My daughter, who’s eleven, did her first NaNoWriMo and made her goal of five thousand words.  I’m so proud of her!!  And I now owe her a large bag of Reeses Pieces for making it.  That’s one tasty treat she worked toward, but even more tasty, she said, was writing her book.

September passed me by in a rush of colds, sleepless nights and homeschooling.  So did October.  Wait, who am I?

Don’t I wish this was me…

(I ADORE Doctor Who.)

…but it will be, sort of, in a matter of days.  NaNoWriMo 2010 is nearly here!  So is another book!  I can’t wait for the rush.

I can’t resist giving one more clue to my WIP, since my family is telling me I’m impossible to dig from.  It’s more a part of the inspiration to it, not center stage, but it does creep in.  More creepies.  I can’t resist them.

This beauty is a dragonfish.  According to wikipedia, it lives 1500 meters–nearly a mile–below the ocean’s surface, and bioluminesces at frequencies its prey can’t see, giving it a killer advantage.  Neat, eh?

My office is painted!  It brings the outside inside :).

The stickies on my bookshelf really belong on my blank plot wall to the left of my desk, but the paint ought to cure for a few days or the story will imprint itself permanently.  I’d rather that was left to the publishers.  Someday.

For now, I can happily get back to work completing the sticky arc.  The rainbow is color-coded.

Orange: main character, Jer Solomon
White: timeline
Pink: the Midge and Libby team
Green: Professor Urdrin and his dead sister
Yellow: the evil dude

But you don’t get to appreciate the full pattern until after it’s finished.  Paint asserted its temporary supremacy and I have to say I’m glad it did.  I love my office!

I dreamed that a praying mantis, head the size of a football, watched me through the window.  Behind him, a grasshopper sat on the deck rail.  Not a sweet little deary, but one the size of a yardstick.  I turned away, shuddering, and my breath froze at a similar-sized grasshopper sitting on the wall beside the kitchen bar.  How had he gotten there?

He stared at me with his funny grasshopper smile and I knew he was going to jump, and bite.

I freaked and called my husband, counting the seconds until he came in.  Taking a deep breath, he lunged with his two hands stretched like a mantis and grabbed the thing around its body, struggling to keep it from kicking and biting him.  Fortunately, grasshopper heads aren’t attached to swivel-necks.  My husband kicked open the patio door and threw the monster off the deck.  Superhero.  That’s right.

As I peered for openings the beast could have entered through, the mantis watched me through the window.

My husband took me scuba diving in Hawaii to escape the giant bugs.  It wasn’t beautiful or enjoyable.  I knew fish would brush me on the legs and I’d get tangled in jellyfish tentacles.  As my husband reassured me, a killer whale–dear Shamu–poked her smooth snout under my hands.  She swam with us for three whole days, and with the enormous predator at my side, my worries floated away with the currents.

First off, I didn’t know I was such a scaredy cat.  I’m the one who rescues spiders and feeds sicko superworms to the lizard.

Secondly, I didn’t realize I look up to my husband that much.  (Or killer whales.)  I hope he’s pleased.

Third, the influences to the dream are clear:

the mantises and grasshoppers in our garden
the kids’ desires to feed grasshoppers to Spike (a carpenter ant already attached its jaw to his, imagine what a grasshopper would do)
talks with my husband of going to Hawaii
Sunshine’s adoration of all things killer whale

Add in my late-night Google search on parasites and creepy deep-sea fish, and memories of touching scales with my feet in summer lake swims, unable to see what I touched, and you have the shudder factor.

I love how the mind pieces together stories out of what it is given.  This combination could have played out completely differently.  It gives me faith that there will always be a bizarre story in my brain, no matter how many I write.  And that life will always be interesting with a skewed perspective.

The reality of my writing life is: I will NEVER have time or space alone to write.  Or to attend conferences.  Or to make it out the door to sit in glorified coffee shops and library stalls.  The vacuum I aspire to live in simply does not exist.

Blowing my fleshy bits to smithereens over my four children and husband might in fact happen, but they will never learn from it.

Here I am, crammed into a corner of my closet, after explaining to my family I am unavailable due to the awesome, free online conference I’m attending (or because I have to finish my next chapter before so and so deadline, or because… please fill in the blank),

and my husband comes in to tell me all about his new iPhone app called the Auto-Nag (not really, it’s a to-do list app) instead of going out to mow the lawn, for which the alarm is buzzing in his hand.  Do you really think I want to download That when I’m trying to escape the undying list?

How about the kids, who suddenly need lunch though they barely ate breakfast, which included a piece of chocolate birthday cake as bribery for not interrupting me during my conference sessions.

And the screaming baby who woke up from the riot Dad created by announcing he’ll walk the kids’ Poke-Walkers while he mows the lawn.  I know, how cool is that?  (The baby did not get the cake.)

I do not live in a quiet household.

So here I am (still in my closet) evil-eyeing my love for asking me where the camera battery charger goes, since he’s finally cleaning out his suitcase from his trip (a whole week later) so he can not do what his Auto-Nag is nagging him to do (oh, he informs me it really was nagging about the suitcase)…

…and telling myself I need a new perspective.  A new set of skills.  A new strategy.  Since hiding and escapism do not work.

Nor do ear-plugging devices.  I’ve tried these in the form of fingers (limits typing), plugs, buds, muffs and blankets, and they all result in in-my-face time with the person deciding I’m part of their conversation.

My new coping strategies are:

1) Use your lungs.

Scream it out.  Hurl your laptop if necessary.  Then take a deep breath and RELAX.  Reassure yourself that whatever manageable goal you set for the day WILL get done.  Believe this with your whole soul and don’t give up (you can use your spiral notebook as back-up).

2) Use your fury.

If you still feel explosive, jot it on a notecard with a brief sympathetic scene (simmering inside a volcano), or character (evil dudesse strangling your child), or description of the bulbous wart making your life a nightmare, and tuck it into your pocket.  Keep every one.  Soon you’ll have an index of baddies to use in your WIP.  This is progress, btw.

3) Use the pause button.

No one ever told me about the pause button.  School taught me for over sixteen years that I needed a longer attention span, tested by long hours hunched over textbooks and essays.  But reality tells me ADD (aka super-heroism, if you read Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief–I think he was onto something) is the new road to success.

In between these very words, I have…

…up-loaded the Auto-Nag app so I can enjoy later follow-up lessons on calendaring (evidently I need help here)
…fed the baby (twice) and changed a dirty diaper
…made left-over spaghetti for lunch
…completed the curriculum for, printed and mailed my Notice of Intent to Homeschool my daughter
…enjoyed guests for an hour
…printed Pokemon coloring pages so my daughter would leave me alone
…learned to play Fruit Ninja properly
…transformed the quarreling of three children into the cleaning of three rooms
…searched everywhere for my iPhone charger cable
…and eaten lunch myself (yay for me).

These words still appeared.  Yep, I’m a super-hero.

4) Use your undying love.

If you’re a writer, you love stories so bad the sparkle of new lives (or old ones) calls you to write even through cement.  Enjoy your awesome life because it gives you your fuel…

…to just write anyways.

all right, since the end of victorious November:

moved into the new house! (i’ll post pictures of that later.)

completed my NaNo draft at 67K words.

cut the draft to shreds and applied it to my office wall in a unique wallpapering method called “Times Roman and Scotch Tape” so i could pick out my themes of love and hate.  i renamed every word “REWRITE”.  (this is about a quarter of it.)

outlined a cohesive plot.

watched my Titan Husband shovel the driveway for over fourteen hours in three days, during DC’s record snowfall of 30+ inches since 1922, to clear an access so i could go to the hospital to have my baby.  another storm-watch is scheduled for later this week.

isn’t it beautiful?

now waiting for baby, night after wishful night propped up on the couch.  he has fallen oh-so-low and will come at any time (watch it be another two weeks).  my creativity is struggling–i want to get as much writing done as possible before he comes but i’m so tired.  i didn’t even touch the driveway.

Ember, my sun conure, stuffs her head in the glass as I sip my water.  What can I do but enjoy her enthusiasm for bath time?

50595 words.

I still have a ways to go: scenes, bridges, back story, tweaks.  But I have way more than I did before the month started.  And it’s cake, now, to work it into my day.  That was my most important lesson–how to have a future.

Okay, maybe it was how to write a novel.  And still love it at the end.

My goal is to have a cohesive draft ready to edit by the end of December (since I have a few children and other items to add back into my life now that November is over).