Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak...

It only took six months to get this way!

I'm back.

Or at least, I'm back for this one post at least.

What in the world happened to me for the last half of last year? I wish I could point to monumental happenstances which prevented me from making entries here. Sadly, that is simply not the case. I've been at my computer almost daily, as is my wont, yet none of those days led me to this corner of the Internet. Part of me feels guilty about this, but a larger part of me refuses to beat myself up about it. Let's face it: most of what's put out here is just me screaming or whispering into the void in any case, so the person I first aim to please is, quite selfishly, me. And "me" has had other, mostly mundane, things going on.

So, let's spend a moment catching up with where I left off since my last entry in June of 2019, shall we?

Summer breaking

This summer saw Number Two Son moving in with us in order to begin his journey through college. It also saw us procuring a car for him, that car being involved in a wreck, and procuring ANOTHER, VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL car for him. If he hadn't actually been there when the wreck occurred, I'm not sure he would have believed the cars were different.

Number One Son was also involved in that wreck as well as an accident with HIS car that required repair. Thankfully, neither of the sons was hurt at all during any of the above. We're sincerely hoping that this has gotten both of them past the statistical portion of accidents while driving.

Fall beginnings/ends

Fall had Number Two Son enjoying his first semester of college. He says he enjoys it more than high school. I think it has to do with him being able to set his own schedule a little better as well as not having to get up early any day except Monday. He even went to a couple of social things, although I don't think he's actually hanging out with anyone regularly. I remember having similar experiences my first couple of years of college. Then again, I always had a girlfriend back home, so I didn't spend much time actually *living* while I was there.

Meanwhile, Number One Son finished his final semester, graduating with an Associates of Applied Science in Web Design and Development. Garrett was really worried that he wasn't going to be able to find a job, given the ratio of applications he was making to responses he was getting. Then, over the course of about a week, he set up an interview, had it conducted, and accepted a job with a company called Revature. He's now preparing to head off for their three-month-long coding boot camp in West Virginia, after which he'll be placed with a client to begin a two-year contract (with Revature, not the specific client). I'm all emotions wrapped together for him -- excited, proud, anxious, happy, sad, freaked are the most dominant currently. 

Mostly, I'm coming to grips with the fact that Garrett is, in fact, all grown up, and about to be off on his own. Gabriel is right behind, living mostly independently from Tanya and I even though he's right upstairs. It really does seem like the virtual blink of an eye since they were toddling around. I'm reminded of that daily by some picture or memory of them from the past, primarily via their Contact pictures on my phone (which are, of course, from when they were little bitty) juxtaposed with two men, both at least as tall as me, and sporting beards I could never grow.

I'll stop here, but encourage all of you to cherish EVERY moment of your life, especially those shared with people you love. Each moment is completely unique and will never occur again in all of existence. Ultimately, they are the sum total of who we are.

Autumn Vacacay

We took an Autumn trip to Minsk and Spain and have a zillion pictures. I REALLY considered blogging about those as they happened, but was very focused on other things at those times, like being *IN* those places instead of looking at them in third person. I'm glad I resisted the urge and remained (mostly) disconnected from reality for those days.

Suffice to say that I thoroughly enjoyed visiting Minsk in the fall, and was finally graced with some proper weather (gray, slightly rainy, and chilly). Leaving Minsk and arriving at Tenerife in the Canary Islands was a culture shock of another kind, and was breathtakingly gorgeous, marred only by the fact that driving (and parking) there is painful. A day in Barcelona wasn't enough, but we saw enough of the city to say that we've been there. It was a trip worth taking.

NaNoWriMo

I wrote another book. It was a return to the world of Aether, and I actually finished it, all the way through. Most of it is, as usual, crap, but there were at least a few scenes in there that make it worth editing. The next step will be to go back through it and start writing the first draft of a REAL book. I might not dump too much, as Tanya will be better than I am about identifying what things are interesting versus boring.

This makes for a total of four books I've written: one that went through a couple of rounds of revision, two that weren't worth finishing, and another that is to-be-edited. Add to that a handful of short stories and a ridiculous haiku collection, and I suppose I have to consider myself to have an actual hobby.

And before you ask -- no, I never picked up the other hobby (drawing/playing an instrument). I didn't have that much extra energy.

What's next?

• The year-end reading challenge review is in flight. I'm hoping to add a couple of interesting statistics to it this year, but we'll see how that pans out.
• I've already mentioned the first real draft/edit of the NaNoWriMo2019 book, so that'll happen.
• Supporting Number One and Number Two sons.
• Trying to maintain good habits in health, fitness, work, and play.

I make no promises, but as of now intend to create more content here as well. I'd tell you to stay tuned, but that seems self-serving as well as disingenuous. Tell you what -- check back every now and then, checking the monthly post totals. If any of them have gone up since your last visit, have at them!

And I sincerely wish all of you all the best for this year!

NaNoWriMo 2018

That makes three in a row...

Pretty similar to last year's graphic...

First, context. If you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, mark the following for later reading: National Novel Writing Month.

As I've already mentioned, this was my third year of completing the challenge (results for prior years can be found here: 2016, 2017).

This year was... different... from the past two years. More on that later. Let's get straight to the numbers (since everyone likes graphics and/or tables).

Only 25 days!

That's right, everyone! I crossed the "finished" line on 11/25, with a full five days to spare. This result was three days faster than last year, but still two days slower than 2016. Still, the pace seemed really consistent. Metrics include:

• Highest day's output: 3,491 words on 11/04
• Lowest day's output: 630 words on 11/13
• Mean daily output: 2,024 words
• Median daily output: 2,050 words

So, what did I learn this year? Or maybe, what did I think about this year's challenge?

Writing every day, even just a little, helps a ridiculous amount. Looking at the day-by-day, you can tell that my flow, such as it was, never suffered from the interruptions that life brings like last year. I had other things going on (more on that in a minute), but still managed to find at least 30 minutes throughout the day to write a few sentences.

Finishing prior to Thanksgiving is a good goal, but extremely difficult. This year, especially, since Thanksgiving was early-ish (11/22), getting everything done before having to leave town or otherwise deal with the festivities was a lot to ask for. I realized this relatively early on and managed my expectations accordingly. The goal shifted to steady progress, at least a little, every day, INCLUDING on travel days and while I was out of town.

(High) Fantasy is pretty fun to write. This probably goes without saying for other writers in the genre, but I found high fantasy to be really fun to play with. Most of my writing is urban fantasy, with a little sci fi and high fantasy thrown in, but this was my first long high fantasy work since high school. Worldbuilding, even in pantser style, was incredibly enjoyable. Some days where my output was lower were actually my most creative, as I was thinking about the world itself, its peoples, its histories, naming things, drawing maps, etc. Some of that work made it back into the story, but most of it was just there, flavoring my thoughts as they went along.

I don't take my advice very well. Last year, I mentioned two important things:

1. Reduce commitments to free up writing time.
2. Write regularly throughout the year so the habit won't be so forced.

Yeah, neither of those happened. I'll speak about the second one first. This turned out not to be that big a deal for me. I wrote a couple of short stories this year, including a silly one involving my summer glamping trip and a funnier one for Halloween, but not much else (aside from journaling). Even so, getting into the writing, finding the times for it, wasn't all that challenging. I looked forward to it on most days, and don't remember feeling like it was a slog at all this year. That's not to say I didn't get frustrated at the way the story went, but I didn't feel like I was fighting it like I did last year.

The first one was much worse this year. We're not running anymore for lots of reasons, but I still try to get some regular exercise in on a daily basis. I'm still running D&D, and participating in the Transformers role-playing game at Matt's. I'm more or less RUNNING Be A Santa this year, as Pat has essentially been out of the country since October. I'm still gainfully employed, even had a work trip over the last few days of the month. Then there's the stuff I do around the house normally, and by the end of doing all that, I'm beginning to feel stretched a little thin...

Worth it? ABSOLUTELY! Despite what I just said about being stretched, I enjoyed this year's challenge more than last year's. I don't think there was any single thing, but the combination of writing something completely new without the expectation of it being good or even making sense was pretty liberating. I felt like I was more in the spirit of NaNoWriMo this year than last.

And the book I wound up with is... broken. Fundamentally broken. HOWEVER, it's got enough interesting stuff to make me realize that I could pick it up for editing and not feel like I was scraping my face off with a rusty spoon. About halfway through, I switched viewpoint characters, and that felt great. I also realized afterward that one character that started silly then turned serious could actually remain silly if I just shifted some of their attributes to the third character (yes, there are three companions in this story). I'm also very pleased with the various races that populate the world, even if they're not all that original, because there are ways to shake them up. It's kind of fun to have a dragonborn that acts like a dwarf a lot of the time.

So... editing in January/February. But, there's still something to be done this year. My last bit of writing for the year will be a Christmastime short story. I really want to make it a ghost story, since that's the old tradition, but I'm struggling with a theme. Any suggestions? :-)

NaNoWriMo 2017

Well, I did it.

This badge is way cooler than last year's!

Another November has past, and another 50,000+ words were written in a NaNoWriMo sprint. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, have a look at a couple of links:

• NaNoWriMo: The writing competition with yourself, and a community of fun!
• My 2016 result: Thoughts from my participation in last year's competition.

For those of you that didn't click the second link, last year's efforts were "complete" after 23 days. This year's efforts were more "sane," in that I used almost all of the allotted time to cross the 50,000 word mark. I'm not going to make any excuses, but I *am* going to offer some thoughts, explanations, and insights into what made this year different from last year. First, though, let's see the splits!

That's a long list.

Here are the interesting metrics from the above table.

• Maximum output: 3910 words on 11/28
• Minimum output: 0 (!) words on 11/18
• Average output: 1799 words per day
• Median output: 1925 words

Insights garnered from comparing this year's effort to last year's:

• Writing every day for at least an hour matters. This is actually a maxim for anyone that wants to write well. I'm not even talking about writing to sell stories. I'm saying that the craft of writing is improved by constant and consistent practice. For NaNoWriMo, keeping the foot on the gas matters.
• Finishing sooner is better. Last year, I finished the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This year, I had to try to write some over the Thanksgiving break, when everyone else is sleeping off the turkey buzz and/or storming the gates of Black Friday madness. Writing the day of any celebration where you're traveling is tough to pull off properly (as you can see from my 296 word effort on Thanksgiving day).
• Writing complete crap really is OK. This was hard for me to accept, but there are parts of this story that are piles of steaming hot excrement. There are multiple places where I left "<insert foo here>" and moved on because I didn't know what the "foo" should be at that moment. Ultimately, I figured out where the story was going generally and how to get there for the most part, and that is really all that matters. If you never get as far as the point from the last sentence, you will never write a book. Period. End of story, literally.

There are a few other thoughts about and lessons learned from this year as well.

• Minimizing commitments is crucial. One of the reasons I didn't have as much time and dedication to this year's effort is because I had (and still have) a bunch of other stuff on my plate. 
• I'm training for a half-marathon in March 2018, so we're running four times a week. In fact, we had a 5k race the Saturday after Thanksgiving. 
• I'm hosting and running a D&D campaign for the boys and the Scattershooters (group of friends from way back), and we had the first big story arc for the larger campaign on 11/18 (the day I wrote 0 words). Don't think I wasn't writing that day -- I was picking up the boys and finishing other prep work (15 or so pages of character, setting, and outlines for the first couple of scenarios).
• I'm helping with beasanta.org's annual fundraising efforts to benefit Penny Lane. This is my fourth year doing it, and it's always exciting, fulfilling, and stressful. If you haven't checked it out yet, stop reading this and do so. :-)
• Did I mention Thanksgiving? Traveling and spending time with loved ones is a must, and I enjoying being able to do so. Like I said above, having the book "done" before this is a WAY better scenario.
• Oh yeah, work. Work is still a thing I do for about 1/3 of the day, and it takes up about half of my waking time.
• Writing regularly throughout the year helps. I've been revising last year's book off and on for the better part of the year, but haven't really been spending dedicated, daily time working on the craft of writing. I think that if I'd been more diligent about that, even as little as fifteen minutes a day doing creative journaling or scene writing or anything, would have put me in a better position than I started in.
• Pantsing can be frustrating. If you don't know the difference between a Planner and a Pantser, the gist is that a planner plans the story a bit before writing while a pantser flies by the seat of their pants, essentially writing whatever comes into their mind. Stephen King is a famous pantser. He essentially thinks up characters and settings and puts the characters in the settings and writes what he observes happening. I am also a pantser, but I didn't feel nearly as inspired about this year's characters and setting as I was by last year's. As a result, the writing turned into slogging. About halfway through, I knew I didn't even want to finish the story.
• Take what you're given and be thankful. Even though I wasn't thrilled with the story as I was writing it, some really good things fell out of it. First of all, I should let you know that this story takes place in the same universe as last year's. With that said, I can see how one of the characters from this year's story could cross paths with the protagonists from last year's, and have a fully fleshed out backstory. If nothing else, that's a really good thing. And the characters from this year's story did manage to surprise me a bit. The guy that I was sure was a bad guy from the beginning turned out to not be, and the guy that I was sure was a good guy turned out far darker than I expected.

So now that it's done, was it worth it? Yes, definitely so. I needed to make sure that last year wasn't some kind of fluke. I now have two data points: I can write 50,000 in 23 or 28 days. I *can* write a bunch if I really *want* to. It also taught me that I need to vary my approach and style to help keep it fresh. I had the honor of meeting and hanging out a little with Amber Benson in September, who had already given me this advice. Amber, thank you, I'm finally ready to listen. :-) And finally, I apparently do like writing enough to put myself through this two years in a row, and see it through to the end both times.

I may have finally found the hobby I can carry through to old age... :-D

New Year's Resolutions

Today is July 30. We are a month beyond the year’s halfway mark — past time to take stock of how things are going.

How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along? I actually don’t make New Year’s Resolutions anymore. I stopped making them several years ago when I realized (or admitted to myself… I’m not sure which) that if something is worth doing, you don’t need a special day on which to initiate the thing. Life, as it turns out, is too short to wait until January 1st to make a change that you want to make, or should make, or ultimately need to make.

I also think that change is necessary in order to grow. Change doesn't have to be drastic, and the kinds of changes/challenges I undertake usually aren’t huge upsets to my routine. Here are a few of the things I’m currently working on.

Mindfulness

I’m a very goal-oriented person. I like having a target at which to shoot, a direction in which to go. Ironically, one of my goals for growth this year has been to be more mindful of life as it is instead of as I think it should be. As such, I’ve taken to doing mindfulness practice more regularly, trying to get in five minutes a day four or five times a week. It’s a practice because our animal brains aren’t naturally wired for this kind of introspection and self evaluation. Combine that with the constant inundation of stimuli in our current environment, and most people wind up with squirrels in their heads (including me). So, five minutes a day of sitting still, focusing on something simple (like breathing), and gently bringing that focus back to the breath every few seconds has been a challenge and treat for me.

Fitness

Over the past year, I’ve taken on several fitness challenges. To be clear: Tanya and I have been trying to work towards improved health through changes in our diet and exercise for a while now. But last October, I had bilateral inguinal hernia repair surgery. Combine that with the recent annual physical that revealed that my glucose was at pre-diabetic levels, that I have slightly elevated cholesterol levels, and top it off with my deficient vitamin D levels, and I needed to focus on losing some extra fat. I’ve lived in the 210- to 220-pound range for twenty years or so, which is at least twenty pounds beyond the ideal range given my height. Changes in diet alone never seemed to get me below 205, so I finally bore down and started lifting some weights combined with running regularly and more strict adherence to healthy foods. This has required me to sacrifice sleep, which isn’t ideal, but the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. As of the time of this writing, I’ve spent the last month in the 195-197 range, which means I’ve got about seven pounds to go to hit the ideal weight (according to the notes from the annual physical). It’s strange to have plateaued there, but I think it’s an indication that I, once again, need to change something. I've said it before and will say it again: change is good!

Reading

Regular followers of this blog will know that I’ve been trying to read more for the past few years, and have succeeded pretty well. However, I noticed that last year, I was trying to “hit the number” instead of reading what I wanted to and enjoying it along the way. This year, I decided to still have an aggressive reading goal, but would not beat myself up if I didn’t hit it. I’ve found that I’ve enjoyed reading more, and have punted on stuff that I didn’t enjoy more easily as well. I’m also trying purposefully to vary my genres and authors, which has been enlightening in several ways.

Writing

Ah, so many things to touch on here.

Books. Or rather, Book

First of all, I am declaring the book I started with NaNaWriMo 2016 “done.” I don’t think it’ll ever be DONE done, but I don’t particularly want to futz with it anymore. It’s been through two simple revisions, and I think is good enough to get the story I wanted to tell told. I’m strangely unsure of what to do with it next. I think the general process would be to have other people read it, so if you’re interested in an electronic copy, let me know. ;)

Blog

Beyond the book, there’s this blog. If you’re here, you know how that’s going — I’m at roughly the same pace I set last year. The truth is that I write something here when I feel inspired, or it occurs to me that I haven’t had a post all month.

Journal

The other thing I’ve tried doing, with very limited success, is journaling. I’m not talking about typing stuff into yet another electronic gadget; I mean full-on, hand-written journaling. I made mention in a post this year about fountain pen experimentation, but haven’t actually written a blog entry about it yet. Suffice to say that I am using a fountain pen to write in a paper journal on occasion. This type of writing is the one for which I find myself making the least time. Yesterday, I was challenged by my friend Pat to change that habit. I plan to rise to the challenge, and will hopefully report back here relatively soon on successful efforts!

Travel

Tanya and I have made it a point to increase our travel over the past few years. She’s now working for a company that does quarter off-sites, one of which was in London. We took that opportunity to explore that grand city (as detailed in the London Vacacay blog series). We also typically take a summer trip with the boys. This year, we hadn’t planned to do anything, as the boys had already been on a cruise with their mom and her family, and only like our “active” vacations so-so. However, since this is the last summer Garrett will have free, we decided to get out of town at least for a few days and stay in a cabin in the woods in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. It hasn’t happened yet, but is impending. We have at least a couple more trips in the queue this year, so stay tuned for future entries about those.

So, at this point in the year, I’m quite satisfied with the way I’m growing. I sincerely hope each of you is enjoying a fantastic year so far, and encourage you to make resolutions to grow every day — you don’t have to wait until New Year’s…

Current Reading Status

At the beginning of the year, I set a reading goal of 50 books. This seems like a low bar considering how many I read last year (65). When setting the goal for this year, I realized that I wanted to focus on diversifying my efforts a bit, to pursue some of my other interests with more gusto.

To that end, I managed to finish the first revision of my NaNoWriMo book earlier this month, and I'd like to keep writing more consistently (look for a future blog entry on my experimentation with fountain pens). I've started running again, and have kept up the habit fairly well so far. I also have a goal of necessity: I want to become more flexible. My muscles and joints tend to ache more now than they used to, and I think that increasing my flexibility (or at least focusing on stretching/warming down properly) will help mitigate that.

The good news is that I'm making progress along all of the above fronts, and am enjoying doing them as well. But reading... Reading might have been a catalyst to help me figure out that I needed to spend a little more time doing things that expand my mind and make me happy, especially in light of so much that might cause distress day-to-day. (insert politics/economics/other miscellaneous worries here)

It's the last day of February, and I have managed to finish reading eight books so far this year. They are:

1. The Backwards Mask, by Matt Carson
2. The Heart of What Was Lost, by Tad Williams
3. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
4. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
5. The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
6. Tales of Pirx the Pilot, by Stanislaw Lem
7. Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher
8. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich

I liked all of the above very well, and encourage you to pick them up if you haven't. 

I think it's interesting to see the distribution as well. Two of these are non-fiction (one philosophy, one political economics), two are sci-fi, four are fantasy (with two urban and one alternate history). Additionally, two of them are collections of short stories (Side Jobs and Pirx the Pilot).

Strangely, my to-read list never seems to decrease, despite a consumption rate of one book a week. My long-lost love for reading has definitely been rediscovered, and is being pursued passionately.

Whatever inspires you, I hope you get a chance make the time to do more of it in the days to come. :-)

NaNoWriMo Part 2

Before I get into the unexpected happenings of NaNoWriMo, I'd like to take a moment to talk about Scrivener. I purchased Scrivener two summers ago, after reading Stephen King's On Writing. I used it a fair amount at the end of that summer and for the rest of 2015, but had really not done very much writing during 2016. This was not the tool's fault, unless we're referring to the tool between the keyboard and chair. Scrivener is a very powerful tool for all kinds of writing. I happen to use it to write short stories and blog entries, but it supports authorship of screenplays, scholarly or news articles, and poetry among other things. It's a mature product, and has a LOT of how-to articles and videos to help you get up the learning curve. It's a little pricey, but not selling for an exorbitant amount, costing as much as a newly released video game and less than a yearly license for almost all of the other software tools I use professionally.

So, with Scrivener opened to a newly created novel project, I started typing. My normal writing speed is somewhere between 700 and 900 words per hour without stopping for too much editing or backtracking. With NaNoWriMo, you're supposed to write an average of 1,667 words daily to get to the 50,000 word mark by the end of November. At my hourly rate, I was going to have to write for at least a couple of hours a day. I was getting up an hour earlier than usual, so one hour was available, but where would the other hour come from?

As I typed that first morning, words appeared on the page, and kept appearing regardless of my effort to stop. I wrote for at least an hour and a half, and found that I was genuinely enjoying it. I went to work, but was distracted at times by thoughts about what was going on with the story, as if the characters' lives were progressing while I wasn't looking. I wound up jotting down random thoughts throughout the day, and then writing more in the evening instead of messing around on the Internet or doing whatever I do normally.

During the first two days, I wrote 5,218 words. I wasn't diligent the first two days about updating my word count at the end of each day, but the average for those first two days was 2,609 words per day. I was ahead of schedule already, and quite surprised by that fact. I thought for sure I'd be lagging behind early on. This year really did feel different than my two previous attempts on all levels.

There's a maxim in writing: "Show, don't tell." For your edification, here's the breakdown of my progress per day, in tabular format.

Date	Total	Incremental
Tuesday, November 1, 2016	2609	-
Wednesday, November 2, 2016	5218	2609
Thursday, November 3, 2016	7200	1982
Friday, November 4, 2016	9264	2064
Saturday, November 5, 2016	12085	2821
Sunday, November 6, 2016	14339	2254
Monday, November 7, 2016	16236	1897
Tuesday, November 8, 2016	18105	1869
Wednesday, November 9, 2016	20152	2047
Thursday, November 10, 2016	22168	2016
Friday, November 11, 2016	23079	911
Saturday, November 12, 2016	25718	2639
Sunday, November 13, 2016	29247	3529
Monday, November 14, 2016	32678	3431
Tuesday, November 15, 2016	33841	1163
Wednesday, November 16, 2016	35921	2080
Thursday, November 17, 2016	37870	1949
Friday, November 18, 2016	40334	2464
Saturday, November 19, 2016	41550	1216
Sunday, November 20, 2016	43501	1951
Monday, November 21, 2016	45936	2435
Tuesday, November 22, 2016	47637	1701
Wednesday, November 23, 2016	50421	2784

By the end of the day on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I had made it to the victory requirement, and still had a scene left to write. I had done it -- I had written a The-Great-Gatsby-sized novel in just 23 days.

Interesting metrics include:

• Max output: 3,529 words on Sunday, 11/13
• Min output: 911 words on Friday, 11/11
• Average output: 2,173 words
• Median output: 2,064 words

As an aside: Sunday 11/13 and Monday 11/14 were the first two days that Tanya was in Australia. I found myself both inspired and trying not to think about the fact that she was on the other side of the planet quite a bit those days.

If I wrote an average of 800 words per hour, then that means that on a typical day for the first three or so weeks of November, I wrote for 2.5 hours. Here's the key bit though: I didn't feel like it was that long. I didn't find myself dreading the time required to get the word count in. I was energized pretty much the entire time. In other words, this didn't feel like work, at least not for those three weeks.

I haven't mentioned the final week on purpose, because I took my foot off the gas pedal, let my mind wander a bit, and messed around with a couple of alternate final scenes. I did just enough work on them to realize that I really didn't like either of them. I wound up with almost 56,000 words, but the last 5,000 need to be completely flushed down the toilet in favor of something that actually pleases me.

The other thing that I've found myself doing this past week is studying the craft of writing a little more. Brandon Sanderson (one of my favorite authors) teaches a class at BYU on creative writing. This past spring, they recorded the lectures and published them on youtube. If you're interested in what he he has to say, you should definitely check them out. I'm only through the third lesson, but very much like what I've heard so far.

Where does that leave me? Am I going to become a professional writer? Almost certainly not. However, I have learned something about myself, and that is that I genuinely like making up silly stories. I fully intend to go back and revise this one in January (as NaNoWriMo has suggested), and even if no one else reads it, it will have been worth it. My imagination produced something that (I think) I would like to read. This is a hobby worth having.

NaNoWriMo Part 1

And here you thought it would be November 30th before you got another post...

November has, admittedly, been a busy month both personally and professionally. On the work front, we've been trying to secure a deal with a new, rather large, client. The good news is that the client is not only very interested in our product, but more highly motivated than we'd anticipated. We've had several sets of discovery meetings, and I'm happy to say that we're now engaged in a proof-of-concept implementation with them. We are VERY excited about this.

On the personal front, I need to offer full disclosure to you. I had surgery about halfway through October that has kept me pretty inactive for the past six weeks. That, in some ways, is a good thing. The forced inactivity allowed me some extra time to do something that I've wanted to do for years and never got the full motivation to finish...

This year, I entered NaNoWriMo again, for the first time in a long time.

For those of you that aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo and didn't click the link, here's the executive summary.

<snipped from the website>
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing.

On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel.
<end snip>

I first heard about NaNoWriMo at least seven years ago (and most likely eight or more). That first year, I had a severe false start and only got about 6,000 words in before giving up. The second year I doubled that total, but also fell flat on my face at that point. As a side note, that was the year that my friend Staci Linson entered and produced a book that might still be unfinished at 100,000 words (if memory serves). The next several years were no-go's for me altogether, although I considered it every year. I always managed to find "reasons" not to do it.

But this year was different. I had been getting up early to work out since the spring, and then surgery happened. So when November rolled around, I knew I could carve an hour out of the day just by getting back into the "waking up early" routine. I also had at least a vague sense of what I could write about as well. I created my official NaNoWriMo profile on Hallowe'en; I was all set to go. I set the alarm for 5:30 the next morning, and fell quickly asleep.

I woke up from a dream before my alarm went off on November 1. The dream was an interesting one. I made the decision to use that dream as the basis for my NaNoWriMo story instead of the original vague thoughts I'd had. I realized it was a completely different direction and that I had absolutely no idea of where it would go (much less how it would end), but I trusted that something interesting would evolve. I later found out that NaNoWriMo has a badge for this behavior. I am a Pantser. Simply put, a plotter is someone who plans out the entire novel before writing it. A pantser is someone who, “flies by the seat of their pants,” meaning they don't plan out anything, or plan very little. Some people, call themselves “plantsers,” which means they're in a little of both. (thanks to The Writing Practice for the succinct definitions).

So, I had a brand new story in my head. I opened Scrivener, created a new novel project, and started writing. What happened next was completely unexpected, and I look forward to telling you about it in the next installment.

And yes, I know I'm an incorrigible tease...