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.