Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06
- I haven't written for the past two days. Tomorrow I'm back on the hobby horse. #
- 1342 Words added to my novel today. #nanowrimo was just the beginning. #
- I win #nanowrimo with 50049 words. Still more to write in the novel. My arbitrary target is 110000. I like deep dish novels. #
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06
- I haven't written for the past two days. Tomorrow I'm back on the hobby horse. #
- 1342 Words added to my novel today. #nanowrimo was just the beginning. #
- I win #nanowrimo with 50049 words. Still more to write in the novel. My arbitrary target is 110000. I like deep dish novels. #
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NaNoWriMo is Just the Beginning
I slid by 50K yesterday, so I am an official winner. The novel isn't done yet, though. I'm happy about that, because the novels I like to read are considerably longer, so I hope to write something along the same lines.
So, my next goal is to get to 90,000 words by the end of December. That is a stretch goal. My fallback is 80,000 words. Do understand that I mean total words, in addition to the 50,000 I wrote this month. So I'm really aiming to write around 1333 words a day to reach that goal. My minimum daily target is 1000 words.
You may have noticed, I am goal oriented, and I also like numbers in my goals. It's just the geek in me, I suppose.
If you've been following this blog at all, you are familiar with this trend of setting numerical goals. But the problem is, I have a hard time with the follow-through. But I worked at the writing for a month. So I figure I've got a habit established now, and rather than raise the bar to something unrealistic, as is my usual pattern, I'm lowering it a little. I do have a day job, or rather an evening one. So this should be doable.
I also have the best sweetie in the whole wide world, who views my fiction endeavors as a permanent lifestyle change. Yay.
Now I just need to start exercising and eating right and meditating again. But first, I gotta go write.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-29
- Starting day 29 of #nanowrimo and I plan to finish today! #
- I've fallen into my novel and i can't get out. #
- Updated my livejournal with thoughts of nanowrimo and impending doom for our kitty: http://janetwain.livejournal.com #
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I’ve Fallen Into My Novel
. . . and I don't want to climb out.
I feel like pieces of me are just sitting out there, waiting for me to get my butt back in the novelist's chair. Part of me holds pieces of scenes; dangling at the end of strings; stuck like floss in the folds of my brain; just waiting for me to reel them in again into the gray matter so I can squish them into shape and properly channel them through my fingertips as words.
My ability to be a retail store owner has plummeted. At this time of year, this is not a good thing. I'm planning to cross the 50,000 word NaNoWriMo barrier on Sunday, my next day off from the day job. Technically, I'm at work right now, but can't seem to convince my brain to come back online. Instead, most of that silly organ sits ensconced at a breakfast discussion with three of my characters as they try to come to grips with events which have left one of them bruised both physically and emotionally, and quite possibly made him at least a little batty. Part of it is looking for a character who's just plain gone missing, and another part is with another who has entered another realm, not unlike myself; and it's not too sure of the time-line, again, not unlike myself.
Oh, and I'm loving it. I love every skein of the threads and every turn I see in the road ahead of each of my characters; I love the settings, and the sounds; love the struggles and the emotions; and most of all, I love the wonder that writing is at least as fun as reading, now. And I want to go back. I don't want to be sitting here, writing about it as a feeble attempt to extricate myself for a few hours to do something 'useful' and hopefully profitable. I'd so much rather dive all the way back into my novel and not climb out again until it's done.
Love of my Life
You know, I knew it all along--knew what I wanted, craved, what made me feel most alive. Writing. It's always been that way. But it is only lately that I find myself actually consistently doing something about it. Okay, that's not entirely true. I once quit my job to write, but could only afford to live for about a month without a job . . . they let me go earlier than I had planned, and other money miscalculations put the kabosh on it.
For a while, I wrote every evening. But then I stopped. My excuse is that life got in the way. But the truth is that excuses got in the way. Why did I spend years listening to and even finding more excuses to keep me from doing the thing I love? You know the answer. Fear. Thoughts that devour, and stuff you back into the womb because you are afraid of what you might have to grow up into.
They say that love is letting go of fear, and now I am embracing my love and finding it is not entirely true. When you tune into love, whether it be your calling or allowing love in your life, fear simply dissapates. I'm not talking about need for love. That's a different thing, which I think should go by another name. I'm talking about when you open the spout wide and just allow yourself to gush.
I don't know if I will feel the same way about submitting my work for publication. But it's definitely how I feel about the writing. I'm at 21,192 word in the first draft of my novel. I simply love everything about what I'm doing, and that puts me into a place where I am in love with my life. The sidewalks are friendlier when I walk on them, my legs are stronger. The sky smiles at me. Yeah. This is what life is for. I write, therefore I am.
October 2009
No real accomplishments this month. Very hit and miss for just about everything. In November, everything is changing. I'm writing in the mornings. Writing and writing and writing and writing and writing. It's NaNoWriMo month. I did about 1500 words yesterday. I need to do about 2000 today to get back on track.
But now I have time set aside for things on this new schedule. I write then I work out and then I go to work at the corporate job. Okay, so I own 49% of the corporation, but still.
I haven't worked out in like two weeks, so I'm a bit nervous.
Craving cigarettes. I quit smoking like two years ago.
Measure of Success
Sometimes it's challenging to feel good about working out and eating right. Other people have such dramatic progress. I worked out 5 days this week:
- Upper Body Weight Training
- HIIT Cardio (20 minutes high intensity interval training with a 5 minute warm up and 5 minute cool down)
- Lower Body Weight Training
- HIIT Cardio plus 7ish miles of target-rate cardio on the upright cycle
- Upper Body Weight Training followed by HIIT Cardio
The result is I gained 1.5 pounds. But I know I've gotten stronger, and my scale measures body-fat percentage, and it's the lowest I've seen yet. I'm also in that particularly feminine phase of the moon, and I fully expect that next week, I'll be a little lighter because I will no longer be retaining so much water and other assorted materials.
But I'm just so goal oriented. It's getting harder and harder to lose weight. I know I'm eating right, or at least I think I am. According to HMM, the thing to do is join Sparkpeople.com.
So I've done it. We'll see if it is a system I can work with. Click Here for my Sparkpeople page
September ‘09 Accomplishments
Well, I lost a little over three pounds this month, and I started going to the gym again after a 9 day "vacation" not planned, mid-month. If I hadn't taken that lazy time I probably would have lost at least 5 pounds. At least I'm back at it, and back at it in a very focused way. On Monday I started the Body-for-Life 12 week training program. So instead of using just weight machines, I'm using dumbbells and free weights, especially for the upper body. My Cardio workouts are shorter, too, but a bit more intense. Body for Life is all about High Intensity workouts, and of course six small balanced meals a day. It's also about planning what you are going to do ahead of time. Again, it's all about focus.
I'm not sure if this type of cardio will work for my body, though, but we'll see when I weigh in again on Sunday. I'm willing to give it a test drive, but if necessary, I will work out twice a day. I should be doing cardio in the morning, according to the ideal BFL plan, anyways. If you do cardio in a fasted state, you are going to burn more fat. Makes sense, but figuring out when the exercise room at home isn't in use is tough. Nobody signs up for anything. I figure if I'm down there at 5:30 a.m., though, it should be good. I don't think anyone else is willing to get up that early to work out.
But I have to manage to do cardio only the three times this week. I don't want to be burning the muscle I'm trying to build.
This learning how to train the body is so much like programming. You have to understand how to hook in to the operating system, and what instructions you need to give it to acheive the results you want.
My current goal is to lose 10 pounds in October, well, that actually includes losing some this week, so it should be at about 2 lbs. per week until the 31st.
I'll have to update after this week to let you know if BFL proper (3 days of cardio and 3 days of weights) is working or not.
Tracking Progress
I haven't been updating my Geek Body for Life Trackers. I update pages for my own notes, but never type them in. I don't know if that is going to change or not. It's a matter of time, really. But I'd like the info online for my own tracking purposes, if nothing else. Right now, it would just be embarrassing to note that there was at least a full week where I didn't go to the gym. Sigh. But I've started going again. There's just no easy widget for tracking my workout project. Maybe there's something out there on the web somewhere. There is a widget for my new personal challenge though.
I've signed up for National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, and the widget is in the sidebar. So my new big project (in addition to continuing to work out) is to write 50,000 words of a rough draft this November. I've studied fiction and written short stories and even seen a poem in print, but I've never actually written more than a few chapters in a novel. It's time I did. As an official participant I get my own page here.
Categories
Novel Progress Tracker
That's a guess for how long the first draft should be for me to get the kind of novel you can really get into. I don't like those skinny-mini-booklets myself. My favorite book is the Lord of the Rings, after all. This wonderful adventure started with
NaNoWriMo
What I'm Doing...
- I haven't written for the past two days. Tomorrow I'm back on the hobby horse. 2009-12-03
- 1342 Words added to my novel today. #nanowrimo was just the beginning. 2009-11-30
- I win #nanowrimo with 50049 words. Still more to write in the novel. My arbitrary target is 110000. I like deep dish novels. 2009-11-29
- More updates...
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Recent Posts
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06
- NaNoWriMo is Just the Beginning
- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-29
- I’ve Fallen Into My Novel
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