My NaNoWriMo book, ‘Crystal’, is nearly caught up to date. I’m supposed to be at 36,674 words. I have 36,087 so I’m going to random word prompt until I can meet the quota.
How are all of you? Making things? Words?
Tag Archive: Crystal
I had to miss yesterday. I went to town (two hours away) to get an upper GI procedure done. I barely got 400 words before I left and had no energy when I got home for anymore. So today, I had to play catch up. My friend and I are finding when we get together on Zoom, we are reasonably productive. We do a bit of a chat but then get right to it. Sometimes we talk about our projects and somehow, bringing the story to light seems to give us a push. This is her first year in a long time that she’s felt up to NaNoWriMo. But she’s being gentle and keeping it accessible for herself to feel good about it. Her goal is 25K, and she is going great guns. I love hearing about her story.
My own story is coming along. It surprises me that the story that started out as a bunch of drawings for #Inktober. Yet the characters feel as real as if they lived in this house with me. Anyway, Crystal now has 26,873 words that make me just a smidge ahead of today’s count.
Knitting still continues. I think I will have a hat finished in the next few days. I can say, happily, that the mohair is finally gone!
I also have two pairs of socks in the making. This one is ahead of the race. I like to work on them two at a time, so they stay the same length as their mate. This one is for a male, so the heel will be another four inches from here.
It’s been a day. I feel accomplished. The NaNoWriMo goal for today calls for 18,337. A Zoom write in with a friend pulled 18,430 words. With the coming appointment days I wanted to be farther ahead. There’s still enough day to add more.
Duo is done. I’m in a hard lesson but I finally got it done!
And I had no idea what to put here but that sunset got me a start. The rain had been more than usual. I love it! The clouds keep the sky beautiful.
Now back to writing.
Happy Friday Junior!
I decided I had better get over here and try and see if I have anything at all to report. Sadly, I feel I have much more to-do on everything than any Ta-Da could handle. So let’s see if I can figure out What Day of the Week Is It Anyway? Tuesday means somehow Monday happened and I missed my writers’ group again. I think it is the timing. Sometimes it is after my only meal and I feel I need to wash dishes or nap, sometimes both. My phone isn’t near when I am not at the recliner or the bed or the desk. So hearing an alarm is always elsewhere and I missed it.
And I feel badly in that though I seem to get writing done, it is seldom their prompts that I’ve been writing, and I can’t read aloud right now. The news that I may not even get my surgery until after the beginning of the year is so discouraging. I usually have yWriter read back to me what I’ve been writing. If I am in editing mode I have Word read my work to me. I can’t wait until my eyes can read again! I miss stories coming into my eyes! I often miss things that are read to me. But I’m doing the best I can.
So, I have nearly made the daily quota for NaNo for the day. It is supposed to be 15,003 I’m at 14,861 so before I go to bed I will probably hit that. But with the two medical procedures coming up that will take up whole days I wanted to be a couple days ahead. Not that the procedures will take that long but each time we go to town it is four hours of driving and wearing on body and soul. Who knows how much energy I will have to write those days?
Four socks and a hat are in the early stages so I can’t even feel anything more than happy to be making them. The hands feel good doing what they can, you know?
And maybe because I’m supposed to be writing, I have found my recorders fun again. AND I just found the music book with Moonlight Sonata to play again! Yay! Me! I think I can blame the Pandora station called Classical Study Music Radio. They seem to tease me with that song every other piece! Guess who needs to dust her piano keys? Yep! This gal!
Though I can read music since my eyes are so bad, maybe I should work on this one (I used to have memorized) with just ears so I will try this guy out tomorrow:
Someday maybe I’ll share my musics with you. Right now I wish I could find a quiet spot in the woods where no one can hear me and just mess around with notes and sounds. After all, I share my blunders and mistakes with art, knitting, and all. Yeh, a lot of psychology is involved in the music of my life. It’s a work in progress.
So I finally caught up with the Wholloween Doctor Who marathon. We recorded it so I could watch it when I could. Does anyone still slip up and say taped? Yeah, I almost said that. I prefer watching recorded things in my own time and without commercials. Say, but this Flux first of this season, that scene that looked like witches on brooms was fun. I can’t wait to see more of this season! I was upset with the Marathon as they skipped around, Totally missed showing my favorite one, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I love Doctor Who. They don’t take themselves too seriously while still having some sciency sci-fi on occasion rather than just silly stories. And the action and music kept me writing with something to look at to rest my eyes afar for a moment. That is something that music, like radio, CDs, or Pandora, doesn’t have. I need that visual thing going on.
I am having fun and am caught up with La Brea. Between Jodie Whittaker and Zyra Gorecki, I think my hair is destined to that shorter bob. I really like their hair. And hey, congratulations, Hollywood, for hiring representation of amputees. I had to look that up. Anyway, I love the creativity of this show. I wish I could watch it more than one or two at a time. And since these are new to me, I get sidetracked from writing when getting engaged in a story.
Speaking of writing, I feel Crystal, my #Inktober/NaNoWriMo crossover, is growing nicely. As of this moment, I have 11,049 words in my story, and I can’t wait to get back to it and see what happens. Crystal’s eye-crystals have her causing hallucinations; she found that her aunts and grandmother have the same things in their eyes but different abilities, some a bit of a curse, like Crystal’s. I thought maybe I heard Haven calling. But she hasn’t put her two cents in, so maybe Crystal and her family can get the whole story done on their own.
Speaking of NaNo, I found this YoutTube that might help newbies:
If you are looking for inspiration or just getting started, click here.
Since cataracts control my reading diet, and closing eyes to point won’t work for Audible books, I downloaded my next Kindle Unlimited book and went a few pages in to do the pointing. Here is the fantastic sentence I found. Sorry, chaos was the word but this! This is MARVELOUS! “Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike.” This is from a book my friend, Michele, recommended, Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. With just this sentence I can hardly wait to read the book!
I remember the line from Game of Thrones, …’Chaos is a ladder…’
So, does that mean you pile up your plants, dog, and bike to climb? Ouch! Yet, that seems to be implied with chaos, right? Maybe a rusty bike could have a comfortable seat. The dog is dead, use the hide to make the seat usable? Compost the dead plants and squeak through the old neighborhood on that bike to find friends or food. They’ll hear you coming so hopefully they are friendly.
This stream is far from drained. It is NaNo after all. Yet my novel, Crystal, isn’t post apocalyptic. This imagery could fit in either Pandamapocalypse or Marine’s Mission. But maybe I can get a little ‘chaos theory’ mixed into Crystal’s world. It is a lot of craziness going on.
But this isn’t adding to my word count. Which is currently 9,096. That’s not too bad. But I wanted to stay a couple days ahead so I’m aiming for over 13K. So it was nice floating in the Stream but it’s needed elsewhere or there will be chaos in my soul!
Linda’s newest prompt:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “close eyes and point.” Grab the closest printed material to you when you sit down to write your post, open it up (if it’s a book, flyer, etc.), close your eyes, and point. Whatever your finger lands on, use that as your prompt. Have fun!
After frogging yesterday’s hat, I nearly have a brim finished on the new one. Within a row or two, I will put that first row in the middle onto the pegs, knit the first and the last row together, and then start the main part of the hat.
And after ‘frogging’ yesterday’s podcast attempt, I spent the morning learning about starting a new project. I used Wondershare, the free version, to try and work on what might be salvageable from yesterday. I have only gone through the first couple of steps and feel confident I can do something to help others. Here’s their first YouTube.
So my attempt for tomorrow is to show how to set up for NaNoWriMo and hopefully show how my friends start theirs in other programs. I will even walk through setting up a new project on NaNoWriMo. Though I finished (Pandamapocalypse) and won last year’s, That book isn’t finished. I got halfway through another during the first CampNaNo with Marina’s Mission. And suddenly, I had another story, Meeps creep in, but I haven’t posted word count to NaNo yet. And now, because of #Inktober, I suddenly have Crystal. Which I set up in yWriter yesterday thinking I had screen sharing going on Zoom. Nope, it was just me talking, and all you could see was my glasses as I had to get really close to the screen to see. The nice thing about NaNo now, as opposed to how it used to be, is you can divide your wordage between projects or even aim for pages edited or other types of goals. So I plan to share that tomorrow also. So the mistakes of yarns yesterday become new projects today.
This day! Yikes! It started with a sad situation for my son.
Our internet has been so sketchy today.
I attempted to do my first Podcast. I did the recording on Zoom. I thought I was capturing the set-up of my yWriter project for this November. What I got is a recording of my glasses and my voice yammering on and on. Then I could go no further because of a bad internet connection.
So to soothe my soul, I pulled out the hat I was knitting. It was supposed to be a fast one as I was e-wrapping. But 5 inches in, I found it was too large. So I had to frog-it, rippit. Now it is only an inch long and that’s part of the fold up brim.
Tomorrow is another day. I’m hoping for insight. Anyone know how to share screen on Zoom on the laptop?
On the plus side one of my NaNoWriMo project is ready for wordage!
I got more of the story written to go with #inktober, but I haven’t finished the pictures. If I get the time I’ll start adding the pictures. Just a bit of a review Crystal was leading the pickle flavored guard, William, and her new friend Cindy to her trailer.
Crystal led the trio to her trailer. It was a cozy RV. “William, take these and hit the shower.” Crystal tossed him a towel and a sweatsuit “It’s a little too big for me so it’ll probably fit you. At least until your uniform is clean and dry. Toss them out before you shower and I’ll wash the clothes.”
After his shower, William sat in his temporary sweat clothes beneath the clock. The ticking was louder than the rain on the roof.
Cindy started laughing.
“What?” William asked as he finger combed his mop on top. “There wasn’t a good gel to contain this mess!”
Even with the dryer balls bouncing in rotation the tick tock grew louder.
“Hey!” Cindy jumped up and pointed to a stream of water leaking from the ceiling.
Crystal grabbed a pot to capture the flow. It filled quickly. “Oh, boy! That’s a big one!” Crystal was getting stressed. William saw the crystals in her eyes. He knew what that meant. He looked around and noticed the football helmet. He looked under the sink and found the stuff for stopping leaks. He donned the helmet. “It’ll keep my hair out of my eyes”
William went straight out into the rain and climbed up the ladder on the back of the RV. He found the hole on the roof and plugged it.
Back inside soaking wet again, William looked at Crystal. “I don’t suppose you have another sweatsuit?”
“No, but there’s a robe hanging in the bathroom.”
They tossed the sweats in the dryer.
William felt silly in the satiny robe but it was far better than another hallucinating session.
Everyone sat near the fireplace. It wasn’t real. But it did warm them physically and calm their souls like a real fireplace.
“How did you come by your name, Crystal?” Cindy asked.
There that’s the story so far now I have to get busy on the drawings and continue the story later hope you enjoyed it.
Finally, done with the things like my walk, winter clothes out, and summer put away. Hey, did I tell you I’ve managed another 36+ hour fast? I’m pretty jazzed about that. It has taken me a LONG time to get to this point. I decided Sunday is best for the day to skip food. It gets more of a spiritual feeling as I try to find which things to focus my thoughts on. And just like the fast I did with my husband for his procedure last week, I find the hours 24 and 25 the most difficult. After that, it is a piece of cake. I broke that fast with two slices of bread with butter and one egg. And I didn’t get sick from it! Yay!
The fall progress picture was taken after my walk.
So on to my #Inktober submission and a continuation of the story.
“Crystal, wake up!” Her fan was shaking her.
“Go away. Let me sleep!” Crystal groaned. Then she rolled over. She was cold. She pulled on her hood and stuck her hands in her pockets. “Oh, it’s over?”
The fan was surprised. “Yeah. What was all that? Was it real?” The fan held out her hand. “Cindy, by the way. My name is Cindy.”
Crystal took Cindy’s hand and allowed Cindy to help Crystal to her feet. “Hi, Cindy! What happened?” Crystal knew. But each of her helpers experienced these things far differently from what Crystal knew as the truth.
“Were you a lizard? Who killed the guard? And should we go help that guy?” Cindy asked and pointed to another corner where a barrel seemed to be calling out with a hand waving. “And what is that sour smell?”
Crystal sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. “Ew! Yeah. What is that?”
Crystal and Cindy walked toward the barrel. As they got closer, the word ‘Pickles’ gave them the odor’s origin. “They must be rotten pickles.” Crystal stated. She reached into the barrel and pulled out a man in a soggy green uniform. A puffy sopping hat was in his other hand.
“William! How did you get in here?” Crystal asked.
“There was a huge wind. It blew off my hat. The hat fell into the barrel. I had to go in and get it. But that was when I got stuck. I’m so glad you found me before I was pickled.”
Crystal laughed. She understood how all this happened. She wanted to hug her friend, but, ick! “Let’s go back to my trailer, and I’ll explain it all to both of you.
After you shower and change into clean clothes, that is. You’re quite the guard, Will! And you were put into quite the pickle!” She laughed again.
Darswords 
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