I shoveled the driveway. Which probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, except that I’ve never done it before. It’s always been something my husband did, like mowing the lawn. It’s all very old-fashioned and cliche, I know. But I think it’s sexy to watch him do “manly” things like that. So that’s how we do it.

This year has been full of financial setbacks, of various shapes and sizes. Every time we start to feel like we’re doing okay, something pops up and cries “Me! Me! Me!” and we have to take care of it. And they never feel like going back to square one. Since I consider square one to be the day we got married. And at that point, we didn’t have any debt, we had a car that was older, but totally paid for, and Allen had just gotten an awesome job. Five years later, we do have debt, our car is nice-ish, but not paid for, and Allen’s job is starting to seem less and less awesome every day. So when things pop up, it feels more like we’re going back to square negative one and working toward zero or one.

Our most recent setback, coming the day after Christmas, feels more like square negative five. Maybe six. It feels like too many holes in a boat with only one bucket. It feels like five feet of snow. We have worked hard to trim and trim and trim the fat from our budget since I lost my job. And because of that, we were able to buy some wonderful Christmas gifts for our family. But because we’ve got things trimmed back pretty much as far as it can go, this latest setback feels insurmountable. Because it’s going to take money out of our budget beyond the point that we can reduce bills to offset it. And from what we can tell so far, there’s nothing we can do about it. So, since I couldn’t figure out how to dig us out of this new financial hole, I shoveled the driveway.

It helped, I think. I shoveled and cried and watched the driveway slowly appear. But I don’t know that I really felt any better when it was over. Though I’m proud that I finished it, and I’m happy that my husband can now park in the driveway when he gets off work. But I really wish all that shoveling would have translated into something that could fix this new problem. It didn’t.

The worst part of the whole thing, is that we would have been able to start paying them off within the next six months. We have several things that we’re paying on right now, that will be done by April. The payments that were going to them, could have gone to this. If they could have just waited. But we’re in a time where no one wants to have any patience regarding money. And we’re stuck in a money place where no one can help. Our rent is too much, and going up. But any place that we could actually afford a deposit for is in a part of town where I’d fear for my daughter. And we can’t buy a house, because our credit sucks, but trying to improve our credit is going incredibly slowly, because we can’t reduce our rent. The best way to improve your credit score is to have a credit card in good standing, but we can’t get one (and the one we had, closed our account when the economy went bad, even though we never carried a balance). We can’t use one of those debt consolidation/counseling services because our debt is almost exclusively medical and those only do consumer debt. We can’t even declare bankruptcy because you can’t get rid of judgments or student loans and those are the two biggest portions of our debt. Sure, we could get rid of a number of small debts, but the two big ones would still be there, just waiting for us to trip so they could eat us alive.

While I was shoveling, I was praying, not for a miracle. A miracle would be nice, of course, but what I was really praying for was a light at the end of the tunnel. A rainbow on the horizon. Something that might let me know that everything will be fine. My husband and I keep telling each other that. But from square negative five, it’s starting to get harder to believe it. I told him that one day, we’ll probably look back and this will be a good thing. But today, it’s so hard to see how that could ever happen.

I need to figure out how to put a little graph in my post for how far along I am in editing. I’m currently going through and editing my ‘07 NaNovel for typos and coherency. And I’m also looking at ways to clarify all of my major plot points. After this run through, I’ll probably have more major revising to do. My ending needs some major work, since that was the time of the month when sleep deprivation was really setting in (I did have a 3 month old at the time). Unfortunately, this editing stuff isn’t particularly exciting. So rather than talking about rooting out typos, I’m going to talk about the highlights of our extending family Christmas get-together with my maternal grandparents.

• Papa John’s Pizza. It may sound strange, but I really like Papa John’s. My husband is a bit of a pizza snob though, and he’s not a fan. So I don’t even remember the last time I had it. It was delicious.

• Baking exchange. Since we had some major changes in our family this year, we didn’t do a big gift exchange like we usually do. Instead, we each brought a batch of baked something or other for each family to take home. I brought Snickerdoodle Chex Mix (which tastes ten times better the day after you make it). I left with several kinds of cookies, peanut brittle, snow pretzel turtles, magic bars, and some peppermint fudge that may cause me to gain back my three pounds because it’s so delicious.

• Poo Paper. Yes, you read that right. My cousin bought me a couple of notebooks. One is your regular, run of the mill, recycled paper. The other is a notebook made from elephant dung and rice paddy. I think it’s totally awesome and I can’t wait to start writing in it. It almost seems like it needs a special project just for it. But I may not be able to hold out for that. I may just need to write something stupid in it, like a grocery list.

• My family. I’ve always been a family person, so I’ve always looked forward to family gatherings. But this year just feels different. I’m more appreciative of everyone, and I’m more filled with Christmas Cheer (it still hasn’t gone away).  And somehow that just makes me enjoy my family that much more.

Overall, it was a wonderful family gathering, even if there were some arguments revolving around a game of Monopoly City. And I always love watching my daughter play with her cousins. Next up, the big celebration with my immediate family on Christmas Eve. And since we’ve been spending so much time shopping for everyone, I’m really looking forward to seeing how much they enjoy what we got them.

I’ve been working on revisions of my 2007 NaNovel in anticipation of this years Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Last year, I didn’t know about it until a week before the submission period, so my entry was incredibly rushed. This year, I’ll still be a little rushed, but only because they’re holding the competition earlier in the year than I expected. They just announced last week that the submission period will begin January 25th. So I have a little more than a month to get my revisions done and prepare my pitch. Luckily, the way I’m starting on my revisions should make a pitch and synopsis much easier to write. So I’ll work hard on my revisions, then finish up my pitch. Then, after submitting to the competition, I’ll write my synopsis and query, so that if I don’t win I’ll be ready to start submitting it as soon as I’m knocked out of the competition.

As part of my revision process (and an attempt at continuing my Christmas cheer), I’ve been doing some major cleaning. We have a spare room that’s basically been a holding space for. . . whatever. We kept trying to plan a move to Arizona, so there were a ton of empty boxes. Plus, whenever we moved our cluttered desks from one spot to another, we had a bad habit of just sticking all the clutter in a box and tossing it in the spare room. Which is a really bad habit that I hope to break.

Since I decided that I need a spot where I can go to write without being interrupted, I wanted to turn the spare room into an office. Which meant going through a LOT of boxes, setting up some shelves, and managing to stick a desk in there right next to the exercise bike (that my husband may move out into the living room so he can exercise while he watches TV. I still think it looks messy in there, but I made room for my desk, so it counts as an office. And, since a lot of the stuff that didn’t get thrown away when I was going through everything, is baby stuff, I know that all of that clutter will start to disappear after we have our second kid. But we’ve always planned on having two, so it seemed silly to get rid of any baby stuff that we might be able to use with the second kid. So after kid number two (est. to be born 2011), all of the baby clothes and the bassinet and the swing and all of that stuff, can be sold/given/thrown away. Which will make the room even cleaner.  And I can tolerate pretty much anything, if I know it’s temporary.

The next step, after cleaning up that room, is finishing with my daughter’s room. We’re moving her toys out of the living room and into her bedroom so that we have room for the Christmas tree. And since her room has been the home for a big filing cabinet that we weren’t actually using, there’s plenty of room in there for toys after my mom adopts the filing cabinet.

So it’s a lot of house cleaning and rearranging, just to make it so that I have my own space for writing and editing. But as soon as I’m done rearranging my house for my writing, it will make rearranging my time for my writing a whole lot easier. Not to mention, I’ll feel a really great sense of accomplishment when my house looks a little closer to what I want it to look like. And feeling good about my house and myself makes a huge difference in my writing.

I do not like the Holidays. Ever since I worked the Holiday season at a Target about ten years ago, I just haven’t been able to get into the spirit. It’s supposed to be a season of cheer and instead it ends up being a season of rudeness, greed, and way too much traffic. A couple years ago, I even refused to put up my tree, because it felt like too much work, when I knew that the cats would just knock down the ornaments all season and drive me insane.

But this year, I’ve been infected with cheer. I’m not even sure how it happened. I think it’s some weird combination of having a 2-year old, having enough money for gifts, and a husband that wants to buy gifts. It also helps that I won NaNoWriMo early, so I had a week of relaxation/housework to let me unwind a little before we hit December and the chaos that is prepping for Christmas.

For the first time, I went shopping on Black Friday and actually enjoyed it (we didn’t do the early morning thing. We went at 5 or 6 in the evening). My husband has been enjoying buying gifts so much that he suggested that we take them all back so that we can buy something new for everyone. In past years, he’s been anti-gift, leaving me with all the stress-filled parts of the holiday. It has been so much easier to get gifts for everyone with two of us to come up with ideas. I’m already almost completely done with my shopping.

And, in a fit of random cheer, I even wrapped almost everything we’ve bought so far. I only stopped because I ran out of tape and part of one of the gifts was missing (found it in the trunk beneath a softball glove). It’s the weirdest feeling. My husband has even commented on it. Last year, I didn’t put up the tree until the week before Christmas, but I’ve already talked about putting it up.

The best part of all this cheer and spirit, is that I’m actually keeping some of the momentum of NaNoWriMo. I’m not working on 50,000 words in December, but I’m getting my WIPs properly outlined so that I can do a lot of editing. And I’m going to be trying for 50,000 words in probably April. I have several projects to edit before then. But most years, after NaNoWriMo, I hit a speed bump in the Holidays. I usually get so stressed out and depressed, I don’t do anything writing related in the entire month of December. Not so, this year. In fact, I’m working on rearranging a few rooms to make an office for myself in our spare room that is currently just storage.

I’m not 100% where this Christmas Cheer infection came from. But I’m loving what it’s doing for my writing. So I’ll take it.

Also: Happy Birthday to my wonderful husband!!

Last, but definitely not least. I have been spending a lot of time reading through the posts on Storyfix.com. It is really awesome and he has explained story structure in such a clear way. It amazes me how much more clearly I can see the flaws in my writing after reading the things he has on his site. That’s part of why I’m spending my time re-outlining and editing right now. I don’t need to start on anything else until the stuff I’ve already written is in good shape.

By the time this post goes up, I should be really really close to winning (like 3000 ish words away), if I’m not done already. Week Three was by far the hardest. And not even because of my novel. Week Three I was saddled with both jury duty and training with H&R Block for this next tax season. Which meant that by the time I got home in the evenings, I was too exhausted to get much writing done. Every single night of the week, my word count goal was 38k. And I didn’t hit that number until Saturday night.

I have definitely learned this year that my husband is more of a writing distraction than my daughter is. I can easily get several thousand words on a night when he’s working. But  night when he’s home, I don’t even always hit the basic word count goal of 1667 words.

I have also learned that my husband complains far less about my participation if I take the time to do the dishes before I get started on my writing. And I’ve been keeping him happy by making sure to cook dinner at night before he even knows he’s hungry. Which seems like the opposite of NaNo dogma. But I like the break. And since I’m winning before Thanksgiving, it’s apparently not a detriment to my wordcount.

My plans after winning: Choose a novel to focus on revising and preparing for this year’s ABNA. Assuming it’s going to happen again. And then, there’s NaNoEdMo to spend revising yet another novel. Now that I think I’ve figured out how to keep my focus, I have a feeling I’m going to get quite a bit more accomplished in the next year than I did last year.

My first NaNoWriMo was in 2006. I started the month with nothing more than a counting down tagline, a couple rough characters, and some ideas. And I was doing okay. I was slightly ahead, even. And then I hit the scene. The scene where my brain completely shut down. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t write the scene, and I couldn’t figure out how to move past it. Because, for the most part, I had no idea what was going to happen. Getting stuck meant staying stuck.

Enter NaNoWriMo 2007. I had just had a baby at the end of August. I was exhausted, and knew there was no way I could finish if I tried things like the year before. So I pulled an old project out of my writing box, made an outline based on what I’d already written, and what I’d planned. Then I put away the old version (and subsequently lost it completely), and started fresh on November 1st. That year, despite the 3 month old and the sleep deprivation, I finished on the last day. Why? Because when I got stuck, I could skip forward by half the book to write the part that I was inspired by, then work between the two parts until I caught up with myself. And that’s what I did. Knowing what was going to happen, made it easy to write in whatever order I felt like it.

NaNoWriMo 2008 I spent most of October plotting out my novel and writing my outline. I got to 40,000 words by the 15th. Unfortunately, personal stuff made the remaining 10,000 take the last half of the month. But I made it. And while I mostly wrote things in order, I knew that if I got stuck, I could always skip forward. It was a good feeling.

Enter 2009. I’m doing NaNoWriMo again, but because of everything that happened at the end of October, I’m working on a completely different novel than the one I’d planned. And while I had a vague idea about my novel, I’ve had to stop several times and brainstorm, just to get the next section figured out. I still don’t fully have the ending worked out. It’s the sort of situation, that makes me feel a little uneasy when I’m writing. Because any scene could become the scene that stops me in my tracks.

Writing without an outline isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I can do it. I’m just very nervous about doing it for NaNo. The writing period is so short, I don’t like having a huge margin for error. But I feel like I’m conquering fears this year. I’m pushing through when I start to feel blocked. I’m learning new things about story structure and how to figure out what comes next. And I broke 30,000 today. I’m doing okay (one might say I’m doing well, even). I can clearly see myself making it to the finish line (both the 50k finish line and the end-of-book finish line) and while I know the book will need a lot of editing when I’m done, all NaNovels do. So that’s no big deal.

It is definitely a year for being fearless.

And, in case you’re curious, you can read all 20449 words of my unfinished 2006 NaNovel, I’m Afraid I Have To Kill You Now. I have warned you though, it’s totally unfinished. And I’m not sure it will ever be finished.

I have a confession to make. I have never been behind before. At least not for more than a day. Even the year that I didn’t finish, I was right on track to make the 50k before I got stuck and ended up quitting. But this year, I was behind for almost a week. Starting over on day 2, especially when I’d had such a measly word count for day 1, put me quite a bit behind. And my nervousness over not having a completely plotted out novel made it difficult to catch up at first.

I finally did catch up though, on a day that our region had a virtual write-in. I wrote over 4000 words in one day (and if I’d realized how close I was to a 5k day, I may have written more to make it there). I still feel nervous about a novel that’s so un-plotted in the middle, but at least I know where I’m headed and I’ve learned my weak spots over the last few years. So I’m hoping I’ll be okay. But I definitely decided that I don’t like being behind and I plan not to do that ever again.

One week before NaNoWriMo began, my uncle was murdered. And everyone in my head went silent. I have never felt so completely drained of creativity and imagination. The entire week, as I spent time with my family, avoided reading increasingly negative news articles, and prepared to attend the funeral, I was also thinking about the lack of anything coming out of my fingers. I’d already scheduled all but two of my Prewriting posts, so after I finished those last two I basically had nothing going on in the writing department. Needless to say, I was worried.

Then, Halloween came. We dressed up the kid and went to visit the grandparents. After making the rounds, we were invited back to my mother’s to watch Drag Me To Hell. So my first NaNoWriMo words were written while watching the movie (not really scary, more Army of Darkness than The Grudge). My grand total during the two hours? A whopping 100 or so. After a full night’s sleep and some breakfast, I was only able to add an additional 50. Basically, the characters for that novel refuse to be roused.

So, for the first time in my NaNoWriMo history, I’m considering changing novels. Which means I basically have to speed prewrite. But luckily, I have an entire box of story starters and sketchy outlines that I’ve written down over the years. So at least I won’t be starting completely from scratch.

Before I finish this post up, I had some requests for info about POV and Voice. I feel like those things are decided organically as I prepare everything else for my novel, so I’m not so great at them. Thus, some links:

POV:

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art36814.asp

http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/read/pov1.html

http://fiction-plots-pacing.suite101.com/article.cfm/points_of_view

Voice:

http://www.write101.com/lethamfind.htm

http://www.ttms.org/writing_quality/voice.htm

http://efuse.com/Design/wa-voice.html

I know it’s a little late, if you want to have that information for prewriting. But I find that those are things that can easily be taken care of in revising instead of prewriting.

Today’s Link: www.nanowrimo.org

First of all, if you haven’t signed up on the NaNoWriMo website, go do it. I’ll wait. Really. I’ve got time. The fact is, everything that I’ve said, and probably more can be found on that site. It’s also the way you win (by reporting your word count to the site). And, best of all, once you sign up, you get a whole forum of information and ways to procrastinate. At your fingertips! Plus, pep talks every week, not only from the founder of NaNoWriMo (who’s written over 10 books by now), but also from other well-known, published authors. Every year, I look forward to seeing which of my favorites is going to be pepping us.

And best of all, you’ll have an entire site full of people that are interested in nothing more than watching you succeed at writing a novel in November. And if you really, really get stuck, you can probably find someone who’s willing to procrastinate for a few hours to read your novel and give you some advice. Or maybe just tell you something random like “Add a talking frog.” You never know, but there will always be help.

Today’s Link: http://www.jennymeyerhoff.com/writers.html

This author has a lot of good advice on her page. But the really great stuff is her worksheets. She says that she’ll pull them out and go through them whenever she gets to a tough spot and I have to say, they probably work for that. I think they’d also work great for prewriting. And I’m looking forward to printing off several of the character worksheets. I like that they’re two pages, so they’ll fit nicely front to back on a single piece of paper. I can fill them out and stick them in my notebook, then if I need to add stuff later, I have a sheet for each character and I can just add it on. For me, it might work better than adding to the excel sheet. I love excel, but I’m a tactile person and sometimes I just need something to be on a piece of paper. And I like the handiness of having a front and back sheet. The worksheets that I’ve used in the past were multiple pages. This is more compact, and I like that.