Nonfiction

Photo time! Two weekends ago we went to Sausalito and stayed in a floating house. I've finally uploaded photos from that trip, just in time for us to leave for another trip.

Over the past month or so, we had our yard and patio completely redone and beautified. Louise documented the process with daily photos. And now it's all finished, just in time for us to go out of town.

Yes, we're taking a vacation. We're heading to Michigan for a week of family fun, sunsets by the lake, and more family fun. So now I have to get back to trip preparation.

I have joined Facebook. The breaking point came after I'd remarked that I was okay as long as my mother didn't join before me, and a few hours later I was talking to my brother and learned that Mom signed up last month.

Greetings, people of the internet! Contrary to appearances, I have not in fact vanished into a cave/black hole/Bermuda Triangle/other location without a wifi connection these past two months. I have simply been busy. Not truly so busy as to not have any time at all to post an update, but let's just pretend, shall we? After all, here's a long list illustrating merely some of the many things I've been occupied with:

( class, revising, copyediting, and even more )

Today I celebrated my birthday on Martha's Vineyard. Despite growing up in Massachusetts, this is my first trip to the island. It's lovely here, quaint and peaceful and sunny and not too cold.

My birthday included:
- chocolate pancakes
- alpacas!
- houses like candy-colored gingerbread
- a clam roll
- ice cream
- a lighthouse
- drinkies
- video chat hilarity
- delicious French food
- more drinkies
- family togetherness fun
- many wonderful birthday wishes

We have a couple more days here at the Vineyard, and then we're off to New Hampshire. No real Boston time on this trip, except for coming and going from the airport.

ETA: As always, Louise has awesome photos.

Where have I been for the past 6 weeks, since I last posted? I've been in my writing room, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. Not every day, but about half of the days, sometimes for just an hour, sometimes for most of the day. It was a damn big project, but I am very happy to announce that it is mostly done. If you haven't already been following along, check out the Flickr photo set to see how far I've come. (Again, photos are friendslocked, I can send a guest pass if you're not on Flickr.)

The cleanup isn't done-done because I still have to sort and file a ton of paperwork (currently in boxes atop the filing cabinets where it belongs), and I have some plans for decor. I'll post more photos (maybe even public) when the room is really finished, probably at the end of the month.

And now I can sit at my clean desk in my beautiful writing room and write! One of my writing projects for the next 10 weeks will be the assignments for an online fiction class I'm taking through Stanford Continuing Studies. The course overview and first week information has just been posted, and the curriculum and format look great. I'm excited to be taking this class, and I'm looking forward to trying a different approach to writing for a little while. Maybe I'll even produce some (gasp) short stories. Yes, I am actually aware that fiction can be less than 100,000 words, thank you very much!

In my house, there is a room with a desk at which I theoretically do my writing. In actuality, I only use this desk a few times a month, and for various reasons, I do most of my writing on the couch or at cafes and libraries. Still, the room is considered the Writing Room (or the Art Room because that's how we thought of it when we first moved into the house, though very little art was ever done in it). The room has no other intended purpose except to be my workspace. It's my room of one's own.

But boxes not unpacked never do unpack themselves, and clutter attracts clutter, and over the years the accidental purpose of the room has been to accumulate household stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else. Including stuff that doesn't belong in the house at all anymore -- getting rid of things isn't my strong suit. As a result, one of the various reasons that I don't use my writing room much is that it's not all that pleasant a place to be. I'm actually a neat freak, I just have a strange way of expressing it.

And so, after some months of deliberately letting things get bad enough to disgust myself into action, I've embarked on The Great Writing Room Cleanup of Aught-Nine. I hope that by cleaning for a couple of hours every day for the rest of the month, I can get rid of all the stuff, all the boxes, all the clutter, and create an actually nice writing space. With room for organized storage, too, since writing really doesn't require very much square footage, and maybe even decor to complement the anticipated pristineness.

I'm documenting the cleanup process with a Flickr photo set. The photos are friendslocked because I felt a bit strange about displaying my mess for the whole internet. If we're not already Flickr friends, I can add you, and if you're not on Flickr but can't live without viewing my piles of crap, I can send you a guest pass.

Writing Room of Doom, I will tame you!

Querying: Just so you know that occasionally I actually do things when I say I'm going to, I did begin sending out query letters after my last post. I am mostly still waiting impatiently for responses.

The Overworld: Feedback from a few of my brilliant and insightful friends was quicker to arrive, and now I know about some big things still wrong with the manuscript. Many things are right, yes, but there remain problems to solve, which I am extremely grateful to know about. So thanks, guys. I'm giving the novel a bit of a break while I reflect, gather more feedback, and see what develops.

The Extent of the Damage: More commonly known as "the earthquake novel", this was my 2007 NaNo novel about three generations of dysfunction in the Santa Clara Valley. For a few months, I've been turning my obsessive thought processes to revision plans for this manuscript, but I had not actually looked at the text since I finished writing it more than a year ago. Last week, I finally read through the thing, and I'm pleased to report that it doesn't suck. It's actually pretty decent, considering it's a first draft. It also is pretty close to how I remembered it, though there were a few surprises, plus a bunch of funny lines that made me laugh out loud. (Yes, hello, I'm the dork sitting at my desk LOLing at my own writing. Because if I don't, who will?) Now some more research, then some planning, and then we'll see what happens with this.

Okay, so, you may remember that back in December I went on about my excitement at finishing my latest revision of The Overworld. You may also remember that I said, "I have a bit of text cleanup to do in the next couple of weeks." Well, what with travel and holidays and my computer breaking and all, what was legitimately only a couple weeks of active working time took a month to get done.

But now, I've done another pass through the novel to reassure myself that, yes, the story does hang together coherently, and I've made a bunch of small but important changes suggested by my brilliant and patient in-progress readers. So now I can really and truly announce that this draft is completed. I've sent PDFs out to people who I remembered had expressed interest in reading. If I forgot about you, or if your interest has remained a secret until now, let me know. As always, there will be more drafts, and someday (fingers crossed) an actual published book that you'll be able to read.

To that end, querying begins Monday, for real.

Short version: My MacBook Air is all better now. It was fixed on Thursday. (Sorry to not post sooner -- I know you were all waiting anxiously for news.)

( Long version )

In 2008, I ( continued my tradition of doing things. )

We just returned from a family trip to Point Reyes Station, near the coast north of San Francisco, where I:

* Sprained my foot on the first night. Doh! There was a power outage, and I was attempting to go outside to admire the stars in complete darkness during a brief period of cloudlessness, but I was foiled by a wet front step. As a result, I spent most of the next two days sitting on the couch. Which is not the worst way to spend a rainy vacation.

* Appreciated the return of both my mobility and the sun on Christmas Day. We celebrated the holiday with the traditional flat seasonal foods of crepes for breakfast and latkes (along with probably-now-traditional bacon and eggs) for dinner.

* Ate well and practically constantly, natch. (And discussed the word "natch".) There were many flavors of ice cream, with the most unusual two being butternut squash and clove buttermilk, both very tasty.

* Played games, including Guitar Hero World Tour (inferior to Rock Band, in my opinion), Blokus, Take Two, Boggle, Taboo, and Pictionary. Note: It's really hard to draw the phrase "cave drawings", especially if you get off to a pathetic start.

* Read one novel, didn't write any.

* Once again left the taking of photos in the hands of my more capable companion photographer.

A few days ago, I was getting down with the happy dance of joy. (Sorry, no video evidence exists.) The reason for my dancing foolishness is that I once again made it to The End of The Overworld, the novel I've been working on for most of the past three years. ( gruesome details inside )

The second annual NaNoWriMo Night of Writing Dangerously Write-a-thon was fabulous! I only wrote half as many words as I did during last year's event, so that must mean I had twice as much fun, right?

It was hard to sit down and write during this so-called write-a-thon because I was so busy with other activities. These included:

* talking to lots and lots of cool people, including two on video chat from Canada and some in person from as far away as Australia.

* consuming a ridiculous amount of candy, including candy that isn't actually any good, such as chocolate Necco wafers and a strip of candy buttons/dots.

* adding to the collaborative story.

* being interviewed for a Stanford radio show. (I'll of course let you know if anything comes of it.) Check out how earnest and engaging I look when I'm giving an interview.

* listening to Chris Baty's wonderful and hilarious talk on the first 10 years of NaNoWriMo.

* having an author photo taken. I'm using two from last year on my web site. I skipped the viking hat this year, as I was already wearing a fedora, in keeping with the NaNoNoir theme.

* eating more candy. Oh yeah, and a tasty dinner, too.

* and most excellently, having Chris call figarofigaro1 to wish him a happy birthday.

Yay for skneal and Storyist taking photos for me to link to!

Though this is my seventh year participating in National Novel Writing Month, this time around I've experienced a couple of ( NaNo firsts. )

Hope everyone else's NaNoWriMo is going well.

I have:

- Halloween candy
- names for the characters in my NaNo novel, The Nap That Never Was
- a sense of zen-like calm and literary abandon about the eventual plot or lack thereof for this novel
- a nap that never was
- an article about NaNoWriMo in the latest South Bay Writers newsletter (page 6)
- a cough and a hoarse sultry voice
- more Halloween candy

Happy Halloween to all, and to all a good NaNoWriMo!

So, the deadline and all that. When I got back from vacation and back to work on revisions, I had a couple chapters of smooth sailing (or whatever metaphor I'm currently abusing). Then I finally had to face the pacing and sequencing problems I knew existed in the last third of the novel, and that required long sessions of scribbling notes in tiny, illegible handwriting, but I arrived at some solutions I was very happy with. In early October, it was really looking like the question of whether I'd finish this draft before the end of the month could go either way.

In the past week, I had to admit that unless I wanted to sacrifice sleep and the quality of the end of the book, both of which were clearly not options, I was not going to finish by the deadline. It was not that upsetting a revelation, because come on, how slow a learner can I possibly be? I really will have only about three chapters left going into November, and I intend in all sincerity to just keep editing while also starting my NaNo novel. The new novel isn't designed to be too time- or energy-intensive, and I'm not even feeling particularly invested in it at this point, which might be just what I need this year.

I haven't made much more progress than before on NaNo plans. I will at the very least have to decide what the characters are going to be named by the time November starts. It would also be nice if I had a clearer idea of what happens beyond the first chapter or two, but I'm not getting too worked up about it. There are still two weeks left for genius to strike.

I grow weary of my uncompleted travel notes. Herewith, the rest of the now-long-ago trip, in a desultory fashion:

* In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, we got to see and meet many delightful people, most of whom have LJ usernames. We also saw many of my family members, who (fortunately) do not.

* This portion of the trip was heavy on spending time with people and light on scenic and noteworthy locales, which is why I have less to talk about and almost no photos to share. nena_nieve's little Rhode Island village was pretty darn picturesque, though, but I failed to take any pictures.

* Brown University, like the state of Vermont, is under a lot of construction. This sign, posted at the construction sites, is really something.

* Oh, all right, I guess I'd better talk about food. The stuffed French toast at Sound Bites was pretty darn tasty, but the company of copper_beech and desireearmfeldt was even better. The French toast created by contessagrrl was so good that it competed with even the sparkling company of the chef, laurenhat, and their wonderful friends. (That sentence was really designed to be complimentary to everyone involved, and I hope it hasn't failed massively.) Out of the Blue, J.P. Licks, and Tu y Yo get big recommendations from me, and were enjoyed along with more lovely company.

* The bummer of the trip was that our rental car window was smashed in a parking lot near Davis Square, and the GPS we'd left on the dash was stolen. Somerville residents: Did you know that your fair city is overrun with criminals, hoodlums, and dare I say it, ninjas? Ninjas: Thanks a lot for breaking into our car the day it started pouring down rain. Jerks. Travelers: If you're going to have your car window smashed, have it be a rental car, not your own. So much easier to deal with, since the rental company will give you a new car.

* It rained. A lot. The Californians were standing around going, "What's this wet stuff falling from the sky? Rain, you say? Hm, I might remember rain." (I tried to remember, but I said, "What's a flower?")

* And then we went home. The end.

Ah, Burlington, Vermont! Ah, all the witty things I would have said about our time there if I'd made this post a week and a half ago! ( But here are the notes I can remember, and photos, too! )