NaNooo NaNooo (That's Orkian for I'm Breaking My Neck)

My friend DeAnn said she's not doing National Novel Writing Month because she finds the pace "too neck breaking." Well, she's right. It's also housework breaking, homework breaking, meal-preparation breaking, and probably a lot of other things. I am not sure it's truly worth it. It's fun, the creativity and the sense of accomplishment, but I hope I'm not losing sight of other things that could really use...sight.

Meanwhile, my go-to sustenance during this neck breaking is something I found at WalMart called "Strawberry Awake." It's cold cereal, kind of like Frosted Flakes but with slices of delicious freeze-dried strawberries in it. Oh, and the flakes are not corn. They're wheat and rice flakes, so the texture is unexpectedly crisp. LOVE it. It's a WalMart brand, and I don't know if there's a brand name comparable cereal, and I don't really care. This is doing the job for now. Until it runs out and I have to break away from my broken neck and go back to the store.


The 50,000 words in a month isn't a problem. I can probably type that just in Facebook replies alone. (I'm kind of a junkie lately. It's also contributing to the housework-breaking, I'm sure.) It's getting those 50K into a coherent form, with pacing and characterization and excitement and scenes. I keep having to jump away from the text flying from my fingertips and do research checks online. (I am doing something a little technical and I need to check my facts as I go.) This leads to Facebook checks. And slowed progress.

But I will sally forth! Right now my total, as of November 8 in the morning before typing a word in the document, is .... 16,707. So I guess I'm on my way. But I have to accelerate the pace of word insertion because of being on my way over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house toward the end of the month, during which there can be no progress due to the intense pie-making and pie-eating activities I'll be required to immerse in. And not grudgingly.

Can't wait for pie. So many, many good pies in my near future. It makes everything sweet.

Summer Treasure Hunt--Giveaway!

Hey! I'm so excited to be a part of the 3rd Annual Summer Treasure Hunt: Dig for Clues and Win! There is a prize to WIN every single day in the month of June. My day is TOMORROW, and a lucky reader/player can win a copy of my most recent book, Delicious Conversation, mailed directly to his or her mailbox (within the U.S.). Cool, right? Plus there are a lot of other neato prizes, books, iPod covers, cool stuff. The authoress organizing the event is a friend of mine, Joyce DiPastena, a fine writer and a lovely person.

http://jdp-news.blogspot.com/2011/05/3rd-annual-summer-treasure-hunt-dig-for.html



Here's a link to her blog with all the rules and stuff. I hope everyone will play and blog hop and WIN. And any of you newbies to my blog, please feel free to follow and to comment and stuff. I always feel validated and special and stuff when I get new followers and nice comments. Mean comments, well, I probably don't need a lot of those.

Meanwhile, I'm still not eating sugar, but I am chewing gum. A LOT of gum. I bought a zillion pieces of sugar free Extra Dessert Delights Key Lime Pie. It's so much like candy I hardly notice I'm off sugar.

Guilty admission: cold cereal is getting too much of a free pass in this time of Lentish denial. I think I ate half a bag of Malt-O-Meal Blueberry Frosted Mini-Spooners (the knock-off of Mini-Wheats) yesterday. That's a lot of spun wheat, I tell you. But that blueberry flavored frosting on top of each wheaty bite was so yummy. I had to force myself to resist today. Maybe the kids will eat the rest of the bag at breakfast tomorrow and my temptation will have passed.



Now, where's my green gum?

Genre:Does Cold Cereal belong in the Candy Phylum?

Lately deciding on how to label the genre of my novel has been taking up an unnatural amount of my brain's hard drive free space. I think I need to defrag or something now. Does it fall in mainstream fiction or commercial fiction? Ha ha I wish I could say it fell into literary fiction but it's too cottony and candy-y.

So since my protagonist is 24, it won't fit into YA (young adult) fiction, even though it is a kind of a coming of age story. I got that much. Parameters as far as I can gather from combing the Internet and agents' sites and know-it-all-experts' advice books require the main character of a YA novel to be no older than 17, and preferably 16.

So it's definitely not middle grade even though when I read the prologue to the 5th graders a few months ago they ate it up. Middle grade novels star kids age 11. Or else!

Then there's women's fiction. Even though this could be termed a love story (the main character gets the girl at the end) and I would like to believe women will really find the hero of the story appealing, in spite of his flaws. But it's not technically a romance, even though the protagonist's main need is to overcome his loneliness. It doesn't fit the template of what's required for a romance. For one, the main character is male, not female. And since it doesn't star a 28+ single woman with a careeeeeer and eschewing marriage but secretly pining for love, it sure ain't chick lit.

So, do I try to market it as sports fiction? The whole story is about a fish-out-of-water, an unexpected foray into a new sport. It doesn't cover one of the big favorite sports of basketball or football, or even NASCAR, so maybe that won't work. Did you know there's a NASCAR sub-genre in Harlequin romance? I heard that last summer and I think my head is still trying to wrap itself around that fact.

Sometimes I think I should rework my story to fit neatly and squarely into one of these categories. But I wanted to tell the story of this particular character at this particular point of his life. To do that, I need to tell THIS story. I realize that the only reason I would need to alter it is if I decide to try to market it, which I guess I will, just to force myself to DO HARD THINGS. However, I am not going to weep failure tears if no publisher picks it up. I realize the story idea is a stretch. I know it doesn't fit neatly into a genre. I'm okay with that. I like the story, and I'm sticking to it.

For now.

And I WISH with all my HEART that I had a door on my hall closet. That it didn't gape open, with all those cereal boxes calling to me every single time I pass them, begging me to reach in, to get just a little handful of strawberry frosted mini-wheats or a few of those Raisin Bran Crunch flakes. Man, those are good. So good in fact, I kind of find myself thinking they (like the NASCAR Harlequin) should be a subgenre of candy. The mini-wheats and raisin brans could be the health-nut cousins of candy. Lucky Charms and Froot Loops could be more closely related. Apple Jacks have sugar listed as their first ingredient. Mmm. I love when those loopy rings have an obscured center, caked over with delicious dried, appley frosting.

Kingdom, phylum, class, family, whatever. All that sugar tastes really good when combined with wheat or oats or rice or corn flour. I'll take a big handful again when I pass by.

I think I might have blogged this opinion in an earlier post. Oh, well. My kids tell me all the time I'm repeating myself. So why not in cyberspace, too?

Now, pass the Berry Kix.

Clean Carpets and Clean Manuscripts

Last week I did what I dread. I pulled out my carpet shampoo-er. It was time. Long past time.

To get the dirty deed done, first I had to move a ton of furniture into the garage and to the side of the room. This involved silk plants and magazine racks and the rocking chair and a couple of lamps and the little bookcase with all the kids' piano books. And the kitchen table and chairs. And tipping the loveseat up on its side and balancing it against the window casing. And shoving the long couch up against the front window where no one walks or drags trikes or sleds or rollerskates so the carpet is still relatively bluish there, as opposed to the brown-grey-blue of the heavy traffic areas.

In this house, with these feet, everywhere is a heavy traffic area.

Then, it was the vacuums. I make that plural because the big one, my Hoover Platinum, vacuums the middle of the floor, and the hand-held with the wand gets the edges of the room. Man, that thing has a loud, high-pitched wail. Good thing I put in earplugs, or I'd be sitting here enjoying the strains of tinnitis instead of Phineas and Ferb being piped in from the other room.

How long does it usually take me to vacuum? Like 15 minutes? More or less. This time, I think I clocked in at three times that long. There was just that much dirt lurking. Ground in cold cereal, thanks to the little girls doll tea parties. Hey, I had a bad year for housework. It happens.

FINALLY, I pulled out Old Reliable. Er, Old Soapy. Or whatever it is I'm going to name that shampoo-carpeter (as my sister calls it.) The Hoover SteamVac. It's pretty heavy. And it's loud. And it requires vacuuming at a snail's pace with something twice as cumbersome as my regular vac.

It took me five (count 'em five) hours of push and pull to get through the living room and hallway. Forget the bedrooms. Every time I emptied that rinse basin, I cringed. How could that black sludge be all around us?

WE ARE LIVING IN SQUALOR.

When I finished, I couldn't just stop. The black sludge sickened me. I had to make another pass. Against the better judgment of my impending back-pain, I got up my courage and made another pass.

Guess what. No black sludge! Yes!

Sure, there was brown sludge this time, but it wasn't black this time. A little cleaner! So happy.

After that pass, I realized it could use another rinse. However, I'd been at it for hours, and all I could do was crawl into the passenger seat of our suburban and say, "Sweetie, can you, just, please, uh, drive me through McDonalds. Need. Hamburger. Need. Yogurt. Please?"

My sweetie did. Those yogurt parfaits deserve a place in the candy pantheon. I love them.

So. My point is this. The first time I went through my manuscript to edit it, it made me sick. Pulling out black sludge. Chunks of goo. Bad, bad, murky nasty. It made me want to quit.

But I kept at it. The second time, it was more like brown sludge. Less goo. More clarity. And the third time, even cleaner.

Now, on my umpteenth read-through, it's a lot cleaner. My critique pals are pointing out the typos, rather than the glaring plot errors, for the most part, and it's encouraging.

So, to get a clean draft, it might take a lot of passes to get there. It's worth it! Here at home my carpet is almost blue everywhere again. I walk through and it's spongy fluff, rather than brownish matted ick. What a change! I feel the same way about my manuscript. With every pass it improves.

Of course, like with any analogy, it can be taken too far. The wash cycle can actually start wearing away at the fibers of the carpet, and likewise over-editing can start chipping away at the charm and life of the story. Be gentle and selective and careful.

Now. Enough of that. I have been thinking about that yogurt parfait and how a lot of things ought to be included in the Candy Family. How did that biology chant go? Kingdom, phylum, class...Who knows. Anyhow, it's my firm belief that many cold cereals belong firmly in in the candy family. For sure any that list its first ingredient as sugar just flashes "candy!" at you. Apple Jacks? Candy. Froot Loops? Totally candy. Those taste a lot like Skittles to me. Sugar Smacks...burned candy. What about anything that is half sugar-coated oat flour and half marshmallows? Undeniably candy.

Bill Cosby had a skit about fatherhood where his kids were chanting something about chocolate cake for breakfast. Not a bad idea. But candy/cereal -- just a good substitute for that on days we don't feel like baking before the morning meal.

Bring on the sugar. I'll have mine in honey nut flavor today, please.