You may or may not have noticed my absence from my blog in the past month or so...particularly after I said that I was going to try and blog everyday until the baby was born. Clearly that did not happen. This is what happened instead. National Novel Writing Month was/is November.

I used to (pre-child) participate in this event and I really liked it. I completed three novels this way. In 2006, I was pregnant with Ben and though I made a valient effort I didn't finish even though I was pretty much on track until he was born. In 2007 Ben was a year old and that's still a fairly needy phase and then I had surgery that month and was hence derailed. In 2008 I really thought that I was going to be able to do this. Ben can play independently or at least watch TV for some time by himself, he still is napping well most days and is in bed early. I have the time to write a novel this month. Plus, I can pretty much promise that I won't be able to do it next year because I'll have an 11 month o ...

Okay, so my novel died. It was struggling weakly along and I would have carried it through to the end despite our rough beginning, but my emergency surgery and then recovery period delivered the killing blows and I decided there was just no way that I was going to be able to pull this off this month. It was a sad decision. I mourned (parts) of my novel. I grieved for another November passing without my completing a novel. I've also decided that I'm going to give myself a "re-do" month once I'm fully recovered and back up and around. So, this thread might be revived later on, but I just wanted to let anyone who was wondering (aka no one) what had happened to my poor book.

I am suffering. My story is suffering. We do not go well together. Nothing is going well. (Note to the concerned: there's not actually anything wrong with me besides the story.)  I have 6,319 words. Today I should be breaking 10k. I have a very definite feeling that I will not be making that goal. The prospects of me finishing this story are getting slimmer and slimmer (quite unlike my stomach and thighs) because I'll be spending a week in Kentucky this month as well and that will not increase my word count in any meaningful way. Failure is looming over me...and my screaming son looming under me...

Yesterday did not go well. I realized all over again how stupid my plot/lack of plot was and how I didn't really like anything about my story and I didn't know where to go with it and I was seriously considering burning down the girl's house and having her reincarnated into another life and plot somewhere else. However, with the wisdom only a long-time mother possess, mom came up with an equally interesting and less violent proposition. A time travel machine. I was immediately intrigued and have decided to time-travel my female character back in time and pop her into a wagon-train/pioneer drama. This hasn't really given me a plot, but it's a change of direction at least and so I'm just going to go with it for now. Saturday's funk has left me with only 3,705 words where I should have 6,668 leaving me 2,963 words behind. I wasted most of Benjamin's first nap today watching tv and so now I'm definitely feeling the time crunch.

I'm ending Day 2 with 3,416, which puts me just slightly ahead of where I ought to be. The good news is that I'm not behind yet, the bad news is that tomorrow I have to write basically all my words. The badder news is that my story is not good. It's really not. Somehow before all my beginnings have turned out pretty well and that at least gets me a rather inspired start. This year that is not the case. I have no description. My dialogue is trite. My plot is sparse at best and is taking me places that I don't know about which means my choices are to either make something up (hard to keep up over 50,000 words) or do research (slows the whole process down). I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about it. But for me to be stumped on page seven does not bode well. Week One is supposed to be this flurry of inspiration and Week Two is supposed to be the bog so I'm just not sure how this is going to work. I'm giving serious thought to starting Day 3 with the sentence "And then she woke up from a ...

This is my first entry in my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Blog because today is November 1st, hence the first day I'm allowed to write on my surely disastrous novel. I SHOULD be writing right now and so while the writing has yet to begin the procrastination is in full swing.

I've been thinking about what I'm going to write on and off since the beginning of October when I realized that this day was fast approaching. This is what I came up with: _________________________ Nothing. Now, it's possible to sit down on day one and start without a clue as to what's going to happen. I've done that before and the results are about what you think, some good, some bad, and a lot ugly. However, since last year I've added the complication of having a son which severely limits my writing time, plus having Andrew taking college classes online also limits my access to the computer.

I started my noveling notebook by titling a page National Novel Writing Month 2007 and ...