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The Last Tea Bowl ThiefThe Last Tea Bowl Thief by Jonelle Patrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m sorry it took me so long to review this. I read it while deeply into NaNoWriMo, so taking the time from my own writing seemed impossible. But finally, here I am!

I love Jonelle Patrick’s writing. I always find myself drawn in by her characters and the virtual travel to Japan. I am not much into mysteries because most involve murder and finding who did the murdering. This mystery goes histories deep, and it is to find what happened to the tea bowls and the artist who made them. My way of describing this story sounds rather boring. The author makes this an adventure in two parts of Japan’s history. All the characters seem real and in the now with the reader. Best of all, in this book, there is no murder, even though in war times. Meanwhile, we learn a little about modern Japan while being taught about people’s rituals and beliefs from three different generations of Japan.

I was sad to leave the book in the end. As always, I want to know more. Don’t worry. You feel secure by the ending. Our main character, who has had to research the feudal and WWII Japans, grabs your heart as she tries to keep family and soul together.

Great job with something quite different in this genre Ms. Patrick!

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On the main page at the top is the title Haven 1-4. If you go there you will find I have added 5-8. Or you can go here. HAVENย  I am going to try and get the whole story up here. But still, need to keep editing Pandamapocalypse.

Oh, and I finished these slipper socks and started the next pair. I know! I had a lot of that yarn!

 

One-Liner Wednesday


On day 1, the politicians and NaNo writers say, I will… here it is day 2. Yeah, I did all the things, LOL!

 

That was a bit more than one line. But you get the gist. That was my answer to One-liner Wednesday. Thank you Linda G. Hill for this fun, easy prompt.

 

Just a bit about my day, I spent the day finding more pictures to represent characters I hadn’t found images for before. I find it helps me as I write to get a better handle on them. Mostly I am trying to make sure all my programs have all I’ve done so far.ย  I promised my blogging friend jenanita01 I would share my experience with Scrivener as I go. This copying and pasting from the other programs, Word, WriteItNow, and yWriter have given me the first experiences. If you like ctrl/a, ctrl/c, ctrl/v, like I do there, is a new step when you land in Scrivener. I kept pasting to Scrivener and the result would be one long URL (blue underlining of the copied work). I finally figured out that if I did ctrl/shift/v it pasted perfectly.ย 

I probably need to back up a bit. After two days of reading the instructions of writing in Scrivener, I was lost. I found the tutorial on their website that said you can start with a template of the kind of document you want. I chose the 2 part novel. It will probably be 3 but for now, this will do.

One of the first neat tricks I learned is ctrl/n that is for a new text (scene). One was already there but I didn’t know beyond there what to do. Right-click and the new text and a lot of stuff I still don’t know are right there. Oh, and ctrl/shift/n is a new folder (chapter). Figured out character templates, too. I should have copied the template and used it over and over. Instead, I made one character then duplicated the template, and just filled in the new character’s info. It works!

 

Bitmoji Image

A Non-Word Count Whew!


It was nice not going into the imagination and having my fingers try to keep up with the story pushing out, I decided to move Pandamapocalypse into Scrivener. It is a place to get lost in. It is scary. A whole new language to figure out. Oh! ‘Folder’ is Chapter? Okay. ‘New’ text is Scene, okay got it. I gave more of my characters pictures of people they look similar to. And I am more than halfway done moving chapters and scenes. I still want to make sure that all characters from all books move with each story as I often find some appearing when I least expect them to.

Yesterday I rewarded myself by watching the Undoing. It was pretty good. Quite a surprising penultimate moment in the end. No spoilers.

Today the background entertainment was The Crown. Finally, getting to Margaret Thatcher.


Last of the word count: WriteItNow reported to me that I had 80,129. I know I started with 25K from my CampNaNo experience in March. NaNoWriMo gives the goal of 50K. My goal then was 75K.ย  I increased my yWriter by finding the missing chapters and scenes and my RTF in Word, where I found others missing from the other two programs. I think as I go through the edit and fixing yWriter7 problems, I will find the missing bits. Once I have everything moved from the unstable (for me) to Scrivener and a new Word file, I will feel this book complete. It is weird to think, ‘Did I write a scene with … or was it a dream?’ And then to find it again is like Christmas!

I will continue today’s writing as I have a scene that is dancing in my head. Then I will start that scene by scene editing and possible rewriting. I am not tired of this story or the characters. I hope someday others might like it. My first four chapters of the first book, Haven, can be found here. The whole book is here. I was a new writer, but the characters and the sentient planet have been my life for nearly two decades!

to

Pandamapocalypse

NaNo Word Count Sort of


According to WriteItNow, I have 79,268 words. My guess is I lost fewer words in that program and managed the right saving system. So I say I won more than my 50K. But with all the maths and programs losing full chapters to full novels my word count on the NaNoWriMo site is still shy of 2K. The story continues and suddenly there is a new character that feels like another novel coming up. My brain is not ready for that! Yet I love this new person and what she knows about the Havenverse at large, especially the history and future for all true Gene-Poppers. I only have two in all my novels. But this one will bring us a population unknown until now. I think the last part of the words I need will be an introduction to all the questions my favorite character, Dusty has had most of her life.

The fun math says that tomorrow I will have over 80K. I don’t think I’ve written a book this long, ever. And though it is a jumbled mess I like all the ideas that are streaming in there. Yes, editing is going to be a bear, but it is a bear I want to meet!


I have options. I can accept the word count on WriteItNow that says of my CampNaNo/NaNoWriMo combination novel that says that I reached by writing the two words ‘The End’ 75,000. Or I can accept that my adding and subtracting with all the computer glitches, including finding yWriter an empty project as of this morning. Grr! My husband and I found my saved RTFs, and I copied and pasted the missing parts to WriteItNow, then added a few scenes today, making an additional 2,000 to NaNos word count app, bringing that total to 46,235. That one should be the goal for the 28th of 46,676. So, in that case, I am 441 words short. In that case, I need about 2,000 a day until the 30th. I think I will opt to try and find a better place to put that ending. There are lots of loose threads to tie-up. So I will just keep writing until I am satisfied. Then comes editing. Ugh! I doubt I can write 2K a day for the next two days, but I will try for the record.

2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley! https://www.quaintrevival.com/

Per Linda:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is โ€œopt.โ€ Use it as a word or find a word with โ€œoptโ€ in it and base your post on that. Have fun!


First, the disappointing word count of 44,235. That is 774 words short of the goal of 45,009. But I will try to make that up tomorrow.

On the other hand

Two more slipper socks, and the toe of the first of the next pair ready to go. I added a few rows on the multi-frogged X-Wing loom of four socks. So maybe the words suffer for the soft yarn? If I yarn better can I get more words? Curious minds want to know.

Meanwhile, my son and I are watching S.H.I.E.L.D.

We are into season 3. It is a Marvelous background to write to. It is fun and has similar energy that I think my NaNo has.

In the mornings after Kelly and Ryan and the View, oops and the News and GMA3 I am rewatching the Crown I just got to the Kennedy part. By the way, the choices for actors for those two was so wrong!

By the way, I finally finished Poldark. I had to leave it for a while because it added to the dispare of the day. And the cold parts were hard to watch when the weather got cold. But I did enjoy it and wished for more when it ended.

 

 

NaNo Update :-(


I had a marvelous Thanksgiving. I hope you did, too. As often as I have enjoyed Zoom calls, today I set one up. It worked but I felt silly as I didn’t find the automated thing to send everyone. I sent out a text message typing out the number and finally figuring out where the password was. Oh, well, like I said it worked. We got to talk to all our grown kids today. I was exceptionally surprised to wake up to an FB IM from my son! โคย 

I even got to chat with my friends and that was fun, too.

Oh, and my son foot the bill, and my husband picked up the Thanksgiving Pizzas. Yum! No one slaved over a meal I never was fond of. And there is always pizza left for breakfast tomorrow morning.

.

SO all that means that I didn’t get my words for today. I think this is the first Thanksgiving that I didn’t. Even when we’ve gotten together at each other’s homes I’d bring my laptop and type while visiting. Oh, well, I do have a storyline that is making me happy to pursue. So only added 644 words making my total to date 42,435. I need 907 to make the required 43,342. I really do far more math during NaNo than the whole rest of the year combined!

Anyway, I am so sleepy I can’t write another word.


Added 1300 to the project. I’ll get this out and edit after midnight after I have the full numbers to report.

[EDIT to follow]

So the total for yesterday (since it is after midnight) was 41,791 the goal was 41,675. So staying ahead. A bit.

 

This came up as a memory on Facebook. This was five years ago.

Guess what happened several times today.

One of the One-Liners that came to me for yesterday would have been:

This is the fake snow, it turns brown.

 

But it is interesting that we get snow the same day years later.

 

Another one-liner to say was:

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