I don't even...

Truthfully, I've got nothing to say. Really. I just got tired of looking at that last post, and never quite got around to doing a music post (but I keep promising myself that I will!). So here's a random post to get rid of that last one.

Let's talk about NaNoWriMo for a minute, since we're here. I did it, and I won, and I did it quickly, that's how good my outline was. As in, I was finished by November 15th. And it was actually kind of a bummer because it took away from the experience for me -- part of the fun is the struggle and the bonding with other participants to see if you can get it done or not. And instead, I felt like one of the assholes in the Overachievers thread who has to set their word count goal to like 150,000 (pfffft!) because they are so prolific they can't possibly settle for a mere 50k. So I kept it on the downlow and kept posting in the Chick Lit thread and getting to know the women who started the Chick Lit NaNo Cheerleaders group (they are all awesome, by the way, and by "awesome" I mean "super fucking cool and awesome"). But I felt sort of fraudster-y and whatever, and then later I felt dumb for being embarrassed by finishing so quickly. Why be embarrassed about something like that? It's only because I had a really detailed outline. It's never going to happen again, let me just say that!

And doing NaNo did totally screw with my head and mess up what I had going on with Less Than Perfect (novel #1). I lost my mojo for a while there. But I think I have it back. I just have this huge chunk of the book that needs to get fixed and taken down to about a third of its length -- this huge chunk called "the beginning". Which is like whatever, no problem, right? Also I feel like it's all lost focus a little bit. But I think my readers will give me fresh glimpses into where the focus needs to be. Let's just hope that my five readers don't come with five totally different opinions...

So also, I just want to say that Christmas was lame. It was lame, because my sister wasn't there. Maybe it will be better next year, but this year, it made me feel stressed out and a little bit melancholy and there was drama with getting a new tree (I was allergic. To a plastic tree. We had to take it back. Even the store clerk laughed at me.) so we didn't end up having a tree and that didn't help, and we didn't plan well financially, so that made it hard to buy gifts, and -- it was lame, like I said. I mean, it was nice to be with the family, and see the kids having a good time. But there was the underlying unspoken sadness over who was missing and honestly, I was just glad when it was over and we had gotten through it.

Our traditional Christmas morning breakfast at the Waffle House was delightful, though!

Also, I didn't hit my goal for 2011 of reading 100 books, and I counted comic books. Comic books. Okay, they were trades, but still -- I still couldn't get it done. I blame my sister dying. I'll do it in 2012 for sure.

So That Happened.

Seriously, I can't believe it's almost Halloween.

Obviously, the last couple of months have been a little... well... stressful, for me. My sister passed away and it was horrible and it's still horrible, and I miss her every single day. But then to top it all off, about two weeks after her memorial service, I was innocently wandering through my favorite grocery store, and slipped in a huge puddle of something and broke my ankle. So I've been in this boot-cast stupid thing for almost a month now, and have about two more weeks with it, and it's generally been the biggest pain in the motherfucking ass EVER. Because first of all, it's my left foot and I'm left handed and left footed. And second of all, we live on the third floor of a building with no elevators. So good times have been had.

Yeah.

Anyway. I'm trying to finish the second, hopefully way more polished, draft of my novel. It is so much harder than I thought it would be. It goes like this: you sit there and you know what has to be done, but you can't figure out HOW to do it, so you just stare and stare until the page becomes blurry, and then you get up and wander around the house and eat some chocolate and take a shower and while you're in the shower you have a revelation and figure out HOW to do it, and then you go do it, and then you move on to the next thing that needs to be fixed, and you sit there and you know what has to be done, but you can't figure out HOW...

Yeah.

And there's this voice that lives inside my head that tells me all the time how I could totally get this done faster AND better if I didn't have to work full time, if I didn't have to take care of my child, if I didn't have to ever speak to my husband again. And sometimes part of me believes that voice and I become very crabby and out of sorts and bent out of shape with my real life. Other times I manage to just suck it up and get the writing in when I can like I always have. Early mornings. Late at night. Lunch hours.

Today it's snowing, the first big snowfall of the season. I feel like I should be allowed to stay home and write if the weather sucks, but that didn't happen -- the amount of snow fell far short of the predictions. So much for that idea.

Revising mostly feels like taking one step up and two steps back. I'll be all excited over a breakthrough, and then I'm suddenly crushed because something else isn't working, or because a part I've fixed creates problems elsewhere, 100 pages down the road.

But it's getting there.

It's definitely better than it was when I finished the first draft in July. It's changed, a lot. It's a thousand times better than what it was when I started pounding it out for NaNoWriMo last year.

I just wish I could make it get there faster, without sacrificing the writing.

But it's getting there.