Ready, set, go!

Nov. 1, and NaNoWriMo begins again. I'm already procrastinating working up a giddy enthusiasm as I tank up the caffeine reservoir. 7:25 am here in Hawaii, which means most of the rest of the world has cranked out their first day's word count by now. I don't mind starting out "behind" because on 11/30 I will have (apparent, though not actual) extra hours to finish. My great plans to have some kind of story line in place by now fizzled and are lying in a dessicated heap by the side of the road somewhere. I do, however, have a premise, and I did finally manage, over the past couple of days, to get curtains made and up in my office. This may sound like a low priority, but with seasonal sun-shift southward, glare has become a problem here on my trusty computer screen. The eye strain and splitting headaches that have started to crop up after a long morning at the desk will not help with the NaNo thing (or any other desk-related thing), so taking a couple days to get "make curtains" off my to do list was worth it.

I'm going to go pound out my day 1 word count now, starting with a killer first sentence.

Ants in my pants

I'm getting Kindle: whooot!

And it's so bugging me that, having convinced myself and DH that it will be a useful (deductible!) device for ourselves and our business, and having worked up enthusiasm for the "new book in 60 seconds" thing, I now have to WAIT for it to ship! (Word to the wise: don't order something you want now over a holiday weekend, unless it's an ebook and you already have the reader).

It will be late in the week, or later, before my new toy lands in my mailbox here in Hawaii. I feel like a little kid staring at the Christmas gifts under the tree, with a week to go before the big day. Ogling an emailed order confirmation is not quite as much fun as shaking a nicely wrapped gift box, but at least I get to browse the Kindle store, think about which books I want first, and contemplate what level of weekly/monthly ebook indulgence our budget will support.

Purchase #1 is going to be Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White because it's been over 10 years since I last read it and I'm overdue for a repeat visit. I have a paper copy, purchased at Borders a week ago with said overdue reread in mind, but the print is ludicrously tiny, and the paper quality so thin and awful, that I've set it aside as incompatible with my middle-aged eyes. Which is another reason DH and I decided to go for the Kindle: adjustible font size.

Not-so-subconscious

I had a dreamlet, just before waking this morning, that I was reading a [blog post? tweet? email? Facebook update? - don't know, doesn't matter] from someone crowing about her delightful first day of NaNoWriMo, and how she was thrilled to have so quickly cranked out an awesome word count. In my dream I realized it was already Nov. 1, and National Novel Writing Month had begun without me. Not only had I forgotten to get started, I still had no idea what I was going to write.

Gee, you think maybe my not-so-subconscious was delivering a wee kick to the patootie?

What a relief to wake up and realize it's not yet October, and I still have a month left to gain some glimmer of an idea for where I want to take this next novel.

And I did feel comforted when my sister pointed out that dreaming I'm slow to get started is a lot better than dreaming it's Nov. 30 already and I'd missed the whole thing...

What I Did This Summer

You already know that I moved. That was the big time-energy-money-attention monster that ate the first part of the summer. Since my last post I also:

~ Caught up on many bookkeeping/admin tasks. Much of my time goes to that, but it's not really worth mentioning here. Don't know why I've even typed this much about it.

~ Ate too many Hurricane Cookies, leading to thrice-weekly morning workouts with Jillian.

~ Renamed my "pre-published" novel: now "Lethal Blossom." Too soon to say how well that name will stick, but I'm liking it well enough.

~ Consulted my wonderful astrologer about an auspicious day to send out query letters to my most-desired agents list: turned out to be Aug. 17 at 10am, so I twiddled my thumbs and tweaked and retweaked and retweaked my letter/synopsis until I had to just stop looking at it.

~ Sent out query letters/etc. to said target agents on most-auspicious time/date, most by email, a few by snail post

~ Got three top-speed replies back: "Sorry, we're so busy with our current clients we don't look at submissions unless they've been blessed by the Pope, Stephen King, or Janet Evanovich." Such is life. I don't need 10 agents fighting over me, just one who really likes my stuff. Seven remain unheard from as of this writing, so that's still wide open.

~ Sent off for an entry form for the 2010 "Malice Domestic" competition. If no agent is delerious with excitement about my potential by Oct. 1, I'll give that a go.

~ Finally got around to joining Facebook.

~ Retrieved and reviewed my NaNoWriMo novel from 2005 -- the one that got set aside so I could write what is now "Lethal Blossom" (LB1)to which NaNovel '05 is the sequel. Much has changed during the writing of LB1, and much of NaNovel '05 is headed for a deadly encounter with the delete key. Fingers crossed there's enough left to give me a jump-start on a complete draft of the next one (working title "Lucky Bamboo" - LB2).

~ Got a Wordpress theme to use for my future author site. Don't have much of a clue yet what to do with it, but I'll be playing with that this fall when I need a break from working on LB2.

~ Downloaded a bunch of photos from Fotolia, for potential Wordpress site use.

~ Looked for free, interesting fonts online to use for Wordpress banner, maybe some headline graphics. Got as far as AbstractFonts, which is totally groovy, and only downloaded 37 of the 1019 in the "handwriting" category, which I think counts as remarkable restraint. It's trickier than you might think to find a font that's attractive and readable while also whispering "humorous mystery." Horror novelists have all the luck, as there are many fantabulous fonts that shriek of murder, mayhem, and madness. Not right for my stuff, though.

~ Oh, yeah. I also read a lot, as usual. And did some sewing.

Next up:

~ Try to remember how to install fonts so my font manager will recognize they're on the system.

~ Come up with some kind of a plot for LB2 before the end of October, in time for...

~ NaNoWriMo 2009. I may churn out nothing more than 50-60,000 (or more) words of drivel (it's happened before), but the group write-til-you-drop experience is too much fun to pass up.

Onward...

Settling in at the new place

I'm never, ever moving again.

I mean it. I'm done with the whole purge/pack/clean/schlep/collapse-and-look-at-the-mess/unpack drama. Five moves in the past ten years, three of those in past barely-more-than-three years, and I've had enough.

Good thing we're finally in a house we love.
Too bad it's a rental.

The silver lining: owner says he's open to selling to us should we ever decide we want to buy it. I'm ready to buy it today, if that would mean I didn't have to move again for a while. Not sure where the buckaroos will magically materialize from to support that little fantasy, but I'm deteremined this one is gonna be MINE some day.

It has to be. I've been affirming for two years now that "the next house we move into, we're going to buy." Clever me: I had in mind some kind of a rent now-buy later plan, as that's all our finances will stretch to a the present moment. And that's what I got.

Thing is, I wasn't actively looking for it. We'd talked early in the year about whether or not to renew our lease at the old place when it expired at the end of May, and had decided that moving was waaaaaaaaaaaay too much of a hassle (and expense) to be worth leaving the very nice, big, comfy house by the water we were already in. So, decision made: we'd stay put.

Then one day my Inner Voice spoke up out of the blue and said, "Go see what's on Craig's List." So I did. And there, in the Hilo rental listings, was a photo of our dream house. Seriously. The house DH and I have been talking about having "someday": north side of town, great deck, ocean view, etc., etc. It was all there.

"Honey," I said, "come look at this house on Craig's list."
"Why are you looking at Craig's List?" he complained. "We decided we aren't going to move this year."
"I know, but come look at these photos."
"Holy Sh*t," he said, looking, "that's our Dream House."

He's as big a believer as I am in listening to your inner voice, so we contacted the owner and after months (literally) of nailing down the details (much waiting on previous tenant to schedule his move-out), it all worked out beautifully and with perfect timing, and we're finally in. [I was gonna insert a photo of the view here, but realized they're all on hubbie's hard drive... oops.]

My estimate (based on way too much prior experience) that it would take a full two months to prep, move, and recover is turning out to be accurate. I haven't blogged, I haven't written, I have done barely more than nothing about the agent hunt, I've hardly even cooked, I have a pile of aging admin/bookkeeping tasks to do that's about a foot high and getting taller... but I have a new home office with a view of Hilo Bay and the ocean that takes my breath away.

There's some time-sensitive paper-pushing to be done (semi-annual General Excise/Use Tax filing, fun things like that), and a ton and a half of mental clutter to clear away, but finally, at last, I feel settled in.

So long as I don't think about the fact that it's July 1 and that means the year is half over (which could lead to panic attacks), I'm good to go.

Invisible Progress

Novelling has been the back burner for most of the past month, what with visiting family and our impending move (and all the stuff I'm supposed to be staying on top of, like doing my part to sustain our self-employed status). Getting to a signed lease for the next house has taken forever and a day, but has finally been achieved, and now I'm checking the calendar and thinking, "okay, not too soon to start packing."

In the meantime I've taken the tweaks and polishes as far as they will go without derailing my sanity, and in between all the other tasks that occupy my days I've pulled together a pretty darned good (I hope) query letter and synopsis and have embarked on agent research. Plan is to finalize the "most desired" list by the end of May and send out the first round of queries in early June, right before we move. I'd do it sooner, but Mercury is retrograde and there aren't any good dates between now and then for initiating important things like a novelling career (or a move to a new house).

Chapter Breaks

Chunking the text -- or, rather, re-chunking -- into optimal chapters is proving to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. I've done one pass, but suspect I may have gone too far: there are now 52 chapters instead of 35. That feels like too many. Started out just aiming to fix a couple of the original 35 that felt too long, not in terms of draggy scenes (I've fixed/trimmed those to the best of my current ability, although there's always the possibility I will find more to cut if I look at it again in, say, a week), but in how many pages are flipped before that refreshing half-page of white space. Perhaps I got a little carried away?

Wish there were some way to get a bird's eye view of the entire thing without completely losing legible text. Don't think there's any kind of computer function or human eye -- or brain -- capable of that.

Haven't made a rock-solid decision yet about the chapters, a reliable sign I'll have another go at it at whatever point I can face the task again. Could be soon, 'cause the only other thing I really need to do is get a frickin' synopsis done. Ugh. Don't know precisely what it is about even thinking about synopsizing that hits the procrastinate button so firmly. It's been on the list for months, and I still haven't squirmed butt into chair to get it done.

Well, I did play around with it a bit yesterday, from my narrator's point of view. Just to see if that would help me get into it. The result (which only got halfway through the story) could be a fun addition to my author webpage, if/when I ever get around to doing something about that, but is not useful for a submission packet.

On the progress front, I have produced a generic query letter ready to be customized for whichever agents end up on my "most desired" list, and a somewhat playful author bio in support of my non-fiction credentials. I think I'm happy with 'em, but they're still fresh. There's a chance I'll cringe when I look at them again after they've aged a few days, and realize they're awful.