The official NaNoWriMo Word Counter says I have 50,426 words. I think I might have to buy myself a “winner” t-shirt. And on December 2nd, I am taking advantage of that discount on Scrivener.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating today. I’m thankful that I married a good cook, especially since I sliced my thumb open washing a knife last night.
Seriously, I have much for which to be thankful. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Lil Miss and I have a parade to watch.
Slowly but surely…
He’s a little creepy with only part of a face, isn’t he?
I haven’t tried doing a reading challenge over here yet, but I just can’t resist The Story Siren. (Heh. See what I did there?) This particular challenge is all about reading debut Middle Grade/Young Adult novels. The idea is to read and review at least 12 titles in 2011. While I read children’s books by many different authors, I can get in a bit of a rut when it comes to YA. I’m looking forward to encountering some fabulous new authors.
My preliminary list:
Watch this space (or my GoodReads profile) for the reviews. And thanks to Kristi for putting this together!
I’ve been working on a big project in the Picture Book section at my library lately. It’s made me think about the fact that you can find a picture book for just about any topic you can imagine. Including, of course, knitting. And spinning. And weaving. (I haven’t found crochet yet, but I’m sure I will.)
Being me, I was drawn to the yarny yarns. Want to hear about a few of them? Of course you do! You know, books make fantastic holiday presents for the kids (and adults, for that matter) in your life. I checked all of these out from my library for review. The Amazon links don’t net anything for me, in case anyone is wondering, since they’re not affiliate links.
The Surprise by Sylvia Van Ommen.
Originally published in the Netherlands as Verrassing, this is a wordless picture book. That’s right, no words, just pictures. Give this one to a pre-reader and have her tell you what’s happening as a scooter-riding sheep turns her own wool into a special sweater for a friend. From shearing to spinning to knitting, it’s all there in the brightly-colored gouache illustrations.
Feeding the Sheep, by Leda Schubert, with pictures by Andrea U’Ren
Step by step, through the seasons of a year, a mother transforms her sheep’s wool into a sweater for her daughter. In each watercolor spread, the little girl asks, “What are you doing?” and gets a brief explanation. By the end of the book, the little girl is ready to take on the tasks herself. This one is especially good for a spinner-to-be.
Farmer Brown Shears his Sheep: a Yarn about Wool, by Teri Sloat, with illustrations by Nadine Bernard Westcott.
This adorable book is the third in a series about Farmer Brown, and it seems to be sadly out of print. After being shorn and left with only fuzz in the chilly Spring air, the sheep follow Farmer Brown around as he takes the wool to be dyed and spun into yarn. The perplexed sheep end up tangled in the yarn before Farmer Brown realizes what’s going on, but all ends happily once he knits each of them a colorful, comfy cardigan to wear. The bouncy rhythm and easy rhyme, plus the giggle-inducing pictures, make this a winning picture book, so I’m sad to see that it’s only available through third-party sellers on Amazon, and not at all at Powell’s. Get it second-hand, or check it out from your local library to share.
I’m a winner! It won’t be official until word count verification opens on the 25th, but still. I did it!
50,059 words. 153 double-spaced, 12-point type pages.
I crossed the 50,000 word mark Saturday night. Last word written? “Weird”.
13 days. That’s just crazy.
I spent some time yesterday on revising, but I think I need to take a little time away from it first. Writer-folks, is it normal to look at your draft and despair of it actually becoming something worth reading? Or is it just me?
Yep, I think I’ll let it rest for a bit. I have some knitting to do.
In late 2002, I was fresh out of Library School and still a new arrival to L.A. I only knew a few people, and none of them very well. I didn’t know the city at all. I had very little money. I had a tiny, tiny apartment and a PC that was on its last legs, although I didn’t know that quite yet. On that little old PC, I had started writing again, after taking a break following my graduation with a B.A. in Creative Writing.
On November 1st, I started writing a novel. I didn’t have a great idea. I didn’t have an outline. I had a couple of characters and a concept that had had two false starts already. So why did I start writing? That day, I read an entry on Neil Gaiman’s blog that pointed me toward NaNoWriMo.
I love the whole concept of NaNoWriMo. I know how easy it is to let those story ideas fade away without writing anything down. It’s even easier to write down the idea and abandon it when the writing gets hard. And it’s much, much easier to stop writing than to force your way past that Internal Editor that tells you that if your story isn’t perfect right away, then it isn’t worth writing.
NaNoWriMo gives the wanna-be writer a ridiculous goal: 5o,000 words in 30 days. If you want to finish, you have to keep writing. When the story stalls, you have to keep writing. When the story takes bizarre turns you never planned, you have to keep writing. When the story starts to look like just a bunch of clumsy words, you have to keep writing. There is no time to go back and edit. There is no time to polish up that prose. There is no time to lose momentum in research.
If you want to “win” NaNoWriMo, you just have to write.
I “won” that first year, writing 51,008 words. There was a beginning, a middle, and end. There was also a huge digression into what should have been an entirely different novel, and there was a character I referred to as a “brother ex machina” when he appeared halfway through.
Somewhere, I have a print-out of that story, that novel, and that is the only copy, since that particular computer crashed and went to Digital Heaven six weeks later.
I took on the NaNoWriMo challenge again in 2003 and 2004, but both attempts remain unfinished. The 2004 novel stopped at 32, 143 words. The 2003 novel met a sad fate. It exists as several “untranslatable” files.
And that was that. Until this year, when I got an itch to start writing again. When I saw a mention somewhere about the authors who would be doing the pep talks this year, I signed up just to get those in my inbox. And, of course, I couldn’t just leave it at that. So, on November 1st, I started a new novel. You can see my word count in the sidebar. As of this moment, I am at 42,012 words. Apparently, if I don’t write much fiction for a few years, it all comes pouring out at once.
It’s a messy first draft. I’ve shifted character’s traits and altered the timeline in ways I will need to go back and fix. I have things that need to be researched to round out my best guesses. But it’s a draft. There is an actual story there, on the page, instead of just floating around in my head. And, more importantly, I’m writing every day. For me, that’s the point: to get back into the habit of sitting down at the keyboard and putting words on the page (screen, whatever).
After November, I can revise. I can edit. I can turn this messy draft into a real story. I can work on the art and craft of writing something worth reading.
It’s not too late for you to join in.
First, the vital details:
One of the nice things about having the race start pretty close to home was that I didn’t need to get up at a ridiculous hour to get ready. I was able to get up pretty close to my usual time (which I have been told might be considered a slightly ridiculous hour anyway), have some peanut butter pretzels, get dressed, and head out the door.
K drove me to the drop-off point, and from there it was a pleasant enough walk to the corrals. I was in corral 16. Everyone was in a good mood, which is always nice. I saw a few other shirts from One More Mile, and got some compliments on mine.
We crossed the starting line nearly 30 minutes after the gun, and ran a few miles through Griffith Park.
I went out a little faster than I intended, running the first three miles in 11:25, 11:3, and 11:18. That was with planned walking breaks, so I know that when I was running, I was running a little faster than I should have been. And then the hills came, and the walking breaks started getting longer, and I stopped caring about smiling for the cameras.
It really was a nice course, though, despite the hills. The water stop volunteers were smiling, and I heard a lot of people thanking them as we went through. The bands were entertaining. There were a bunch of different spirit groups, including one that I think was made up of the cheerleaders from Temple City, but I’m still not sure. And, once we left the park, there were lots of people gathered along the streets, cheering us on. I saw a lot of great signs; I think my favorite was the one that said, “That’s not sweat, it’s your fat cells crying.” The most memorable, to me, was one that said, “Run, B****, Run” – without the asterisks. I really, really, REALLY hope that someone asked him specifically for that sign. And also that he figures out for the next time that maybe the rest of us won’t find it quite so amusing. Somewhere in mile 10 – I think, and it was my slowest mile (14:54) – there was a man holding a sign that said, “You’re doing great! Big hill ahead!” I hoped he was joking, but then I turned the corner, and there it was, just as he said, a big hill for our tired legs to slog up.
In mile 11, I think, there was a little girl sitting on the curb with her mother, a cooler full of water bottles in between them. I took one gratefully. It had been a while since the last water stop, and my Nathan handheld bottle was empty. So, thanks, whoever you were!
Once we reached downtown L.A., I started counting down the streets. I knew the finish line was near 11th, and we entered on 3rd (I’ve driven into the city that way many, many times over the last eight years on my way to the Central Library, so this amused me a lot). Of course, a few blocks from the end, we had to turn and do a little zigging and zagging to finish out the last mile. My Garmin, which had been counting down from 13.1 as a “quick workout” decided about a quarter mile from the finish line that I had reached the goal, and stopped recording. Oops. I perked up a lot once the end was in sight, and ran across the line with a smile for the camera.
A race volunteer hung the medal around my neck (backwards). After slurping down a bottle of Cytomax (in retrospect, not the best idea, I should stick with water next time), I went for the posed medal shot.
In the secure area, there were lots of munchies (mmm, bagels) and cold, cold water. I never made it to the various booths at the Festival. I called K to let her know I was done and that I would be inside ESPNZone, because the insanely loud amps at the Finish Line Festival were too much for me. When she arrived to pick me up, Little Miss ran up to me, saying, “Congratulations!” And, really, that was even better than the medal.
Finally, the official results:
And I beat my co-worker’s time by about 4 minutes, although I never saw him, because he started a few corrals ahead of me. Isn’t chip timing fun?
Fear not, my yarn-wrangling friends, Points West has not been given entirely over to the running. (Actually, I haven’t run since Halloween. Since I’m registered for another half-marathon in late February, this is less than ideal.) It’s just that all the knitting I’ve been doing lately has been unbloggable. But you can now see two of those recent projects in the latest Knit Picks catalog: the Inferno socks and the Burst socks, both patterns available as IDP selections. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy doing those catalog samples? I get to try out different yarn lines and new patterns, and I don’t have to figure out what to do with the finished object. And I get paid for knitting. It’s kind of awesome.
When I haven’t been knitting up catalog samples, I’ve been frantically working on K’s poor neglected Christmas stocking. Yes, the one that should have been done for last Christmas. If I want it to be done for this Christmas, I absolutely have to finish the stitching by early December, so I can hand it off to K’s co-worker, who has graciously done the sewing-together part of the two previous stockings for me, and get it back before their Winter Vacation starts. I realized recently that in the entire chart, there are no blank squares. Every single little square on the front of that stocking has some sort of stitch in it.
While I’ve been cross-stitching and knitting up projects that come with their own yarn, my stash has been mysteriously multiplying. I accidentally caught two Wollmeise updates over at the Loopy Ewe (twitter can be a dangerous thing, my friends). I kept the yarn out on my desk for a while, just so I could admire it. And then I decided to clean my desk. When I went to put away the yarn, I discovered that the stash bins were completely full. I honestly have no idea when that happened.
And yet, yarn keeps arriving. Saturday, I came home from the CLC Fall Gala (which was fabulous) to find a package waiting for me. It was the final TLE Club shipment for 2010, a package I had been awaiting since getting a spoiler about it on Ravelry during last year’s club.
You know, since the yarn bins are full, I think I might just have to wind up this yarn and make something out of it right away. I know, you’re very sad for me.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by the Boston Marathon. A few facts for the uninitiated:
1. Boston is the oldest continually run marathon in the United States. The 2011 race will be the 115th running.
2. In 1970, the Boston Athletic Association began imposing qualifying time requirements for entrants in order to limit the field.
3. Boston is the only U.S. marathon (excluding Olympic and other championship races) that requires entrants to meet a qualifying time in a previous race.
4. Boston does provide spaces for runners who do not meet the qualifying standard but are running to benefit charities.
5. Qualifying for Boston (the much-sought “BQ”) is a goal for many, many, many runners.
I would love to run Boston one day. Like many runners, I want to qualify for it rather than take a charity slot. It’s a lofty goal for a slow runner like me, but a girl can dream.
For the runners who have trained and qualified this year, though, one more hurdle (if you’ll pardon bringing the track metaphor into road racing for a moment) came between them and Boston: it sold out.
Registration opened online for qualified racers at 9:00 AM EDT on October 18th. Eight hours and three minutes later, all 21,000 entries had been sold.
The popularity of the race certainly can’t be denied. Nor can the fact that the streets of Hopkinton (where the race begins) can only hold a finite number of runners. And, of course, technical difficulties with the registration didn’t help matters. (Those of you who have attempted to buy Wollmeise can empathize, I’m sure.)
There’s been quite a bit of mumbling in the last few years about tightening the qualifying standards. Last week, the Wall Street Journal turned the focus specifically on lowering the qualifying times for women, arguing that (1) women are fueling the current running boom, and (2) the finishing time gaps between elite men and women do not support the current gap in the BQ times.
Since I’m a long way from qualifying for Boston, I’m coming at this strictly as an observer. I’m wondering what folks who’ve run it or hope to run it, and especially those who are close to qualifying but not quite there, think about the possibility of tightening the standards.
Personally, I figure that by the time I’m about 70, my running speed and the BQ times might finally match up.
A few weeks back, an email popped up in my inbox from somebody at Brooks. It said I’d won a prize in an online drawing, and they wanted to verify my address. I’ve entered a bunch of Brooks drawings online, and I wasn’t too clear on what I’d won. So, I was happy when this package arrived on my doorstep:
A t-shirt (which is a size too small, sadly), a drawstring backpack, and a new water bottle. You can never have too many water bottles, after all.
The shirt is kind of retro. The first thing I thought of when I saw it was my old summer camp shirt. From 1987.
How cool is it to win a little goodie bag? Run Happy, indeed!