Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Magic in the Streets, Nanovel One 2009


Greenwood Road, Nanovel Two 2009


Medicine Show, Nanovel Three 2009


Right on pace, two-chapter day for the 20th and maybe three if I keep on going. It's still early.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Magic in the Streets, Nanovel One 2009


Greenwood Road, Nanovel Two 2009


Medicine Show, Nanovel Three 2009

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Magic in the Streets


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


Greenwood Road, Nanovel Three


Book Three interrupted Book Two. I opened a file for notes on it to make notes and shove it aside. But I was in a trancy, half asleep mood and dialogue happened in the notes at 720 words. Another few hundred later, the scene from the end or sometime after the end that might wind up on the cutting room floor ended and the real opener started -- at about 1500 words in, I guess. The real opener came out good.

I kept going. It is sloppy. I'm not even defining chapter breaks, I'll do that later. I stopped being quite so methodical or organized in favor of mad freewriting... and it's gotten me completely immersed for several days. Now it's big and looking to get lots bigger than 80k.

Or the ending will hit me between the eyes like stepping on a rake and it'll have sequels, it could easily turn out like that. It's either a doorstop or a seven book series.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


Goals accomplished, both before I sleep. Almost went to bed after chapter 7 but thought of the next scene and tore on into it. I am thoroughly into the Middle now and the lives of both mortals and vampires are starting to braid together in interesting ways.

As for it being a Western... I'm not sure anyone's leaving San Francisco anytime soon. But I still have a British gal who has to show up... ooh, trippier if she arrives rather than writes or telegrams... yeah... really wild, that! By a less roundabout means. If she crossed the Atlantic on a faster ship, then took trains and stagecoaches the rest of the way... there you go. Must check railroads and 1860 in Wikipedia before introducing her in person.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


Not even midnight -- but I made 120,000 by 10:54pm, which is great. Midpoint of my grand goal of 240,000+ in three 80,000 word novels. If I don't get the "and change" to push Medicine Show to 40,000 by midnight, I will before I go to sleep.

Did it.

That feels really good. Even if some of this may desperately need a rewrite.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


It's rolling... I need 9,000 words before I sleep to reach my goal for the weekend, though I'm not trying for "before midnight." Just till I go to bed. It doesn't have to be by the hour.

I already have an extraordinary talent, being the Monster of Wordcount.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


But if I didn't have to lose any of my existing talents, I want super-longevity by way of super-health that cures my disabilities so that I'd have the super-ability to hike or play sports or do all the things other people can without chronic pain and my physical limits. I could live without all the flavors of Kryptonite that knock me over in real life every time the weather changes or someone starts an argument. I might actually have realistic longevity though, it's not over till it's over.

But, I would not become a crime fighter if I got it. I'd go on being a novelist leisure painter with a cat. I'd have my life as it is, but better. I would probably travel a lot more and go out a lot more and enjoy it immensely. I let go of vengeance a long time ago because of how pointless it is.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


There's a challenge on the Nanowrimo front page in the new video to try for 25,000 by the end of the weekend -- or half the 50,000 word goal.

So I thought, I'll extend that to half of my real goal, about 240,000 total. Why not try to get up to 120,000 by the end of the weekend. I'll be right on track if I do, know that the first half of the month is on pace.

We may or may not have a vampire Western. We might just have a vampire novel with a historical setting. But it's fun. I'll see where they go when they get there.

Flower in Glass
5" x 6"
Neocolor II on dark blue Canson Mi-Tientes, smooth side.
Photo reference from Weekend Drawing Event November 6-8, 2009 done on the last day (it actually runs till tomorrow when the new one starts) hosted by AlainJ from WetCanvas.com.

I spent most of the day watching Gabriel while Kitten and Karl went out on a sudden emergency call to shoe a couple of Arabian racehorses for a horse race tomorrow with special aluminum shoes. So Kitten woke me up at Ouch in the Morning and asked me to come downstairs and be awake. So I watched movies with Gabriel and then turned out the racehorses' owner had some other horses that needed shoes... so they took about twice as long out as they planned.

I thought that pretty much shot today as a writing day since I was very tired, but I've rested for a while and am starting to wake up again. This may be a really good thing. If I get a chapter done today that rocks. If I don't, I won't worry about it because I had three zero-count days in the first book and still finished ahead of schedule with a day off between them.

I can do this. I should rest when I need to. The sketch was 20 minutes and a lot of fun, I do love those Necoolor II wax pastels -- they feel very much like firm oil pastels even though they technically are watersoluble crayons instead. They handle like really good oil pastels and are definitely Artist Grade.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


And I still have to copy-paste Kartchottee or it comes out Kamchatkee. For all I know that really is a Tlingit sounding name or a legitimate Tlingit name. Ow ow. Or it's something completely different and would mangle it. At least Kartchottee is an actual Tlingit family name. Like someone who's got English as a second language deciding to use Taylor or Jones as a character name for an English speaker character. At least I hope so. But I can do more research in the edit stages anyway.

The main thing is to make sure that it is absolutely spelled consistently throughout the novel so that if later research gives me a better name, I can change it by Global Search/Replace instead of having to hunt down every instance and missing one, so that later readers ask "Who's Kartchottee" or "Who's Kamchatkee?"

Maybe some character will get it seriously wrong because he has trouble pronouncing it. hehehe...

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year:


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


The first chapter is done! I got up this morning after taking yesterday to rest -- lost my one-day lead, but I really needed to relax, read something I hadn't written offline, sleep a lot and enjoy the post-noveling relaxation I usually give myself when I reach The End. I'm still right on target if I do another chapter today and if I do two, well, then I'm making a strong start again.

It's fun. My shaman's name is Kartchottee, actually a family name for a Raven family, but at least it's actually in Tlingit and I'm not mangling them that horribly. I know him a lot better now. But I still have to copy-paste his name in because every time I try to spell it out, I mangle it. I need to really watch that throughout this book.

I also had to look up Arcadia Evans in Raven Dance and have that sitting next to me so that I don't contradict anything Malcolm revealed about his past five thousand years later without good reason.

Short post testing the double-widget setup that I have pasted in the Pad file for Medicine Show. I'm preparing to start the first chapter of my second novel this year. I reset the goal for my current goal for the month and then reset the widget for my goal for the book I'm working on.

Nanowrimo 2009 Supergoal: Three Book Year


Medicine Show, Nanovel Two 2009


This year I want to do three 80,000 word novels, beating my best. I almost did it in 2004, but in the middle of the second Nanovel I got new roommates, which distracted me enough that I did two 80,000 word novels -- one in ten days and one in twenty. This year I'm on track to do it -- so the first meter is the supergoal, my possibly-attainable High Goal. The second meter is the current novel in progress, its separate count. I am likely to run over on the supergoal if I get it, because they don't stop on the even number and never come in short. I'm lucky if I can get within 5,000 of the planned length for a novel.

Right now I'm pretty sure if there's a book three, it'll be a nature novel set in prehistoric times with extinct prehistoric megafauna and an interesting carnivore as a main character. But I might think of something else, so that's open till the day it actually starts.

Right now I'm in a position to match my best-ever Nanowrimo and if I even get to start the third novel, if I get in even one or two days of a third, then I've beaten my best. If I finish it, then I've raised the bar farther than I've done ever in my life and it will be glorious.

Come December I will be writing short stories and editing like a fiend. Eight days of December are dedicated to short-story production and submission so that I'll still meet my "Five Submissions" goal. It'll be fun to get some rejection slips again. Maybe this time I'll start an interesting collage of them.

You're getting this mini-article on dreaming because the commenter on Discovery News seemed to glitch for me this morning when I read this article: "a href="http://news.discovery.com/human/dreams-just-brain-exercise.html">Dreams, Just Brain Exercise.</a>

I started commenting to that idea and the commenter failed, but my comment ran on into a fairly well-organized little article, so here it is -- my view on dreams and dreaming.

The usual sorts of dream interpretations often fall apart because people have different cultural expectations of dream symbols. But if dreams are just a sort of meaningless warmup, why is it that dream deprivation can be so devastating to health and emotional balance? Dream deprivation will eventually drive a person around the bend.

Dreams historically have often contained solutions to problems the waking mind was working on solving, the classic one being that scientist who dreamed of the shape of the carbon ring.

I would not say that all dreams are meaningful. But at the same time I won't say they're all meaningless either. You can be jogging to warm up at the top of the day and also keep going in the direction that you intended to go while making real progress.

I am a novelist. From childhood, I've had two types of dreams -- boring ones that are just a hash of whatever I read and whatever happened in life, your mixmaster approach to life-so-far in which I dream that I'm myself and deal with exaggerated versions of cool things and stuff that scared me. Then there are the others -- the Plot-Dreams. I dream that I'm someone else, could be anyone, could just be a conscious point of view floating in space.

I will live a scene from a book I'm going to write. Then shift point of view and live another scene in the next dream and the next until I get the point that yes, this is one of my novels coming to consciousness and write it down. Once I start writing the novel idea, then I stop dreaming it. THese dream-openers and concepts have turned out to be some of the best writing I've done in my life.

People who have precognitive dreams may be having psychic perceptions or they may just be putting all the pieces together in their sleep and recognizing a likely event before it happens. Either way though, the content of some dreams is meaningful and organized.

Psychologists I talked to including psych teachers had a hard time analyzing the Plot-Dreams because they weren't personal -- they're stories for the general public, the origins of creative work that are always only good beginnings that need to be completed when I'm awake. Their symbolism has much more to do with "the human condition" and what makes a good story in general than what I'm going through in life at the time. Most of all, their themes aren't always about me at all.

So it's like trying to find personal inner psychological significance relating to current events in the first pages of someone's project-focused presentation -- it may have something to do with immediate life circumstances but is much more going to relate to the actual creative task at hand.

I am aware that I spent most of my life learning how to write novels, cared passionately about it and that I trained into it from early childhood. Perhaps my random morning jog always took that turn in the road toward storyland simply because I was that concentrated on the problem -- learning to write good stories. While I rested, even in childhood, my mind was still working on "I want a really good story idea" and so I wandered into organized good story ideas rather than random hash like most of my more forgettable dreams.

My dreams are often more sensory than other people report -- and sometime around junior high I read some articles on writing that suggested bringing in all the senses, not just sight and sound, remember touch and taste and hearing and hunches too. So maybe I'm a trained dreamer and maybe so was the carbon-ring scientist and maybe my Dreamtime isn't that far from the rich cultural information an Australian native finds in a Dreamtime shaped by thousands of years of culture to have certain symbols and beings.

I always like to think about both the physical known-world as science currently sees it, the very conservative "I can only count on what science has shown to be true to be true" with a healthy wallop of uncertainty and awareness science can be dead-wrong so many times from Camarasaurus head on an Apatosaur body to some of the really loony whoppers... and the mystical view of life where all of the less tangible, less definable yet perceptible phenomena also have another large body of human knowledge supporting them.

I like to look at life from both ends of that and live with the uncertainty, which makes me a genuine skeptic enjoying the uncertainty and aware that the body of human knowledge is and hopefully always will be a very tiny fraction of the unknown.

Dreams serve a real function in life, both physical and psychological. Big-brained creatures dream, especially mammals and birds. I've watched my cat dream often and wonder what he's pawing or chasing or purring at. That exercise seems to be important to psychological health and without it, people get run down and edgy fast. Traumas can repeat themselves again and again in nightmares. Flashbacks or hallucinations may be waking dreams bursting into conscious life. Is that a healing process? Is that a way that the mind comes to terms with the trauma, just as a fever is a way the body fights infection by changing body temperature to something bacteria might die off in

I began keeping dream journals in early childhood because some author, I don't remember who, mentioned in an article that he did as a source of story ideas. So I am more likely to be able to remember dreams that matter -- the plot-dreams or any that do hold solutions to personal inner conflicts or were just beautiful or interesting -- and distinguish them from the goofy one that's obviously just Yesterday Hashed.

Where the idea that dreams can be interpreted by psychologists to map a personality tends to fall apart is that people's personal symbolism is going to vary a lot. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Or sometimes it means "that stinky guy that was at th erestaurant when I had my birthday party" instead of a sexual symbol. I think the dream interpretation lists of symbols are generally shallow because those interpretations, while common, are not the only possible meanings of those symbols and they can mean something opposite or completely unrelated depending on the dreamer's life, goals, focus and habits.

A dream with violent content might mean what a psychologist thinks it does -- or might to the dreamer be a pleasant happy dream loosely related to the content of video games or playing cops 'n robbers. The kid who likes playing the robber in the game doesn't always grow up to be a criminal. But psychologists can sometimes filter that through a political and ideological slant that may even be completely unrelated to the dream content.

From what you're saying, any kid dreaming of being a robber or a cowboy or whatever is just hashing up the movies or games and relaxing in a deep way.

The one thing that is clear is that if this is one of its physiological functions, it's an absolutely necessary one. Maybe our brains are like computers on Windows, if there is too much Windows up time the system gets more and more sluggish -- and you have to boot down completely in order to refresh yourself and look at the world with rested eyes.

Humans impose order on randomness and often find deep meaning in it. The patern of the stars resolves into constellations and the map with constellations is much easier to navigate. Big brains need to be exercised... and I see some strong connections between the capacity for dreams and right-brained creative thinking, which is as valuable in science as it is in the arts.

Dreams don't need to have an external meaning to be meaningful or useful or enjoyable to the dreamer. They are intensely personal, they are your own and may be the brain's way of processing the massive amount of information that comes in every waking day. Trained dreamers, lucid dreamers or novelists with plot-dreams ond mystics may wind up choosing a jogging path consciously but that's a valuable addition to mental skills even if it's just making use of something random that happens physiologically to big-brained creatures.

Please post your thoughts on dreams or dreaming. If you've had meaningful dreams or important dreams, write about it and if it had any connection with waking life, write about that too. I am very curious about others' experiences with dreaming because I'm starting to see how much my dreams were shaped by my singleminded goal of becoming an SFF novelist. You are the expert on your dreams and their meaning is what they mean to you.

Green bar again. I'm going to enjoy it.

I'll reset the goal and double it tomorrow when I start "Medicine Show." I was happily surprised at how fast every conflict that's actually in the book rushed together to the same conclusion when I dropped the idea of weaving the hurricane into the outcome. That can be another book.

Egad, there could be a sequel that soon after it. I guess it'd be Magic in the Rain or something like that, if the hurricane is the main focus. Wow. Three month old kittens. They'd be soooo mature....

On into the rootin tootin Old West with an idealistic young British vampire occultist, a disillusioned old Native American shaman, assorted colorful characters including dinosaur rustlers and whatever else wants to drop into the book when they go on the road selling real magic dressed as a scam.

I did it a day early! I got an extra day for whatever comes, be it sick days or stuck-plot moments!

A Pair of Pears
Cropped to 5" square, Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons on black Strathmore paper. From imagination.


Pinecone and Red Rock
6" x 9", Neocolor II on black Strathmore 80lb paper from "Gray Scale" pad. Life drawing.

Just a couple of fast sketches fooling around with my new supplies while watching dinosaurs with Sascha. I needed a break, I've been pushing myself pretty hard on the book and I'm coming up on that self-set deadline now. I want to finish the novel -- and if I do reach The End anytime before midnight end of tomrrow, then I am on track for doing my three-novel year.

Nanowrimo kindly refunded my duplicate order, I'd emailed them asking if I'd made one and so they refunded the duplicate and sent only one T-shirt. So maybe I'll avoid spending wads of money and try to build up enough in savings that I have netbook replacement at need -- that'd be a good thing.

I got 10k today anyway so I'm not really pushing myself -- more thinking of ways to finish up in only 10k to 15k more. Ruminating. I might get in another chapter tonight.

There is no way this book can come in at only 80,000 words. I can't wrap it up in just 3,000. I'll either have to raise my goal again and do another length guesstimate or just keep going and try to wrap up the plot. More things keep happening in it that fit and belong in it but I may have to go back in and insert some foreshadowing about the hurricane. So far they have been seriously distracted from it. Maybe I'll start off at the top of the chapter with it getting their attention. They haven't exactly been paying attention to the news lately.

Three chapter day. I am impressed with those characters, they managed not to destroy their lives or their relationship. Very cool. I think next chapter is going to be interesting.

I only have 15k to go till I reach this new goal. The hurricane had better start blowing in soon, think I need to change the dates in the edits so they're much closer to the hurricane. I can see why they aren't paying attention to the news though, they're a bit distracted. This could get entertaining. Especially if the final magical battle takes place during the hurricane itself and they're all, cats included, soaking wet in a torrential tropical rain.

It may turn out to be 80k. Or it may go longer. Things have changed. Now there's been a death and a haunting. The monster has a chance to reject the evil spirit, to be human again.

This was a rough chapter to write and it will need editing just like the last one, but it's very powerful material. The human characters both hung onto their sanity by the skin of their teeth -- and I'll have to find out next chapter just how shaky they are under their putting a face on it for each other. The cats are in much better shape. The cats have their work cut out for them taking care of their humans right now.

Ironically, I think the human characters distracted the monster and the ghost well enough that they didn't notice small furry animals hopping around hissing at them, or take the young magecats seriously. Stroke of luck, that. But it was so emotionally intense it's a very plausible error on the part of the evils.

It's one in the afternoon and I've done two chapters today. Whoohoo! I might get ahead on this!

Okay, I am already ahead by any reasonable standards, but I might get ahead on my High Goal of three novels and manage to buy myself the elbow room for the future sick days that will inevitably come. I want a red t-shirt and the best Nanowrimo that I've had to date. I could have done three 80k novels in 2004 but for getting new roomies moving in as a distraction during Nanovel Two.

This year, if I finish Nanovel Two by the 20th, I have the same amount of time to slam out novel three and ring the bell on the High Goal. I think it might be one of the prehistoric nature novels -- I got good research materials for those, especially that World Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures -- it's got enough background on habits and locations and connects sites well enough that I can put something decent together for it.

I just finished a scene that ended in a brute shock. It worked. It was so right for the story -- it threw me for a loop and ended the scene. I could either call this a short 2,000 word chapter or move on to another event, something else could happen with what just cut loose -- something supernatural happened too and the evil has to backlash, maybe it already is. The tragedy in the scene is very deep.

Now I have to think of what happens next.

It also occurred to me that I have two more days and only 20,000 to reach my new goal of 80,000. So I should start moving toward the end. I need some time to pass or I need Hurricane Andrew not to be the main point of the novel. This all happened so fast.

I have to think about it now, think about how they'd find out about that fire. Think about who lived or died in it or not and if she got arrested for murdering her husband or it got blown off to a drunk smoking in bed and knocking over a bottle. It might look like that.

The book's heavy.

The book's got some themes.

The monster of the first chapter hasn't come back onstage yet.

Well, it's Chapter 13, maybe it's time for him to.

Fun stuff that both is and isn't Love Conquers All. Leonora's a trip. I've reset the meter to 80,000 which is the planned length of the novel, if it runs longer and still isn't at the end I'll reset it again. But I think it may come out at 80k anyway, we'll see what happens.

I lost a day yesterday, mostly to pain. I was way out in the fog and tootled around posting on forums very slowly, doing email, not really doing much of anything until at ten at night I gave up and went to bed. Woke up at four in the morning and slammed out a five thousand word chapter by sixish, which is quite a bit better than a thousand an hour. So maybe I will manage to get this done by the tenth -- even if I'm only writing on even number days, which is what seems to be happening now.