless, adverb-heavy words of a fluffy romance novel which will need lots of further work before it's fit to read.   In the final eight days of the month, I put together a grant application, made Thanksgiving dinner,  baked a cake for Nova's first birthday, and wrote over 16,000 words while our now-ex-flatmates moved out, leaving us with no salt, coffee table, or wireless router, among other things.  It was kind of crazy, but I won.

I was just looking at Sherry's blog in which she shares the following tip: "Clean up your desk." It reminded me that I do not have  a desk at the moment. Our apartment is small and frequently over-populated.  My files are in boxes in closets and my current writing projects are mostly tucked into folders on the living room bookshel ves.  In October when I was working on four different projects and doing a lot of revision the lack of a desk was driving me crazy.  I wanted to convert the "spare" room into a study/nursery so I could have a fixed place to work and spread out my charts and marked up pages.   October passed and no room-re-arranging happened. Now it's November and I just finished day 9 of NaNoWriMo. Things have changed.  All I'm doing is writing -- adding words to a single document. I hardly even check my plot notes or the minimal research I've done.  Not having a desk is a distinct advantage at this stage of writing.   16k and counting!

Mike has been after me for months to make Nova a Cthulu costume, and last night it finally came together.  Mike made the wings, and I frankensteined the rest together from a cheap pair of boy's pajamas.  Here she is:  

I am signing up for the annual insanity of NNWM, National Novel Writing Month, a pledge to churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month. I got up at 6:30 this morning, and it was near 7:30 by the time I had the document open on my computer.  At 8:15, when Nova woke up, I'd only written about 500 words.  If she takes a nap today, I might be able to do another thousand, but I'm not optimistic.  Still, I'm looking forward to it in a sick sort of way. I'm planning to write a regency romance and take a break from my never-ending fantasy series.  We'll see how it goes.

Nova pulled herself to stand at 6 months and 3 weeks, and cruised almost immediately thereafter, but she didn't crawl at top speeds until a month after that, shuffling the normal order of infant skill acquisition. Now, at long last, after months of warm-ups she's finally walking on her own.   She took her first independent steps almost a month ago, and by this time last week she was stringing four or five steps together at a stretch.  Then, in the last few days, she's finally started to use this new "walking" skill to get from point A to point B.   Meanwhile, she's had a runny nose and possibly an invisible tooth coming in and has completely gone off solid food, so she's nursing like a newborn, but it's all really very exciting.   My mother says that at this age I had about a dozen words. I'm not sure how many words Nova has, or what counts. She hasn't said "baba" (arguably her first word) in months, so I don't know if she still h...