Writing with cold hands

It has finally gotten cold here in Northern Florida. I refuse to turn my heater on until I can see my breath in the house because I love having lower electric bills and it is an excuse to wear all the lovely woolen things that I knit all year long. Let's fail to recognize that I have so many lovely woolen knit hats that I can change them throughout the day. So my toes are toasty warm in their woolen socks. My body is toasty warm in its woolen fair isle sweater. My head is toasty warm under a beautiful woolen cap. The problem is that my fingers are freezing and it is very difficult to type while holding a mug of tea with both hands.

It isn't that I don't have lovely woolen knit things for my hands. I do. I have a pair of cabled woolen mittens in forest green. I also own a pair of bright pink woolen gloves with cute cables running up and down them. And somewhere I own a pair of beautiful dark turquoise Fetchings (fingerless gloves) made out of Malabrigo (the most sumptuous sheep's wool ever!) They are slightly felted (due to my washing them in the pocket of my jeans by accident) but fit my small hands just fine. Except one of them has crawled off and left me. I have only one Fetching and it is not doing me any good. Which leads me to question why I am torturing myself trying to write when I could be making a new pair.

I hate when rejections are correct

I received a very kind rejection yesterday to my witch trilogy. But by golly I can't argue with anything she said. She was also kind enough to offer some helpful criticism, which I have not received in the past. I'm so used to the standard, "Thank you for your submission. You ain't got what we want right now. Quit calling yourself an author. Sincerely, Very Rude Form Letter" In fact it almost caught me off guard to actually have some constructive criticism on how to make the book more readable.

The biggest comment was giving my character more of a voice that people can relate to. I think that the second and third books are much more like that as I learned more about my characters. So far I've eliminated nearly 12,000 words from the book by ditching the prologue and finding ways of incorporating that information into the body of the story. I may write a prologue after the fact later if I feel something is missing, but I'm not going to start with a prologue. I have also combined the first two chapters into one and made what was two days into one to get to the real action of the story quicker.

I've been reading through some of my more favorite YA books over the past two days and realizing how much action does take place in the first 50 pages. Hell, Bella moves to Forks, gets a truck, starts school, goes to classes, is introduced to the Cullens, has her first encounter with Edward, he leaves and then comes back all in the first fifty pages. Whew! I compared that (and other books) to my first 50 pages wherein you meet the twins and their family and they start school and you are introduced to the surly boy with a chip on his shoulder. But really nothing happens until the next fifty pages.

I'm not feeling defeated like I have been in the past. I know it is a good story, I just need to tell it better.

My new phone

This deserved its own little post. This is my new phone. It's red. And shiny. And has Internet access. (Which I found out my old phone had and I just didn't know it!) It has a camera and a qwerty keyboard that slides out. Oh and I don't randomly call people with my butt. This is a good thing. (Ask my friends.) And now I am totally addicted to checking Twitter. Just had to share. Oh and to make this relevant to my blog, I do have a notepad on this phone that I can write when I somehow find myself void of paper and pen.

I'm alive ... but just barely

I'm crawling out of the NaNoWriMo trenches to say: I WON! I made my 50K with an end (thank you very much) Friday night at 50, 806 words. Of course I do need to go back and fix a dangling subplot that was just dumped when more exciting things to write about came along. It was tough this year. Not because I had no clue what I was going to write about, but because I had a planned Disney vacation that started on the fifth. We came home a day early because of Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Wake Me When It's Over Ida. Then three people decided to get the flu and the room with the computer was contaminated. I refused to step foot in there and people say I'm mean because I shoved grilled ham and cheese sandwiches under the door. Hey, I could have stolen Dan's laptop and just gone to a hotel and left them to make their own grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. Thanks to a few five thousand word days, though, I quickly caught up.

I like this story. In fact I like it better than the first in this series. Maybe it is because I'm understanding my characters better and finding them more developed the more I write about them. The really nice thing is that I know what is going to happen in the next book. I love these guys.

In knitting news (yes, I actually got a bit of knitting done amidst all the NoWri-ing) I managed to make a scarf and hat to go up to Sylvia's place and made Dan a fair isle ear flap hat since he is about to leave to Someplace Cold later this week for a month or two. I finished his third pair of socks at Disney and am almost finished with Keon's socks that I started there. It's nice mindless endless rounds of stockinette and I found I can do it easily while standing in line, riding in the car, or waiting for movies to start. I really need to get on the ball and knit up the lace scarf sampler for the January/February JoAnn classes and I have another (super secret) project that I want to work on as well. I just can't decide which to do first. (Especially since I really want to just write some more seeing as I lost eleven days.)

And I'll catch up on cooking before I get back to more writing stuff. Everyone will be happy to know that I have finally successfully had a complete Thanksgiving dinner. Yep. I set the oven on fire and didn't get to bake the rolls. The good news is that the oven was easily cleaned out (the next day) and the rolls were baked on Friday to go with the leftover turkey and rice. (For those of you who don't know, you can stuff risen bread in the refrigerator overnight. In fact you can even do a cold rising if you are patient enough. I'm rarely patient enough.) They were delightful and now I'm craving another batch. I wonder if anyone would mind another batch of turkey and rice tonight. Or rolls. Oh the funny part of all this: the firefighter in the house thought it would be OK to spray "mostly water" sanitizer on the blazing fire. Do not do this. It will not put out the fire. Your best friend for kitchen fires: baking soda. It's cheap too and won't cause your oven to burst into huge tongues of flames and billow out (most likely toxic) smoke.

Now back to writing because that is what interests me at the moment. I bought a magnet a while back that reads: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Then Saturday evening I received a fortune in my cookie that read: No man is a failure who is enjoying life. It got me to really start thinking about my books and what I want to do with them. I really want to publish them. I go to the bookstores and I look for the place where my books would sit on the shelves. I touch the books on either side. Is it too presumptuous of me to want to rest between Ursula Le Guin and Madeleine L'Engle? And what happens if I fail? I'm really no worse off than I am, but perhaps with a broken heart. I have an advantage of not needing to be financially dependent on my writing. I don't have to publish. I just want to publish. So I'm going to pursue that earnestly in the coming year. I'll keep you all posted on how it goes.

Size does matter!

OK, maybe not size per se, but gauge. And don't always trust your memory that you know what gauge you got the last time you knit with a certain yarn or needle. And don't believe yourself when you say, "Oh 72 stitches is perfect for a hat on size US 8 needles with this yarn. I've made them like that before." Because you know what? It's all a lie! Your brain will lie to you in order to not make gauge. It will convince you that the last time you knit with this particular yarn you got 4-5 stitches per inch. I'm quite sure of it. Yeah, and ... and ... and ... I've made lots of hats by casting on 72 stitches. Remember?

Except the sad truth is, now thinking back I've never used Moda Dea Wool 'n' Silk and all the 72 stitch hats I've made were on size US10 needles not US8 and I've never done anything like this before. Ever. Which all means that I just blindly cast on 72 stitches of a lovely blue silk and wool blend yarn and knit it like I knew what the heck I was doing. And in the end I had made a very lovely little lacy hat that would possibly fit a baby!

So repeat after me: Gauge matters. If you aren't 100% absolutely positively 100% sure that you know your gauge with that wool then don't just willy nilly cast on and set to town. You will spend many hours making something that doesn't fit anyone in your household (let alone the charity I was intending this hat to go to). It will make you cuss. It will make you spit. It will make you want to attack your finished work with a butcher knife. (Please refrain. I did and so can you, but you still want to.) Just suck it up, cast on some stitches and swatch for gauge. Your inner self will appreciate you for it.

Fortunately, I know a little boy who is going to look just dandy in a blue silk and wool cap and since he is a baby he wont' mind the lace.

Thank you for your query but blah blah blah

Yep, you know what it says after the "Thank you for your query but..." It means "YOU SUCK!" Or at least that is what you are envisioning the agent or editor to be saying. However, it is humorous when you read through a form rejection letter and count six (yes sax, sex, seis, zes, sass, shest' - you know 6) spelling or grammatical errors in the letter. Six. Wow. Maybe I didn't want that person to represent my book after all (although, admittedly I forgot I had sent that query over three months ago).

But I'm not letting that get me down. I'm not going to quit. I'm going to persevere. I think I've got a good story in me and eventually it will be recognized. I just have to wait.

But in all this waiting, I'm getting quite a big of knitting done. Socks, hats, and I'm even searching for a sweater pattern. I just have this feeling I've got to get to the point of no major UFO's before November 1st. I'm already losing six days of NaNoWriMo due to our Disney vacation. I can't afford to waste anymore with something silly like knitting. I'm even wondering if I will cook anything but hot water for tea.

No Prob!

As promised I am here to write about No Plot No Problem by Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo. It was a fun read. Having already won NaNoWriMo once before and having written that ubiquitous 50,000 words in 30/31 days several times since then, I saw this book as more of a reflection of the work I have done while picking up a few ideas on the way. For someone who is trepidatiously stepping off that cliff of insanity that is the power writing of NaNoWriMo, it could be a great comfort as well as affirmation that you can indeed write 50,000 words towards a novel in 30 days (or less). There is much wit over the task of forced word count writing which I easily saw as a reflection of my own derangement. (Please, I am the sort of crazed author that has lengthy conversations with her characters when she is alone in the car. You just think that I am singing to Cold Play.)

In other news, I did finally sit down and write the synopsis to last year's NaNo. I've heard that the weather here is supposed to cool down this weekend. Maybe even highs in the lower 70's, which is fantastic to finally get out of the 80's that we've been hanging on to like a toddler fearing that first solo step. (That was a feeble attempt at changing the subject. Let's just say that if I were to read the synopsis that I wrote I wouldn't be interested in reading the novel. And no, I really don't want to talk about it anymore. Suffice to say I much prefer writing novels than synopses and it is an area that I know now I must expend more energy in order to become a better synopsist, synopsisist?)

The next book on my table is The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life by Noah Lukeman.