Larocque and Roll

NaNo 2007: Pre-production October 31, 2007

Le sigh.

After I made my little pro/con list last week, I thought in my mind that I’d settled the matter - that I’d sit this year out and come back next year. It felt good to make that decision, and I went about my merry way.

Then I got an idea for a story.

No, no, no. I can’t do it. I absolutely have no time for this.

But it’s a good idea! And it will let you write both a story and free-form parts, for those times when the plot just isn’t there.

No! Three of the four weekends in November, I have either one or no free days. I have work/committee commitments almost every week.

You can write it using Google Docs, so you can steal a few moments here and there at work. Chipping away at the word count all day is better than trying to bang it out in the evenings.

I’m not even finished the work writing I mentioned! It needs to be done first!

You know you wanna…

Oh, fine. I’ll do it. Damn you, mind!

Gardens

This week so far, I’ve been both very productive and very distracted. Productive in that on Sunday, I managed to get my front garden and back yard cleaned up.

You can see how oddly spaced the hostas were. Next year, I’m chopping all of them up into quarters, planting some around the deck in the back, leaving two in the front, and giving the rest away. The irises are also huge - I’m leaving one there and giving the other away. Then I’ll take half the shasta daisies from the back and put them in here, along with some cosmos, black-eyed susans, and other plants to be recruited later.

It’s kind of hard to see, but there’s another hosta plant at the back. It’s also pretty big, but not as big as the ones in the front; that one only needs to be cut in half. There’s also another iris beside it, and this one is bigger than the two in the front, so it’s getting divided too.

I don’t have much to say about this shot, except that the lavender plants are moving to the other side of the yard next year, where they’ll get more sun.

Other than that, it’s been hard to stay on track. I find myself starting something, forgetting what I was doing, wandering off to see what’s going on in other parts of the library, and then remembering what I was doing in the middle of doing something else. I haven’t had as much coffee as I normally drink lately, for reasons that aren’t important. It’s not the only reason I’m not mentally alert, but I like to blame in on that.

To top this all off, I’ve been having stressful dreams lately. They include:

~ Going to write a French exam, except I didn’t make it to the last class, so I borrowed someone’s notes. Starting to study, then realizing the exam was in half an hour, dropping the notes all over, not being able to find my car keys, and then finding the car keys, only to see my father pulling out of the driveway with my car.
~ Going to London with my sister, except we don’t have plane tickets or hotel reservations (we’re going to buy them when we get to the airport). I don’t have luggage or clothes to pack, so I’m frantically running around the mall to get some. Getting caught in a traffic jam, and missing all the flights to London.
~ Going to a restaurant with a friend (Hi Steve!) but all the tables are full or still piled with dishes. Finally finding a table, only to notice he’s been stealing food off other tables and the waiters are so angry that they won’t take my order, so I go hungry.
~ Going to visit a cousin [1], who’s working in Afghanistan (!!!). It’s as bad as the news reports say it is; we leave, only to find out that an hour after we left, my cousin was killed in a bombing. After this one, I wake up in tears.

It’s to the point I’m almost afraid to fall asleep and see what my brain is going to throw at me this time.

And just like that, I’ve forgtten where I was going with this post. Typical of me for this week. Sheesh!

[1] Oddly enough, after the previous dream, it was my cousin Stephen.

To NaNo or not to NaNo October 25, 2007

Basically, I just spent over an hour agonizing about whether or not to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. My arguements went thusly:

Cons:

~ I have proven that I can do it, having won last year, after losing the previous three years.
~ I have other creative outlets; writing fiction doesn’t have the same meaning for me any more.
~ It would be nice to have my Novembers back, finally.
~ I don’t have anything prepared. No plot, big problem.
~ I have a major writing project at work I’m not finished yet, and that should come first. Overall, I’m really busy at work and I’d like to be able to come home and unwind instead of coming home to wind up for something else.

Pros:

~ Just because I did it once doesn’t mean I can do it again. That’s why it’s a challenge!
~ I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience, even in the years when I didn’t win.
~ Maybe not having a plot isn’t a bad thing. I can just write the first things that come to mind.

Right now, the con list is a lot more compelling than the pro list, but I can’t ignore the feeling that this is something I should be doing. The compromise my mind and heart are coming to seems to be something along the lines of “let’s take this year off, and go back at it next year!” Maybe my challenge will be to do one blog post a day.

We shall see.

Bookish musings

Earlier this week I finished a book I’d been pecking at for the past week or two. It was a good book, and I really enjoyed it; the reason it was taking so long was because I didn’t have a lot of reading time, what with playing on the Wii and catching up on the show I’d missed while away [1]. Oh, and knitting up a storm. So I finished that book, put it back on my shelf and went to get the next book, which was…

Don’t you hate it when that happens? You’re reading a book, and you have a pretty good idea of what you want to read next, or you have a stack of books waiting to to be read. When you finish that book, you can move on immediately to the next one on the shelf/stack. [2] However, this time I was caught between reading lists/stacks, so I didn’t know what to read. Honestly, I wandered around for a day in a fog because I needed to read something, but I didn’t know what.[3]

Fortunately, I remembered that I’d been saving The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, and I’ve been happily engaged with it since Tuesday. It’s very good, and so far it only bears a passing resemblance to the movie. [4]

Incidentally, I know I haven’t posted my list of books I read last night, and there’s a good reason for that: I can’t find the notebook I record them in. It’s also problematic because I have a couple of other books to write down in it (I’m paranoid that I’ll loose the post-it notes I’m using to keep track of them.) All I can tell you is that the Stephen Fry book I put in the August read list was actually read in September. It was a terrible error, I accept responsibility for my actions, and I promise to not let it happen again.

(Insert non-threatening musical interlude)

I just went upstairs to fetch the power cord for my laptop (I’m sitting at the dining room table, and the battery was running low) and - lo and behold! - found my notebook under a stack of papers that had fallen over.

~ Lee Gowan, The Last Cowboy (7)
I was expecting slapstick and goofiness; instead, I got sad, beautiful poignancy (is that a word? Spell check says “yes”!) Genius.

~ Meghan McCaffery, Sloppy Firsts (7.5)
Very teen-agnsty. Marcus, the male “interest”, reminded me a lot of all of Sarah Dessen’s male “interest” characters.

~ Penn Jillett, Sock (6)
I can’t think of any other way of describing this book except to say it was a very muscular read. The narrator is a sock monkey, which might normally have you rolling your eyes, but it was very well done. The narration itself was very choppy, with a lot of pop culture references. Although it had a strong beginning, I thought it started dragging some by the end.

~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer (7)
Despite the fact that the plot elements were almost identical to every other book she’s written, I still love her books. Is this how people who love Danielle Steele and John Grisham feel?

~ Timothy Taylor, Stanley Park (8.5)
While I don’t think I completely understood the significance of the case of the murdered children, or the Professor’s research, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I know John of The Book Mine Set didn’t like this one when he read it for Canada Reads last year, but having read a plethora of books about chefs and restaurants and the challenges of working in a professional kitchen, I have a completely different perspective on his actions at the end of the story.

And that was it for the month. Based on my “finished” date for the last one, it was around the time things started heating up at work, and I didn’t have a lot of time for reading.

[1] I have a PVR for my dish. It was an extravagance, but worth it.
[2] Anyone? Anyone? Or am I the only one who goes through books that fast?
[3] Again, this may be a problem unique to me and a very few other book nerds.
[4] Which was AWESOME. Seriously - it made the special effects in The Matrix look cheap and poorly executed.

The dog ate my last blog post October 19, 2007

That’s the best excuse I can come up with for not having posted in over a month. I could pretend to be shocked or surprised by my lapse, but really? Y’all would see right through that. Instead, it was just a combination of being run off my feet at work, and then going on vacation for almost two weeks to a fabulously exotic resort in Fenwick, run by my parents. Yes, I tend towards the dull and mundane - big deal. My mother and I went to Toronto for a day, which was one of the highlights of the trip [1].

Also! My sock pal got her socks!

More later, when I can cobble together a coherent post. And I promise it won’t be in a month and a half.

[1] The others were: spending five days with my adorable neph, going car shopping with my sister, turkey dinners and the acquisition of a Wii [2].

[2] Yeah, you read that right. A Wii. I’m now the proud, anti-social owner of a gaming system, albeit one that requires you to engage in flailing and swinging to make anything happen. So the physical effort kind of makes up for the lack of human contact.