Boo!

Ah, a wet Sunday, a pretty clean house, and a mad rush to get ready for NaNo's start tomorrow. No, my desk isn't clean and I absolutely have a deadline with my farm stories but I have nothing to do tomorrow but that and start this phase of my revision.  I think I can get two more farm stories done today (first drafts that is) and then the last two tomorrow. I'll send them off to my connection and see what will need to be done with them after that. I'm in farm mourning. Perhaps I could phone up random farmers and TELL them I'm doing a story for something and just keep on until I visit EVERY farm in Nova Scotia. Yah baby!

Oh - a little bragodiccio on my step-dot - we all went off to the coffee-house the high-school music program hosts monthly. The step-dot was to sing and play the guitar on her own. We've paid for and encouraged music lessons for about eight years now but never have we heard her perform. You heard me. So we were nervous and excited and like that. She was about the third up and people she was amazing! Her mom and I got totally verklempt - luckily she couldn't see us wiping our eyes and sighing. Her Dad was pretty psyched too. The whole evening was wonderful - the kids all so kind and encouraging of each other, the music superb and the range from folk to classical to Indian classical to pure satirical was amazing. I loved it. Their band/music teacher is a wonder. But the step-dot - she was the best!

But I have something else to talk about. It came up the other day in my Friday Challenge. I wanted folks to write something scary - maybe take an old fairy-tale (the Grimm grim type) and un-pink it from its Disneyesque fluffyness. I think that came up for me because of thinking about Halloween but also because my grandchildren love fairy-tales and I was reading my grandaughter, Hannah, one in particular the other night. It is one that I like a great deal but it has some questions in it. I'm being obscure because I don't want to say which one it is. They all have questions in them, especially if you are a feminist or a social justice type in any way - I mean shouldn't those mice in Cinderella form a union?

The thing is that this one has been picking away at me and I'm thinking that I'd like to write a novella (as if novels aren't hard enough to sell!!) based on it. Can I do that for NaNo as well as the revision or am I setting myself up for failure? Perhaps I can just use that as the lure for doing the revision on mu WIP- last year when I wrote most of Earth Bound for NaNo, I would go on F**mville (euuuuh I can't bear to think of it) when I'd done a certain amount of words. Perhaps instead of wasting my time on idiotic computer games I can begin to write my fairy tale adaptation.  Trouble is that I have a way of making my life more complicated than I need to. For instance getting chickens, men with kids, dogs, marathon committments, etc... my life can get pretty wild. Am I doing this? I suppose if I absolutlely don't obsess about word counts it won't matter. Yah, I'll just sneak up on it. That's what I'll do. I've decided now and there is no point in you arguing with me. I'm going to revise True and write a novella. Starting tomorrow.

Now I have to go find my wig for tonight and get all the candles I can find and carve the tiny pumpkin and write some farm stories and think about dinner and clean my desk and phone my Dad and Stella and my sister Jude and send off a few invoices and look for all the mittens and hats and...

dictionary for those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about:

NaNo - short for NaNoWriMo which is short for national novel writing month in which a crazy person tries to write 50 thousand words in a month. I did it last year but this year I want to revise for 50 hours in a rebel bust-a-move venture.

farm stories - a contract that I have to interview some farmers about their lives. so fun.

verklempt - choked with emotion (german word)

WIP - work in progress usually a novel but I suppose it could be a life in which case we're all forever in a wip and isn't that pomo of me.

pomo - post-modernist - self-referential, the writer looks at the writer, in theatre the breakdown of the fourth-wall. And by the way, I just read Jane Austin's Northanger Abbey and it is entirely and hilariously pomo.

Friday Challenge - a weekly challenge to creativity which has been suspended as of last Friday for an indeterminate amount of time as it is time-consuming and I have things to do!

F****ville - a game involving farming (why the asteriks?- because I know google reads my postings and tries to get me to buy things or do things and I want those weird f**ville freaks well away from me. If you play this game I'm sorry for that and if you don't - don't start. I'm warning you. My obsession thankfully lasted exactly one month. I mean I have REAL chickens, people! I also can't begin to talk about my shame around fro**bubbles, soli**aire, and on and on. I like the mindlessness OK!

True - my wip (see above)

Earth Bound - yet another wip but I've shelved it until I finish and submit True. Earth Bound is a the second in my Kitty MacDonald books - the first being The Rock Walker which is finished and trying to find a home while we speak. I wrote the bulk of the first draft of EB in last year's NaNo.