Books, Facebook, NaPoWriMo

Well, life got in the way of that reading challenge. I still hope to catch up on posting some good books I've read. Meanwhile, I have finally joined Facebook after putting it off for years, which may actually encourage me to post more here too.

And it's April, which means it's National Poetry Month, and this year we're trying NaPoWriMo again. I'm planning to post a poem per day, and A. may post some too. They'll be on our writing blog (link in the sidebar).

NaPoWriMo 2012

Is it April again already? I don't know yet whether I'll be able to write a poem every day like I did last year, but I want to try. My efforts (and any that my children want to publish) will be over at Word Finding.

NaNoWriMo 2011

For some reason, we tend to plan family vacations in November, right in the middle of NaNoWriMo. This year I decided I wouldn't worry about trying to write in a notebook at the motel. That doesn't work very well for me. Instead, I figured out a higher word goal for the days I would be at home writing, and so far I'm on track with that, even though I feel behind because of vacation. I want a winner T-shirt this year!

30 poems and more

Despite a few nights of almost forgetting and frantically scrambling words together at 11:45 pm, I met my goal of writing a poem every day in April! The kids didn't write every day, but they wrote more poetry than they've done before. It was a fun challenge, although it's nice to not have the pressure now of coming up with something every day. The poems, good ones and bad ones, are at Word Finding.

Month of poetry

For April we're making NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) part of our homeschool. Instead of posting our poems every day on this blog, we started a new one to put them on, along with other writing projects from our family. I'm hoping to encourage my children to write more and share more. I'm committing to a poem every day in April myself; the kids may not keep to that schedule, but I'll be happy with whatever they do produce! If you want to check in on us during the month or afterwards, the new blog is Word Finding.

14 compositions in 28 days

It took me till the last day of February, but I finished February Album Writing Month for the first time! Most of the pieces I did this year were short exercises from a composition workbook I'm working through. But hey, I'm counting them. I also put a scripture to music (Matthew 16:13-17, our stake scripture for the year) to help me and my family memorize it more easily. I used a hymn tune, but it took a while to work out how to fit the words to it in a natural way. My favorite composition this year is an arrangement of "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" for cello with piano accompaniment. I've been wanting to put it together for a long time, and the February challenge gave me the push to get it done. Which is the whole point of challenges, I think!

And speaking of challenges, I just found out about NaPoWriMo. NaPoWriMo participants write a poem every day during the month of April, which is National Poetry Month. Anyone want to join me?

My morning project

I'm organizing my living room this morning, with Christmas songs still going through my head, and this is the result.

When I clean out my couches,
To my surprise I see:
12 paper clips
11 board game pieces
10 candy wrappers
9 broken crayons
8 chocolate chips
7 ballpoint pens
6 corroded pennies
5 Chee-ri-os!
4 pattern blocks
3 hair bands
2 remote controls
And a book from the li-bra-ry.

(Sometimes I think a horse could fit down between those cushions!)

Life, lately

Well, it's November 1 and the NaNoWriMo site is overloaded, so I can't enter my first wordcount for this year's novel. (1,144 so far.) So instead I'll give a quick update on what we've been doing.

Gerbils - After a year or more of talking about getting a pet, then researching different animals, we finally got two gerbils last week from the Humane Society. I'll post photos sometime. They are friendly and very cute and should give the kids some good hands-on biology experience. (Not the breeding kind of experience, though. They are both female.)

Music - Last Friday I got to sing in the Assembly Hall in Salt Lake City with a four-stake choir for the annual Relief Society Music Festival. We rehearsed for two months with a wonderful director, and it was an amazing experience to finally perform. I was asked to play a small bell solo for one of the songs, and despite several nightmares about various ways of messing it up, it went just fine.

Chemistry - We have finished 4 out of the 6 chemistry class sessions we're holding this fall. We tried a cool color-changing experiment last week that we got from Home Science Tools. This week we will be testing for acids and bases with litmus paper and red cabbage dye. We may even bake some cakes using different chemical reactions.

NaNoWriMo - This year A. and T. are participating in the Young Writers Program, so there's a lot of writing going on in our house today.

More soon!

Back from NaNoWriMo Land

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and this was my second year participating. The goal is to write 50,000 words minimum during the month of November, and my story wrapped up at 50,191 words yesterday. Whew!

They have a T-shirt that says "Camp NaNoWriMo: An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life." It's true! It's like a mini-vacation without going anywhere. Normal life goes on, but the things I would otherwise do with my spare time (like posting on this blog) give way to the effort of getting that next 1000 words written, and then the next, and so on.

Last year I finished a novel too, but frankly, it stunk. I haven't even looked at it since then and probably never will. I like this year's novel much better. It's definitely a rough first draft, but this time I think it's worth revising and improving. The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it motivates you to finish a first draft, even if it's rough, so that you actually have something to work with and not just an idea in your head.

One of the ways I stayed motivated was to go on the NaNoWriMo forums after each 1000 words or so and play some of the creative word games I found there. My kids enjoyed the games too and helped me come up with ideas. We found that some of the games are fun to play with each other in the car or while waiting in line, although they sometimes get us laughing hysterically and people give us strange looks. Here are a few of our favorites:

The Useless Super Power Game
One person thinks of a useless super power to grant another person, like "You can fly, but only for 2 seconds on alternate Thursdays," or "You can read the minds of earthworms." Then the next person grants a useless super power to the first person, and so on.

Good Idea/Bad Idea
One person gives a good idea, like "Good idea: brushing your teeth every day." The next person might say, "Bad idea: brushing your teeth with corn syrup every day." Then that person gives a good idea of their own which the next person will turn into a bad idea.

Corrupt a Wish
One person states a wish, like "I wish I had a pizza." The next person gets to corrupt that wish by saying something like "All right, but it's covered with anchovies." (Assuming you don't like anchovies.) Then that person makes a wish and the next person gets to corrupt it. We make a rule that you can't be mean, only funny. It's also fun to try to come up with a wish that can't be corrupted, like "I wish I had a pizza with only the toppings I like, that tastes good, isn't poisonous or harmful in any way, won't choke me when I eat it, and has nothing else wrong with it." (Then the next person might say, "Okay, but an angry dragon is holding it.")

One of the worst

Not to brag or anything, but the Deseret News recognized me this morning for my bad writing.

Last year when the Bad Opening Sentences contest came around, I couldn't think of anything to send in. Then, as soon as the deadline passed, two or three ideas came immediately to mind. I wrote them down and added to the list from time to time, and this year I was ready.

The funny thing is, the one they decided to print was not the one I thought was the best (that is, worst). I'll have to come up with new ones for next year, and since I don't want the other awful ones to be wasted, here they are for the historical record.

The one they printed for "Best Local Color":

As LaVonda waited uncomfortably for the uniformed officers to use the "Jaws of Life" to extricate her from her mangled car, she pondered in turn the fragility of life, the massiveness of 18-wheelers, the difficulty of text-messaging while eating fries and driving, and finally, how she could use this experience as an object lesson in her next Sunday school class.


And here are the others. For the last one, you have to understand that there's an ongoing joke about entries involving talking unicorns.


Marcia snuggled into John's arms, thinking how lucky she was to have found him, and how different her life had been ever since the Liquid-Plumr of his love had eaten its way through the clogged drainpipe leading to her heart.

Fifty years, it had been -- fifty tedious, painful years of waiting –- waiting, ever hoping, yet hardly daring to hope; fifty long years had rolled on, leaving him trapped, unable to move in any direction, fixed in time by an insurmountable force –- at least, it felt like fifty years, but he had probably only been at the intersection of Bangerter and 35th for three and a half minutes before the light finally changed.

Doug had just spent three hours connecting and re-connecting the TV, DVD player, stereo system, and the new speakers, and now, as he thumbed the power button on the remote and the poignant notes of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song filled the room, he couldn't help murmuring in awe, "I must be a genius or somethin'."

Lying with his head and shoulders under the bathroom sink, an impressive array of tools arranged where he could easily reach them, competently and efficiently using his wrench, Jed felt like one of the engine room personnel on the Starship Enterprise –- not the chief engineer, it would be presumptuous to compare his moderate skill with that of the master, but certainly one of the trusted assistants -– until the trap suddenly came loose and his new identity was washed away in a rush of dirty water.

As Xyla the warrior princess, scantily clad in leather and ready for battle, galloped into the village on her magnificent Arabian steed, she was outraged to see that show-off Princess Xxyyna from the next kingdom over, clad in even less leather, dismounting from her talking unicorn to accept the adulation of the villagers for whom she had obviously already saved the day.

And this is how the story began...

(Remember that line? "It was a dark and stormy night. All of the boys were gathered around the campfire. One of the boys spoke up and said, 'Grandpa, tell us a story.' And this is how the story began. 'It was a dark and stormy night...'")

T. is writing a book. He's made the title page and the table of contents (he's very fond of the dot leader tab in Word). Today he finished chapter 1 and he said I could put it on my blog if I wanted. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did!

chapter 1
a kid named alix

There sat Alix, in front of “the castle.” Memories rushed back as he sat. One of them was the time he defeated a troll, and another one was the time he defeated a bandit, also he remembered that the first number of the address was the number of the key to the padlock. There is always an adventure to be done inside, he thought. I might want to bring my sister, too. Then he went home and thought about it. To take my sister on an adventure, or not to take my sister on an adventure. To take my sister on an adventure, or not to take my sister on an adventure. To take my sister on an adventure, or not to take my sister on an adventure. To take my sister on an adventure, or not to take my sister on an adventure. To take my sister on an adventure, or not to take my sister on an adventure. he kept thinking about it like this for a hour or so. and then, he finally decided, to take his sister on an adventure. then he went upstairs to his sisters room. the door was open.


Intriguing, mysterious, and suspenseful! Watch for the final product at bookstores everywhere, someday.

Writing dilemma

So here I am, halfway through November and getting within sight of halfway to 50,000 words. And then driving home tonight I got an amazing idea for a totally different story. I just spent half an hour writing the details down so I won't forget them. Part of me wants to scrap the story I've been writing and just do this new one. But part of me thinks I should finish what I'm working on first, even though it's feeling more and more boring the more I write.

If I started a different story I would have 15 days to write 50,000 words. That's 3333 words a day (plus an abbreviation to count as the 1/3 remainder). Possible, but a little crazy. But it would be a lot more fun than the story I'm writing now.

But I just read some advice by a seasoned author who says that jumping from project to project will get you a whole box full of started-but-not-finished stories. She recommends finishing a story even if you get a great idea for something else.

Hmmm... I think I'd better be persistent and finish the story I'm working on. At least it will teach me what kind of story I don't want to write ever again!

Update on novel writing

It's hard, hard, hard to write without trying to edit as I go. I find myself wanting to go back and correct inconsistencies in the plot, change dialogue that I thought was witty when I wrote it but now sounds less lifelike than the presidential debates, and research details to make sure they're accurate. But I can't. There isn't time. And that's the point, I think. If I get caught up in all that, it'll take forever to get to the end of the story. It might never happen.

I wish my first draft could be like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus (a cliche, but a good one). But I'm learning that it won't be. One novelist said he wrote eight rotten books before he wrote one that was publishable. I guess at the end of November, if nothing else, I'll be one book closer to being a good writer! Which will be a lot closer than I was at the end of October.

I just passed 14,000 words. That puts me about a quarter of the way done. The month is almost half over, but I think I should get points back for being gone for a week. Looked at that way, the math says I'm pretty much on schedule.

Note: If you decide to write a novel in a month, don't read excellently written books in the first week of your writing. I just finished a book, the third in a series, that pulled together every plot arc in a breathtaking and creative way (Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson). And I'm listening to a book on tape (Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde) that is just solid fun. Both books leave me (1) full of awe that people can write such a great story, (2) jealous that I can't write like that, and (3) discouraged as I go back and work on my little novel that seems pathetic in comparison. But I keep reminding myself that even those authors had to start somewhere!

NaNoWriMo 2008

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Thousands of people in the US (and all over the world) accept the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch by the end of the month. It sounds pretty impossible until you realize that it doesn't have to be a good novel. The point is to push yourself and just write, trying to ignore your "inner editor." Editing is for later. This is a foreign concept to me and I'm finding I have to keep reminding myself not to get stuck working out the perfect way to phrase a sentence. But I'm up past 3,000 words and now I just need to make sure I have enough of a plot for the other 47,000. If this sounds fun to you, it's not too late to start! You can click here to find out more and sign up.