NaNoWriMo 2020

Participating in National Novel Writing Month this year for me started out well, took a nasty dive and then may have actually cured a lingering malaise I've been having with writing productivity in 2020. It didn't help that I lost my two pups just before and in the first week of NaNo, and I did consider giving up and waving the white flag. Very glad I didn't.

My wordcount as of the writing of this post (10:45 pm on 11/29) was 71,635. I'm going to try to hit 75K tomorrow, but even if I don't, I'm very happy with how much I wrote.

What I did differently this go-round: I joined a writing group on the Nano web site, which was low-key friendly but stayed pretty quiet for the most part. Some nice girls in the bunch, but they didn't talk much. I'm hoping I wasn't the reason for that; I tried to stay low-key friendly, too.

Although I wasn't really inspired to participate in the forums after running into some pinheads last year, I did that, too, and got to help out one writer with a character citizenship issue that she couldn't find an answer to. By random chance I happen to know the rather obscure info she needed. She was delighted and said I'm her new hero now, which was a nice pat on the back.

The writing: Due to my ass dragging with a project for work I had to switch novels at the last minute. Instead of writing Gemini, the book I was going to do for fun, I finished up a starter novel for a new series my partner and I are doing next year. I felt a little resentful about that, but the job must come first.

How it went: such a rollercoaster.

The first part of the month started okay; at one point I was 3k ahead. After we lost Skye I just could not get the words on the page. I still sat down every day and hammered away at it, mostly because I am stubborn, and hauled out from my brain what I could. There was one day when I wrote only 96 words, so I really didn't expect to finish. Then something amazing happened. On the 17th inspiration hit me like a sledgehammer, and smashed open my creative flood gates. All the crap that has been weighing me down simply evaporated. I wrote over 10k in a single day.

I haven't done that in many, many years. I kept writing at that flood speed too, and hit the 50K mark on 11/22. Then I just figured I'd keep going and see how much I could crank out in a month. This isn't a lot of lousy first draft writing, either. It's some of the best writing I've done in years. I'm probably going to be able to do one big final edit and be done with it.

Physically it was a bit harder to slog through the long hours required to write this much, and I've probably spent more time in a cervical collar this month than I have all year due to my neck issues. Don't care. Totally worth it.

Will I able to do it in 2021? I damn well will try to. This year really helped me a lot, writing-wise. Plus I love it. I just love it.:)

We Can't Dodge Them Ten

Ten Things I'm Doing Differently to Survive the Holidays

Adding Letters to Cards:We don't do a lot of visiting during the holidays, but the few people we usually go to see are all at high-risk for covid-19. So instead they'll be getting a card in the mail with a letter (hopefully handwritten) from me with something funny to boost their spirits.

Altering Gift-Giving Strategies: This year I'm going to make at least one gift for the immediate family, which is my usual thing. However, I'm not going to do any shopping at all. Instead I'm opting to send E-gift cards to allow everyone on my list to enjoy a little shopping spree after the holidays. This way I avoid any in-store shopping and the forecasted delays for shipping online shopping purchases.

Bake More: In line with my hand made gifts, I'm going to make cookies, cakes or pastries for our immediate neighbors and family friends, and add the recipe to the gift so they can make more if they enjoy it.

Giving Myself a Pass: A big part of why I dislike Christmas so much is the annual guilt trip I take because I never feel like I do enough (this despite the fact that I do all the shopping, gift-wrapping, meals and decorating.) This year I'm excusing myself in advance for not making the holidays perfect. 2020 makes that literally impossible.

Nature Time: I usually don't spend a lot of time outdoors in December, but nature and exercise both boost my spirits. So every day that the weather permits I'd like to take a walk down by the lake or go for a hike in one of the local parks. This will be good for my guy, too.

Nixing Visitors: I'm asking everyone not to visit us in person during the holidays. This is just to avoid the virus more than anything. I will probably have Oliver and his parents over for a few hours on Christmas Day if we're their first stop.

Not Getting a New Dog Yet (Maybe): Within a month or two of losing one of our pups we usually acquire a new one. I asked my family to hold off on that, as I'm still mourning Cole and Skye. We also prefer to get our dogs young to train them, which is usually my responsibility, and dealing with a puppy during the holidays feels like too much. My daughter agreed, but she also reminded me that if we happen to find the right puppy for us during the holidays, we should give it a home. So this one is a maybe.

Scale Down the Celebrations: I always try to make Christmas nice for everyone else. I think this year I'm going to focus instead on keeping everything simple to eliminate fuss and stress. Maybe that will work.

Staying Home: We have an informal tradition of going out to see the town's annual Christmas light-up event. Nixing that to have a light-up night here at our house just for us. If the weather permits we'll have a fire in the backyard so we can relax afterward.

Writing the Holidays: I usually write much less during December so I can deal with the holidays and all they entail, which adds to my personal misery. This year I'm planning to write more. It's my happy place, and I deserve to be happy just like everyone else.

A 2020 Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a bit weird this year, but a few things happened that were interesting. The night before as I was baking pie and prepping for everything else I also finished a book I've been reading since the pandemic began:

Very well-written and information dense, sometimes a tad bit stodgy, and constantly surprising. Because the author is very smart and not especially interested in catering to the reader, probably not for anyone but an unwavering history buff like me. It's a bit like auditing a college class on Scottish influence on the rest of the world, particularly America. And speaking of pie:

Behold the sugar pumpkin we had to go to six different markets before we could find it. Everyone at the first five markets looked at me as if I were crazy when I asked for one. One young clerk didn't know you could use an actual pumpkin to make fresh pumpkin pie. Ah, youth. You're going to starve when my generation dies.

While I was cooking Edward called me out onto the porch to see what Nature had put up for us as Thanksgiving decoration overnight.

It really was pretty. The nicest webs are spun by these little tiny crab spiders no bigger than your pinkie fingernail.

We invited Katherine's boyfriend to join us for dinner, but otherwise asked everyone else to skip us this year as Covid is raging here and Edward is still recovering a bit from his bout with the flu. Boyfriend ended up cancelling on us, so it was just dinner for three. Nice, simple and quiet.

Well, except that one moment. Ha.

Lemonade Hack

When you're a diabetic who doesn't care for soda you're very limited on what you can drink. I mostly drink water, unsweetened homemade ice tea, herbal tea, coffee or oat milk. For a while I was using Crystal Light, but that turned out to a headache trigger for me. Since then I've eliminated all products sweetened with aspartame from my diet.

I use stevia to sweeten my hot and cold teas, which seems to be the safest sugar sub on the market. I like it (it has a slight vanilla flavor to me) and I don't have a problem with any aftertaste. If anything it's a bit too sweet, so I use it sparingly. I've also been adding a little lemon juice to my ice tea, as I like that, too.

Typically I drink about two liters altogether per day, and the majority of that is water or tea. I've been looking for something else to add to my options, but fruit juice is loaded with sugar, and too much coffee gives me heartburn. Smoothies are a pain to make and even the lactose-free kind often aggravate my stomach. I literally cannot deal with drinking more oat milk; one glass with my morning oatmeal is more than enough in the oat department.

While I was making some tea I glanced at my lemon juice bottle and a lightbulk went off. I like lemonade almost as much as tea. Lemon juice has only about 1 gram of sugar per tablespoon, so it's diabetic-friendly. Because I'd be the only person in the house drinking it, I didn't want to make up a whole pitcher. So I experimented until I came up with the perfect one-glass recipe:

Diabetic Lemonade by the Glass

16 oz. of water over ice

1-2 tablespoons of lemon juice (I use 2)

2 packets of Truvia, or the sweetener of your choice.

Add everything to a big glass and stir. :)

Wishing You

Happy Thanksgiving to my pals. Your ears will be burning tomorrow as I give thanks for you all. Much, much love.

New Studio

Bit of trivia you may not know about me: when I graduated high school, I won both the English and Art awards for the senior class. Came with medals and everything. These were selected by our teachers, many of whom weren't my biggest fans, so I didn't think I'd win anything. When you spend as much time as I did in the dean's office, you generally don't expect to get any medals.

Much much later (after I got out of the military and came home) I met my old English teacher, who among other things told me that nearly all the teachers agreed that I was the best writer and the best artist of that class (not shabby when you consider I graduated with 3500 other seniors.) My favorite part: I was the only senior to win two major awards that year, which really pissed off all the suck ups. :)

My daughter, aka the little apple that didn't fall too far off this tree, is making a little money on the side by picking up art commissions, and she accepted a major one to do a custom painting for the mother of one of her friends. Since she needs room to work, I gave her the sewing room to work in:

Here's the preliminary sketch for her painting:

I'll sneak in and take more pics as it progresses.

Hope and Gratitude

With Thanksgiving looming I've been thinking a lot about my dad lately. Not sadly, or even fondly, but just with longing. Having him here during the holidays would make it easier on me. He loved Thanksgiving, and cooking a big dinner, and gathering everyone at the table to share it. He really liked the way I made turkey, and preferred my stuffing to my mom's (although being a very good husband, he never told her that.) Dad's probably the reason Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. He even made Christmas bearable for me.

Dad would have been in his late eighties for this pandemic, so in one sense I'm glad he never lived to see it. For once Alzheimer's probably would have spared him a lot if he had lived this long. He had so many friends in NYC, and odds are some of them didn't survive the first wave. He would have had to see the idiot ways it's become politicized, and how much all the squabbling has cost our country.

That said, part of me still wishes he was here and lucid so I could talk to him about the dread and despair and unhappiness that has been most of 2020, and how poorly I've dealt with it along with all my personal issues and losing both dogs in just a few weeks. He was the one person I could say anything to, no matter how upsetting it was. Since he died sometimes I feel like I've been abandoned.

What I would say to him if he was still here: we've all felt so scared at various times in our lives that we want to hide out under the bed permnanently, but that feeling has been 2020 for me. There's so much hatred, so much wrong, so much death. It's turned too many people into monsters. I feel horribly guilty for being so depressed about losing my pups when families are losing people they love, but Cole and Skye were my loves. I've got a loop running in my head: With all everyone is coping with, how do we hold onto hope? What if next year is worse? What if it never gets any better? How do we go on with so much darkness blanketing America and the rest of the world? Is this the beginning of the end, and do I really have to live to see that?

Dad wouldn't be angry with me for how I feel. He understood me like no one else ever has. He might not know what I need to do in order to get through the rest of the year, but he would listen, and then he would tell me a story about something he went through in the past. Dad never had an easy life. It was something that we bonded over, I think.

Knowing him, I think he would remind me first of the years that we did have together. I never think about that -- how much time we actually had. He came into my life when I was 15 and stayed until I was 50. For 35 years that man loved me unconditionally, always supported me no matter what, and made me a much better person. He was always, always happy to see me. If you have someone like that in your life then you know what a difference it makes. I think he'd also tell me to go out and get another dog because life is too short not to have at least one more to love. Two would even be better.

Dad showed me the type of person I want to be, by being just who he was. He had to deal with a lot of health issues for the last 10 years of his life, but he didn't let them shadow his life. He ignored politics and hate for his faith and love. He always brought people who were alone during the holidays to share our family dinners. He didn't just go to church and pray, although he did that every Sunday. He mowed the church lawns and did carpentry work and anything else the pastor needed fixing. Even after he retired he went out on weekends to feed the homeless and ran the church's thrift store.

The last time I talked with Dad when he was lucid, which was about six months before he died, we were sitting on the porch with the dogs. It was April, and he was just basking in the sun. He didn't complain about his disease, or whine about how hard it had been on him. He looked out at my big back yard and said to me, "It's beautiful here. It's just where you should be."

It's still beautiful here, Dad. I'm still here, too. For hope I will hold onto the love that you taught me means more than anything else, and that you always gave me no matter what. I will be grateful for all the time we had, and the light you left behind in my heart. No darkness can take that from me.

If the memory of you could help me out with the rest, Dad, I'd love that, too.

Done and Won

As of 11:57 pm last night, 50,015 words written on my NaNoWriMo novel. I'm going to keep working on it to the end of the month, but as I've right now, I won. :)

Goodbye and Hello

During my rookie year as a pro writer I spent $110.00 to buy a fountain pen on sale at Levenger. While that sounds insane, the pen retailed for $450.00, so I thought it was a good bargain. At the time I wanted to make the jump to using only fountain pens for hand writing, as my arthritis was starting to make it difficult to use anything else. Also, I fell in love with the pen, so that decided it.

Back then I had no idea that my Platinum Koi would be my faithful companion for the next twenty-two years. I've written thousands of letters, hundreds of journals and autographed Lord only knows how many of my books with this pen. If you work out the price with the endurance, it only cost me around $5.00 a year, which is probably what a person spends on crap pens. It's certainly always been the finest writing instrument I've ever owned . . . until it started to skip and clog this year. I nursed it along with frequent cleanings and sparse use, but eventually I had to accept that it was time to retire my old friend.

I needed to buy a new pen to replace it, but I was waiting for another lovely bargain to come along. I also didn't want to spend a lot because my ability to hand write is going to end in the (hopefully not too) near future.

Out of the blue Levenger sent me an e-mail to offer me sixty percent off the True Writer pens they were retiring, which included one I've always wanted because the colors remind me of my daughter (I gave her a pearl and rose gold necklace for her birthday that she constantly wears.) So I bought the True Writer Ivory Rose Gold pen for $35.00:

She arrived today, and she's a beauty, too -- very lightweight and comfortable to hold, and so classy:

She'll pick up the workload from my retired Platinum nicely, I think:

I know it's a bit silly to make such a fuss over a pen, but this feels like the universe stepped in when I really needed to find my new writing companion. So thank you, Levenger and the Universe. :)

Oliver's First Hair Cut

His mom sent me these pics:

Done & Done & Certifiable

I finished Mom's birthday quilt on time, and here's how it turned out:

I also made some pillows for Kat and Oliver out of some Minky remnant yardage I got for six bucks at JoAnn (I also used up two bags of fiber fill that I've had sitting in the sewing supply closet for a while):

So that should make me happy, right? Eh. I want to do more with the time I have left to sew. Which brings me to the most ambitious embroidered quilt I've ever made, my recycled linen quilt, which I finished a little over a year ago:

It's become my favorite quilt. It's the perfect weight for year-round use, and I just love it, so I've kept it out in the office since I finished it:

When I finished it I remember thinking "never again." Linen is so hard to piece because it moves all over the place when you're sewing, plus all the work I put into the quilt was just insane. Now that my hands are deteriorating rapidly and my time to sew is running out, I accepted that I really couldn't make another one. And please note I was fine with that decision. Until I noticed the Etsy shop where I bought some of the scrap linen was offering more bundles, and . . .

Yeah, I think I'm making another one. Since I'll have Christmas gifts to make first, and I need to collect more scrap linen, probably after the holidays. Argh.

Secret Garden

Kat and her dad decided to try their hands at gardening, and built this little raised bed patch as an experiment:

The romaine lettuce they planted is doing great; we should be harvesting this in the next week:

The banana peppers also look good, with lots of flower buds:

Hopefully the strawberries catch up, because I love them:

This and That

If I work on Mom's lap quilt for a few hours every night I should get it done in time to send before her birthday, so doing that.

I found another fabric leaf in the yard from my neighbor's ageing fall decorations, so I decided to add that to the little dog dish mat I made from the last of the red scrap pile:

I thought only one leaf looked a bit lopsided, but a few days later another fabric leaf appeared in the yard, so:

It makes me ridiculously happy to rescue these fake, tattered leaves and turn them into something other than trash. :)

Fall at the Farm

My guy and I made a run out to the local farm where we buy most of our produce, and they were all decked out for Fall:

I bought some of these gorgeous sweet potatoes for me and Kat (they're easier on my blood sugar than white potatoes, too):

Lots of spooky white pumpkins for Halloween (I'm writing this on 10/16, btw):

I think fall and farms just go together perfectly -- they both honor and celebrate food:

Now if I could just get over my aversion to squash . . .

Ready to Quilt

I pieced the top for Mom's birthday quilt, which turned out to be a nice lap-size:

Although I was planning to wait another night, I'm running out of time, so I decided to press, batt, back and pin it together as well. For the backing I used a plain soft muslin, and to keep it light I opted for a low-loft batting (which was actually leftover from another project, so it's recycled.)

For the quilting I'm going to use white and pale blue cotton thread:

Now if my hands will cooperate, I should get this done in time.

Fox Tote Finished

I used some twill tape to frame the fox crazy quilt patchwork block and sewed it to the front of the last large black tote:

Definitely lots of sparkle, but hey, I'm allowed. :)

Want to see it sparkle? Ha.