Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “alarm.” Use it as a noun, use it as a verb or an adverb or an adjective, use it any way you’d like. Enjoy!
Alarms are ringing in my head. The night most people feel as exciting fright for Halloween, is my deadline for prep for the night of writing dangerously. Midnight after the trick or treaters have counted and downed much of their bounty, I’m drinking tea and hoping for words to count. But I have to wait for that moment. Five more days! (Only 5!)
This last week my reality was so much better than playing with my imaginary friends, but that time away made these characters as flimsy as paper dolls.
Well, my stream just found an idea! Maybe I’m playing with my new friends this next few days. That is IF I can put down the yarn long enough to create a yarn. By the way, NaNo2.org is the new site, thanks, Yvensong. Still checking it out.
I’ve been busy creating a fun character but not quite ready to share. I must admit to being surprised. But the artwork is still in my head not on paper. I was worried that I was only getting bad guys but I have an unfortunate main character emerging. Even not knowing the next few Inktober prompts are fitting right in. I’m in suspense hope you are, too.
Meanwhile, did I tell you my stationary bike has a friend! Treadmill has joined the living room as a sofa sitter.
Doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m m still meeting my goal of 30 minutes 4 miles not much but way more than if I didn’t do it, right?
It doesn’t hide all the way under the sofa. There’s a bar in the way so I have to push it under just on the end. The handle doesn’t fold under so it becomes a sofa side rail. So far my husband and I have only managed 5 minutes. Old knees and hips need to go slowly and carefully.
I had a great idea for today’s blog. But first thing today, my husband decided to run utilities and updates for me. I hate doing that, so I’m always grateful when he wants to do that boring task. But that means I lost all my tabs.
Two projects have me challenged. Figuring out how to make the heel hole in my yoga socks. Especially, two at a time socks. No YouTubes seem to address my particular issues. But I had saved a couple that would have helped a bit. So issue one was finding the sites.
Problem number two: I have created three characters. I actually dreamed about them and wanted to draw and write stories to get better acquainted. But the socks got in the way.
I finally separated the socks and find it is working. Yay! But somewhere my muses are giggling about how best laid plans fall down the rabbit holes! The joke is on me!
Well, I reported the finished projects last week, so today I’ll share new projects and progress of others.
My new flower balloon is grounded. The dark drill eyestrain is done.
The yoga socks on the Hiya-Hiya Flyers are coming along. The more I work with these skinny, sharp needles, the more I like them. I just need my stronger glasses to ensure nice stitches.
My experimental yoga socks will teach me, soon, how to leave out a heel. But will I have enough yarn for the ankle? Playing yarn chicken.
The watermelon socks have progressed to the arch.
The slipper socks are coming along.
I’m sight-reading through this book. I’m about halfway through, song titles starting with “I” as in “I’ll Be There”. This is fun. Some songs surprise me. Eleanor Rigby was fun to sing and play. As I play I’m finding the ones that challenge me while being doable. Then I will systematically print them. Then I can learn them well enough to sing.
Having not found a website to track my November novel, I’ve started to prepare anyway. My friend and I got together today to start finding characters. We’ve done it often this way. In person when we could, but now on Zoom.
We take each characteristic, randomly select a trait, and move on to the next.
It’s always a surprise how quickly the new character becomes nearly flesh and blood. As my first character came through, Ervin Norbert Dorris (the name randomly generated in WriteItNow 6.03c) seems a dirty troll under his homemade bridge with an attitude like Dexter. Well, the antagonist showed up first. That’s different.
My friend found a rather strong pretty punk character I think will be quite fun.
How do you start a book? For us the characters seem to people a world. Hopefully, all that prep gives us a start.
This has been such a busy day that I can’t believe it is already over. Where did the hours go? I did finish a sock. Oh, I had my NaNo project, Crystal, open all day and I was actually working on the character developments I needed. And Check☑ I got one out of 8 done. And I copied the story from yWriter to WriteItNow. But during all that I was watching season 4 of Dawson’s Creek. It’s so sad to watch the kids all go off to college. It’s called Dawson’s Creek and yet nobody but empty-nesting parents are at the creek. This show so reminds me of times with my teenage daughter, yikes, 20 years ago! And I never watched these last couple seasons as we all moved and my own empty-nest happened. But enough strolling down memory lane, that sock mate won’t knit itself. By the way, this is my last week of being 71. Yikes! It’s all above ground and healthy. Can’t complain, right?
Developed Monty, one of Violet’s favorite brothers in the town. That brought me to 23,679. This story is nearly writing itself. I love it!
Remember how I use random numbers to select the characteristics? Then I put those in Google to see my characters look alike. I think when NaNo is over, I will draw all of my characters as I don’t want to violate copyrights.
Anyone else getting ready for NaNoWriMo? Yeah. Me, too! There have been very few years since I heard about it that I haven’t tried. And most of the ones I attempted I finished (won) I believe what has helped me most is the Sprints/Sprompts that you find on Twitter or Facebook, and the numerous Virtual Write-Ins on YouTube. The first one for this year will be October 30, 2019, for a prep.
I love the excitement of writing a story. Even when it feels like crap. I love the thrill of the 1,666 word-goal a day. Even when you think you don’t have one lying around in your head.
What I don’t like is facing NaNo with a computer that has a screen that seems to go all white unless I fix the lid just so, and finally, I might get a couple of minutes.
My husband is the best! Hands down! He knew how frustrated I was about all this, so he got on the phone and made sure that by Thursday, I will have a working laptop! And I don’t have to relinquish this piece of @#$@#!@. I can face midnight on Halloween with courage and a bit of an idea what the story is about and a way to move it all slowly to the newer machine. I’ll write more about that as it becomes a reality.
So I played with my characters a bit and now have a few. Even a semi-working title Balter’s Dance Studio. And it does seem to be in Haven’s universe on Crim. Where we learned about Dusty’s Love Lair. Yeah, not exactly what you might think. Mostly sci-fi with fantasy and lots of imagination. Sorry I haven’t brought that novel onto the website. Yikes! I haven’t even finished uploading the first book. Dusty’s is about five novels since that one.
I always start prep with WriteItNow. I like its prep-ability. Character development works well in that program. Especially when I use:
I play random numbers on the characteristic to build the physical and then the personality of each character. My writers’ group back in Reno and I would call out numbers and then write down the results. Now without them, near I have numbered the items on each page then use the random number generator to select the characteristic. So now I have Walter Balter nearly standing in front of me. I know a lot about his mental health just from the physical. I will continue making him live and then work on the rest of the family. Hopefully, the characters and a minor outline will be ready for Midnight Thursday.
How do you prepare? What are your methods of writing NaNo or other novels?
Three stars means I liked this book. Was it a favorite? Sorry, no. It had a lot of interesting ideas that were unique, but the follow-through wasn’t there, unless, of course that comes in book two or three.
I liked that the main character was a well-educated lady with lots of smarts. At first, though, I didn’t much like her as she was snotty to her helper. Later that falls by the wayside as the character development reveals someone who does have a heart.
There was a lot of repetition of feelings and information. And it wasn’t long before this genius person, the strong person becomes the fainter, the whiner. And worst of all she becomes the boy-crazy teen. That was too bad as I wanted to like her.
Though fairly well-written, the Tablet/Fire version of this book was hard to read as the font was too light. Thank goodness I was able to read it on my Second Generation Kindle with text-to-speech. I did notice that my edition of the book is no longer available, but there is still a free version for Kindle at the moment. Maybe the font issue has been dealt with. Try it. Maybe you will like it better than I did.
Working on my series: Haven.
Doodler (zendoodle.com)
Music major: voice and piano
Mom of four great adults
Reiki II practitioner
I have been on disability/retired for 10 years now from depression, anxiety and fibromyalgia.
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