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Still no word on the total number of people who officially won NaNoWriMo. I keep checking, and I'll let you know as soon as I find out.

Tuesday is usually my marketing day. Granted, I haven't been doing any active marketing recently. What with one thing and another...like the full-time job, doing NaNoWriMo, trying to get Christmas taken care of, trying to have a well-planned late afternoon-evening that went awry ten minutes after I got home...well, marketing is out the window for the time being.

That being said, I've been having passive sales through Amazon. Lots of them. So this is something I'm happy with. Sure, I'll still grouse at how much it costs to mail everything to them, but I've been mailing them a lot recently.

All in all, that's a good thing.

There's a guy at my work who's reading MORTE A DELI. He comes in every morning and says, your book keeps making me hungry. Hey, he's reading it. That makes me happy.

I do have plans for more active marketing come the beginning of the new year. But I probably won't do anything major before that. It's just how it goes.

If it's any consolation, the publishing companies tend not to do too much this time of year, either...

Still no word on actual count of writers who won NaNoWriMo, but I'm monitoring the site, and will let you know when I know.

I mentioned giving the gift of reading this year for the holidays. I put my money where my mouth was at the nearest B&N (sadly farther away than I would like, and ironically almost right next to the nearest Borders...) and bought three books and a magazine. One of the books was an anniversary present for my dear husband. We celebrate twenty years tomorrow. Happy Anniversary!

I was actually reading this week, too, so I can report on that. It was non-fiction, and actually I was perusing for research purposes, but I was reading the book FDR, on my Kindle. I forget who wrote it, but it's a fairly recent book. I hear it's 880 pages long. I wouldn't know, as it's on my Kindle. It's about 13,000 lines long, according to my tally. I was researching the New Deal and the days between the Democratic National Convention and shortly after his inauguration.

I'm learning a lot about FDR. I'm learning that I knew very little about FDR to begin with. You would think that we'd all know more about the president who served the longest of anyone...but alas...no.

What I did know about him, other than the extreme basics, I learned when I was about ten years old. I think it might have been an SRA card (remember those?) that was a mini-biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, not Franklin. So, I learned about FDR vicariously, as it were, through Eleanor.

I admire Eleanor very much.

I think sometimes FDR might have been a sonovabitch.

This book, unfortunately, seems to make Eleanor out to be a bit of a racist. Please, don't mess up my impression of her.

I don't have a NaNoWriMo update for the day, since I submitted and won yesterday. I'll probably update everyone on how many people actually won tomorrow. It's usually about 10-15%, and they had about 160,000 people sign up. So let's see how close I got.

I feel as though I'm playing hooky from writing today. I didn't write, and it doesn't feel right. But there are times when you just need to take a break. So today's that day.

I still have about a hundred pages to go, more or less, to finish this draft of CATCH 20XX.

Tomorrow, I'll start editing...something. No one's piped up with a suggestion, so I think I'll put all the names of all my books that need editing into a hat and draw one out. Will it be--CATCH 20XX; THE KING'S JOURNEY; THE ADVENTURES OF MEGGIE McFATE? I'll tell you tomorrow.

The PIMPMYNOVEL blog site recommended getting books for Christmas. I recommend getting books for Christmas, too. If you're not going to make all your gifts (I've made the handmade gift pledge) then, I say, buy the gift of several hours of good reading by the fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa. I can't think of anything better to do than that. I am also in the unusual position of being able to say the book I give you was also handmade by me.

I'll get the cocoa...

NaNoWriMo Update for the day--As you can see below, I uploaded my novel-in-progress to NaNoWriMo 09, and so I'm an official winner. I say novel-in-progress because it's still very far from being done, alas, but it's getting closer all the time.

Speaking of works in progress, here's the latest of my missives from WHICH PLANET IS IT THIS TIME?

MISSIVE #5--Balancing My Various Lives

Wherein I discuss my inability to multi-task

I hope you have all had as marvelous a Thanksgiving as I had this week. I hosted the family this year. I suppose I should tell you what a rarity it is for me to be the hostess with the mostest for this event. Usually, Ken, the kids and I are guests at either his parents’ house, or at my mother’s house, and I normally do not provide much in the way of the cooking. I’m a magnificent sous-chef, mind you, chopping veggies and assembling salads and all that, but I think I’ve been the actual master of ceremonies one other time besides this year.

Since my mother’s husband died so recently, I didn’t feel she should have to host. And since this weekend was a long weekend off for my kids, and not so long for me, I thought it would be better for them to travel to US-Beta for the holiday. So I said I’d host. My brother heard about this, and thought he’d come along for the ride.

The family arrived in the late afternoon on Wednesday, and oohed and aahed about the improvements we have been making to the space pod. We have some furniture now, after all. I busied myself entertaining them while at the same time dispatching some pies in short order. I made apple pie, because my husband thinks it’s not Thanksgiving—or his birthday, for that matter—without it. I made pumpkin, because it’s my daughter’s favorite pie. And I made pecan pie, because my son loves that kind of pie. Things seemed to be off to a good start.

Oh, and I had slipped in an ice cream cake while they weren’t looking, since it really WAS my husband’s birthday the next day, in addition to being Thanksgiving.

The next day, I started cooking in the morning. My daughter marvelled that, “Thanksgiving always seems so…efficient.” It did, too. And it turned out to be famous last words.

My space pod has a weird stove. It has two ovens. I discovered during the course of the day that one of those ovens runs hot, and the other runs cold. So the hors d’oeuvres wouldn’t cook, and they slowed down the turkey cooking time. Meanwhile, the dishes in the other oven were, well, a little crispy.

Everything tasted pretty good, though, and I was feeling pretty good about things, until dessert. Let’s see…I forgot to put sugar in the apple pie; the crust on the pumpkin pie was a little overdone; and the pecan pie hadn’t set in the middle. Good thing I had that ice cream cake.

Story of my life. But hey, they looked terrific. And it was just an example of the fact that it’s hard for me to balance all my lives.

Separately, I can keep all my balls balanced. When I’m with my family, I do my best to be a good mother and mentor and friend. When I’m at the office, I think I’m doing pretty well writing my courses and acting as a faculty advisor, even though I sometimes feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants. When I can sit down to write, I am fairly productive. After all, I just put the finishing touches (the term being used very loosely, since it’s a rough draft we’re talking about) on a novel I won NaNoWriMo with (93,572 words!) this weekend. Amazon wants more of my books, which I’d guess is a good thing, even when it’s hard to find the time and money to mail those books to them.

But when I put all these aspects of my life together in one big schmoogle*, some things fall through the cracks I didn’t see until I was on top of them.

I’ll just have to figure out how to patch the cracks before I try to put everything together again.

Till next time—

*Definition of the word “Schmoogle.” Well, it’s funny you should ask. Once upon a time, when one of my kids (who will remain nameless) was misbehaving a bit, and I just wanted to…well…the best thing would be to hug them, so I said I could just schmoogle that kid. And then I hugged said child. Since then, it’s evolved to be more a noun than a verb, and both of my kids are Schmoogles, which is basically a term of endearment. This weekend, I started calling all the, er, mishaps that were occurring “just one big schmoogle.” My daughter said, “Hey, I thought your kids were schmoogles.” I told her it was my word, I made it up, and I could use it any which way I wanted. So there.

Nano_09_winner_120x240

I WON AGAIN!!!

54,504 words on NaNoWrimo today. The book is coming along. It almost has a shape now. I'm about at midpoint, and a lot is going on. For me, it's a middle-muddle, but it's a middle-muddle because so much is happening. This is the opposite problem than I normally have with middle-muddles. Normally, it's all so boring I just want to quit.

Hey, HOW ABOUT THAT DONNY OSMOND???!!!

Sorry, I digress. On to the subject at hand.

Why is it that, when I'm in the middle--smack dab in the middle, in this case--of one book, that the idea for the best book I will ever write will come into my head? This has been happening a lot recently. In the middle of Meggie McFate, I got the idea for Asgard Rising. In the middle of Asgard Rising, I came up with a non-fiction idea about Jungian archetypes for women.

And now, in the middle of the facedown rewrite for Catch 20XX, I get this great idea for a thriller, based on...no, I'm sorry, I don't really want to share the idea just yet. Suffice it to say, it struck me out of the blue, like a massive winter thunderstorm, and when I thought of it, my first reaction was, why did it take so long for that idea to percolate upward? I know why, of course. While the characters of the book have been with me for awhile, it was the synchronicity of some current events happening at the same time that I began a job at the War College that suddenly created the "Aha!!!" moment.

Herein lies the rub, though. Just when am I going to get around to writing this one? Just when am I going to be able to go back and finish revising Meggie McFate, which also shows promise? When will I finish Asgard Rising, which is oh, so close, and also could be a runaway success? When am I going to be able to read through the new version of Catch 20XX?

I think that's one thing about NaNoWriMo. No, strike that, it's two things about it. 1) I get so many rough drafts in one year, and there's only one Edmo month, so I can never catch up. And 2) When you write hot, it gets the creative juices flowing, so you get more and more and more ideas for books. So many ideas, and so little time indeed.

So, I think I'm going to do a departure for the month of December. I'm going to assume that I'm pretty near completion come December 1, so instead of the NaNoFinMo, I'm going to do an Edmo out of order. Fifty hours of editing during the month of December. It will be hard, but it is doable. I'll keep you up to date on the total. So the real question is, do I do Asgard Rising, or Catch 20XX, or Meggie McFate. Feel free to vote, or I might just have to do eenymeenymineymo.

(Author's side note: my word count for NaNoWriMo has now topped 50K! So I am officially a winner. I have 50,200 words, but I expect to be much farther than that at month's end.)

MISSIVE #4—The Strange Beasts of US-Beta

Wherein I discuss various observations about the flora and fauna (mostly fauna) of this strange and wonderful land.

Things are beginning to settle into a routine of sorts here on US-Beta, although this next week, being Thanksgiving, will upset that routine, hopefully in a good way. I have spent the last week in teleportation to the living-spaces of twenty-seven astronautorum studentorurm, as they wangled their way through an application of strategy formulation, with a little help and cajoling on my part. This process took most of my waking hours to supervise.

My astronauti studenti should have included one of the female variety, bringing the total to twenty eight, but alas, after three days of non-performance, I gave her the alternate assignment.

The fact that her departure gave me an all-male forum, save for myself, forced me to admit to a disturbing observation about this planet in general.

It is curiously devoid of females.

I have been in the military a long time. It’s not like this lack of the feminine touch has been lost on me before this. I have known the statistics: seventeen percent of the Army is female. That includes the enlisted personnel and the officers. If you look at just the officer corps, the statistic drops to ten percent. When I was deployed to Tattooine, the rough number of deployed females was three percent.

No wonder I felt lonely.

As you go up in the officer ranks, the per capita amount of females drops with each rank, until, once you reach colonel, or worse yet, general, look to the right, look to the left. There are not many of my gender to be seen.

In my department, I am currently the only full-time female. I will admit, there are two female part-timers. I love them both to death, and would love to take them to lunch some time. But they live in the US Galaxy somewhere, and they are beamed up on short wave.

Once upon a time, I might have thought the only reason females hadn’t cracked this rarefied atmosphere was because we just hadn’t been officers that long. Now, I’m not so sure. The last few years, I have witnessed the glass ceiling closing between me and those above me too often to believe it does not exist. There are times when other women have taken advantage of a crack in that ceiling before it’s patched, but it’s rare.

Almost as rare as a female-sighting on US-Beta.

For womanly companionship, I turn to…well, my mother. I know that some of the astronauts have brought their spousal units along with them, and so I see them from time to time. One thing that is rarer on this planet than women is children. I hear many of the ones that do exist are on other planets, going to college. Maybe I’ll see some of those this week. That will be a nice change of pace.

At least there are dogs on this planet. Lots and lots of dogs. Big ones, like the lovely collie next door, or his pal the black lab. And small ones, like the little West Highland terriers that seem to be so popular. Even though I’m a cat person, it’s nice to see a friendly Jack Russell now and then.

Come to think of it, I think there might be more dogs on this planet than there are women.

Till next time--

Word Count Update for NaNoWriMo: 30,398. I'm still working on the fun and games portion, adding the love interest and the B-story. It's been hard for me to find time to write recently, but I keep plugging away. On the 20th, I'm supposed to have 33,340 words, so I'm a bit behind, but not too bad. I can make it up this weekend. Besides, I have a write-in tomorrow, so I should be able to accomplish a lot.

Of course, I've also got moving duties, and symphony tickets. My mom keeps a busy schedule, and someone's got to keep up with her.

I was saying in my last post that I was supposed to report on fiction I've been reading, when I have no time for any kind of reading, except work stuff (dry, strategy related stuff. Yawn). But yesterday, I kindled while I walked at the gym, so I have read a half hour of JANE EYRE. I must admit, it's finally getting pretty juicy. I'm about a third of the way through it. Jane has realized that she's smitten with Mr. Rochester, and she also realizes there's a mystery surrounding the odd Mrs. Poole, who lives upstairs in the attic (feminist literary criticism refers to this as the "madwoman in the attic" theme, by the way--in this case quite literally). And then, Mr. Rochester brings home Miss Gorgeous. Jane, of course, is convinced this will be the woman Mr. Rochester marries.

Since JANE EYRE is the classic that it is, of course I know how some of this ends. What I'm finding hard to imagine is how Charlotte Bronte filled up the next, say, three hundred pages. For many books this would be the midpoint--the false down upon which the second half of Act II hinges, but it's happening a bit early in the book.

I guess I just need to keep reading. All you spoilers out there, don't write in to tell me the rest of the plot!

Word Count update for NaNoWriMo: 29,973 words. I'm in the fun and games part, the promise of the premise, what have you. I'm still mainly tracking with Susannah Ballion, but I'm trying to expand the plot to include the ensemble. I'm still pretty convinced that S/He-Ta, the narrator/God like character, is the main character. S/He's not the protagonist, though, because for S/He-Ta, there is no opposite...no Satan...and thus, there is no antagonist. And you just can't have that in fiction, can you?

I'm punchy tonight. In addition to trying to write and trying to keep up with email and blogs and Ravelry and all, I'm the faculty instructor for a Joint/Interagency/Multinational Lab forum. There's an extra "I" in there and I'm forgetting what it stands for, but we in the business call it a JIIMLab. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, it is. Twenty seven students at the war college get together in a threaded discussion, and role play various members of the National Security Council, the State Department, and the office of the Secretary of Defense. They're solving the world's problems for seven days, and I get to grade them on their efforts.

I'm exhausted from reading all their posts, I must tell you.

But you know what? It's good work if you can get it. So I'm not complaining. But I AM tired. So, I think I'll make this one another short one.

Thursday is fiction I've been reading. Ha ha ha. That's funny...

I'm tired tonight, so I think it'll be a short post.

I haven't been able to write recently, either, so no update on the words. I'll be back to that, I promise. It's just been a long couple of days. Too bad I can't count the word count on my missives and blogs, right?

So, it's Tuesday, which is market day. I've been doing passive marketing, for the most part. For example, shortly after I got here, I got another Amazon order, so I sent that out. Then, where I work, some of my co-workers have discovered I write murder mysteries, so I've had a few of them buy the two book set.

Another guy is bound and determined to buy my books through an independent book store near here, so my publishing company has approached them about ordering a few books to have on hand.

Every little bit counts.

Meanwhile, we're preparing to publish MURDER MOST MOTHERLY, so we're getting the finances in order, we're designing the cover, and we're beginning work on the typesetting. With any luck, I might have a new book to sell near the turn of the new year.