It’s over. The month of November is finally over and with it, Nanowrimo. And I cannot help but feel an incredible amount of relief that I’m finally free of it.

A coworker asked me today, when I grumbled about my rather pointed lack of desire to spend any more time on this story, why I still persisted.

“Because I’m this close, and besides, I want to be able to say that I did it,” I replied, knowing even as the words came out of my mouth how lame they sounded. But at least it was the truth. I stuck it out, because I couldn’t just let it die when I should have – halfway through the 50,000 word goal when I ran out of plot and realized that I was also rapidly running out of any interest in the story itself. I told too many people I was doing it. I didn’t want to deal with trying to explain why I dropped out. And that’s probably the lamest reason of all. It’s not like I get anything out of it, and my intention now is to pull the few salvageable bits from this pile of garbage and toss the rest. I kept on only because I didn’t want to try to explain why I’d stopped. It was hard enough explaining why I’d started in the first place, after all.

There’s a whole lot of other people who finished too – most of us waiting til the last day, even the last hour, to turn it in for the final count. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who knew without a doubt that those 50,000 words I’d churned out compiled perhaps the worst piece of fiction I have ever been embarrassed to admit to creating in my life. And even though the Nanowrimo crew decided to forgo the official word count because there were just too darn many of us, Ryan not only volunteered to do the counting for the little subset of journalers who’ve all been emailing each other frantic questions and enthusiastic support all month, but he also made up some spiffy graphics for each of the ones who hit the 50,000 word mark (see below).

Don’t ask if you can read it, because the answer is no. Heh. I’ll strip out the pieces I want to keep, and use it for what it was intended all along – the basic background for a character in a role-playing game. And maybe one of these days I’ll get inspired and decide to write a ‘real’ novel – one that I’d actually be proud of.

There’s always next November. They say Nanowrimo is easier the second time around. Hmm. We’ll see.

I’m sitting here at my computer, waiting for Richard to get home. He’s off doing a few last minute errands, and I’ve just finished packing up everything I need for the next few days, and doing a hasty clean-up of the kitchen.

When he gets home, we’ll load everything into the car – clothes, jackets, all the parts for the green bean casserole that is our contribution to the feast tomorrow, and of course our palm pilots and keyboards. I might even throw in that smocking project and see if I can’t get a few more rows stitched since after all, the goal still is to get it done in time to give it to my little niece for Christmas. I’ll do one last run through the house, making sure the food and water bowls are full and that the litter boxes are clean. We’ll say goodbye to the cats and then join the throngs of people on the freeway as we make our way to join our family for Thanksgiving.

It’s going to be a very different Thanksgiving this year though, at least for me. This year will be the first in my entire life that I will not sat down to dinner at my parents’ dining room table, and joined hands in candlelight to sing a blessing before we eat our holiday feast. Friday will be the first time that I will not rise the morning after Thanksgiving and join my mom and sisters on a shopping trip to prepare for Christmas. This Thanksgiving – our first one together – will be at his family home. Like all families, they have their own traditions, and these are simply things I am not used to. Yet.

Before we got married, we sat down and figured out one of the fundamental questions that any newlywed duo must face: how to divvy up the holidays between his family and mine. Easter’s a bigger deal to his family; the Fourth of July is a bigger deal to mine. Those are easy. His family has their celebration Christmas Eve; mine gathers Christmas day. Again – easy (by virtue of the fact that the families only live a few hours driving distance apart). Only Thanksgiving must be shared – one year at one house, and the next at the other (Actually, if we’re going to be completely technical, next year’s Thanksgiving will be mine to host. But the point here is that the family around the dinner table – the dining room table we’re going to have to buy sometime between now and next November, that is – will primarily be mine).

I’ve no doubt that Thanksgiving with my new in-laws will be wonderful. After all, I managed to marry into a family nearly identical to my own in humor and values. In fact, one of the few regrets we have about building our house where we did is that the locations means we don’t get to see them more often than we do.

It’s going to be a different Thanksgiving for more than just me, of course. My parents decided that since none of their children would be home this year (we all did try to plan this so we’d all be together every other year), they’re going to spend their Thanksgiving doing something fun. Even as I write this, they’re on a plane, heading for the Grand Canyon. My mom has always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and I guess Thanksgiving week’s as good a time as any.

And it’ll be a little bit different for Richard’s family as well – and not just because there’ll be one more person at the table. I’m doing my small part to bring a taste of my own family’s traditions with me – by introducing them to the one part of Thanksgiving they’ve apparently been lacking all these years: green bean casserole.

Integrating in the green bean-and-soup-and-french-fried-onion-goo is one thing, but I have a feeling I should probably stop there. Some things – like my family’s traditional holiday beverage are best left unshared.

It is day 18 of Nanowrimo. At 4:30 in the afternoon, I am currently sitting at 21,000 words. After struggling significantly all this past week I have more than doubled my word count, but I still have 9000 more words to catch up to where I really should be by now. I have a page of notes on pieces of my plot that will at least allow me to get that far, and based on what has happened so far this month, I have no doubt I’ll come up with yet another piece of the plot when these are done, so that I can continue to write.

I’ve been writing in spurts. I see posts from other Nanowrimers who are forcing themselves to write a proscribed number of words per day, but until now I have avoided any attempt to do this, mainly because throughout all the time I’ve ever written in my life, I only ever do it when I feel like it. Doesn’t matter when the assignment was due – I’d write it when I felt inspired. Luckily I was always inspired in time – although I very quickly discovered my tendency for extreme procrastination.

But I’m realizing that allowing myself the luxury of letting it sit isn’t necessarily going to work this time, and I’m forcing myself to get the words down.

I don’t like writing when I don’t feel comfortable with the words. I’d rather write when inspiration strikes because that way I at least have the chance that what comes out might be remotely good. Why bother to churn out words if it’s not going to be worth reading later?

And therein lies the crux of my problem. The whole focus of Nanowrimo is, of course, on quantity not quality. In fact, they make it very clear that Nanowrimo is not for the person who takes their writing seriously. And honestly I haven’t really ever tried to take any stories I create too seriously, but still, there’s the little matter of pride, and I’m just not normally willing to let my name be associated with something if I can’t feel actually proud of having been involved. It doesn’t matter that no other living person might ever read this – that’s not the point. The point is that I have to be happy with it myself.

So I’m facing the realization that I must allow myself to – for lack of a better term – write crap. I have to allow myself to churn out the words and not waste energy worrying over the fact that the conversation might be stilted; the descriptions too sparse; the action inconsistent with what happened before.

I knew this thing was going to be hard to do. But I thought the hardest part would simply be getting a mind that’s always focused on short stories to focus on a plot complex and interesting enough to hold out over more than 200 pages.

Silly, silly me.

All day yesterday I pinged all over the office, pestering Richard on Instant Messenger with hourly countdowns til the showing of Harry Potter (we got advance tickets for the last show of the night).

I had only him to pester, see, because – strange as it may seem – the rest of my department wasn’t the slightest bit interested. Most of them haven’t even read the books and don’t seem to have any intention of going to see the movie. If that weren’t strange enough, they probably aren’t even going to go see Lord of the Rings either. I’m in a different world now – a world made up of people who might have studied things like English in college, and have very little interest in the inner workings of the back end of the database they’re documenting. I know, I keep saying this, but it’s still taking a lot to get used to.

We headed off to the theater extra-early, not sure if there’d be lines to get in for our show. Luckily, since it was the absolute last show of the night, the theater was only half full. And the film was wonderful. I’ll admit to disappointment that some plot threads were shortened or removed entirely, but I do understand the difficulty of transforming a book into a movie, and realize that they simply didn’t have the time to put everything in there. I’m sure there are already screen writers tearing their hair out over the sheer length of the fourth book, and my greatest sympathies go out to those who have taken on Lord of the Rings for the same reason.

The movie was definitely worth the hype, but my enjoyment of it was improved just that much more by the presence of the little cluster of protestors we saw driving into the parking lot. The local fundamentalist church apparently decided to attempt a last-ditch effort to save the souls of those of us who were being so wanton as to go see a movie where there would be portrayal of such things as – *gasp* – magic, and wizards, and witches, and other things too horrible to mention. And so there they were – a handful of them waving signs and shouting to the cars that passed them. Repent! God hates witchcraft!

One has to wonder why it is that these same people are also not merrily protesting every single Disney cartoon that comes out on the big screen, considering that most of them include talking animals and a fair majority of them also involve some form of magic. Apparently Disney’s magic is the type that doesn’t condemn you to eternal damnation. Harry Potter’s magic, on the other hand, is sure to reserve you one of those extra-hot suites in the fiery depths of below. After all, it’s turned an entire generation of children into people who actually think reading is enjoyable. Hmm. Perhaps that’s it. Encouraging the imagination and ability to think for one’s self does seem to be a rather big no-no for those of the fundamentalist religious faiths – a trait which isn’t reserved for any one faith in particular.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be poking quite so much fun. After all, one has to admire their sheer determination to stand there on the street corner waving their little signs and taking abuse from people driving by. But I feel rather sorry for them. I’d be willing to bet large sums of money that not a one of those people who were so concerned for my soul have even cracked the cover of a Harry Potter book to see what all the fuss is about. But then, as I already mentioned, the fundamentalist side of any cause – religious or otherwise -is fairly well defined by a rather nasty tendency to discourage people from thinking for one’s self. So I suppose I should expect nothing less. After all, if people are so willing to be blind sheep, well, that’s their problem. Besides, considering I lived with my fiancé before we were wed, and live in a house overrun with dragons and gargoyles, I’m sure that in their eyes I’m already condemned. Going to see the Harry Potter movie – even owning and reading all the Harry Potter books – just merely moves me closer to earning that penthouse suite in someplace extra warm.

So if you haven’t already seen it, and you’re feeling like tempting the wrath of the deities, well, get thee to a theater. I figure Hell has to be a pretty big place. After all, it’s going to have to hold an awful lot of people, considering that Harry Potter opened as the largest grossing movie of all time. So don’t worry. There’s plenty of room for all of us.

Just ask the protestors. I have a feeling they’d agree.

It’s finally been cold enough at night that we got to try out our fireplace. Actually – we have now tried out both fireplaces, but the one we wanted to try out the most was the one in the bedroom because I think we had this idea that it was just going to really heat up the room.

I suppose if we left it on for hours and hours it might do that, but I’m a bit leery of leaving a gas fire burning while we sleep in the same room, so it hasn’t had the chance to do more than create an inviting circle of warmth in which the cats occasionally would enter to investigate what this weird flickering light was in the usually boring and ordinary bedroom corner.

The upstairs fireplace was easy to try out because it is gas and all it requires is that you flip a switch on the wall. The downstairs fireplace requires a little more work than that. For one, it required us to purchase a lovely set of fireplace tools. Well, okay, so maybe ‘require’ isn’t the right word, but we liked them and since we didn’t find the sisal rope we were looking for at the hardware we bought fireplace tools and one of those Duraflame logs instead. I figure it was a fair trade. The cats might not agree, since the sisal rope was to rewrap one of their scratching trees, but this ended up as one of those rare events when the cats lost out.

So a few nights ago, while we were sitting in front of our computers and I was whining because I really didn’t want to write this stupid mutter mutter novel and I was hungry, my marvelous husband suggested that he run off to rent a movie and we give that lovely Duraflame log a try while we ate dinner in front of the fireplace in the living room. While assembling the set of fireplace tools last night he’d also thought to locate the lever to open and shut the flue, so we were all set.

He rented A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum because we just saw the play. I’d been looking forward to the play ever since I saw it would be on this season’s list, because I’d seen the movie ages ago (so long ago that, as I recall, we had to rent the laser disk player and the movie came on this huge thick disk that lived in what looked like an over-sized record sleeve. Sheesh, now I feel old), and even though I didn’t remember much about it, I did at least remember that it was funny.

If you happen to live in the area of Davis, CA and you have a free Friday or Saturday night between now and the 25th of November, get yourself to the 2nd street theater and see this play. It’s probably the best production we’ve seen there so far. Bear in mind that this opinion is based on us only having seen slightly over one season’s worth of plays, and the quality tends to waver from painfully bad to surprisingly good, as is typical in amateur theater like this. But take my word for it – it’s worth shelling out the cash to go see. And after watching the movie tonight, seated on our futon with big bowls of macaroni and cheese (mmmm. Kraft nuclear cheese), we both agreed we liked the play better.

Despite all my whining and the best intentions of three cats who are tag-teaming my lap while I’m at the computer, I have managed to get some writing done. According to those who decided they must write a certain amount per day, I’m pretty far behind at just slightly over 12,000 words after this evening’s stint. But I’m managing to surprise myself by continuing to come up with more pieces to my (admittedly rather sketchy) plot, which means that each time I finish a spurt of typing, I’ve got at least enough to get me through the next one. And now that I finally woke up and realized that the month is half over and gee, I’m only a quarter of the way there, panic is setting in – just enough to give me the kick in the pants I needed to get the creative juices flowing again. Or at least that’s the theory I’m sticking to. Um. Yeah.

It’s been coming all day. This morning even with the sun shining there were enough clouds to give one pause, and later this afternoon, as we emerged from the last stop in a short stint of holiday shopping, the sky was dark earlier than usual, even by daylight savings’ standards. As we walked to the car, the smell of it was in the air and driving home it began in earnest, just heavy enough to be a visibility annoyance.

It was easy to forget about the weather when we got home. After a lot of procrastination on my part, I knew I’d better get cracking on this writing business before I fell even further behind, and so this morning I uploaded all the bits and pieces I’d managed to scribble all week and sorted them out, preparing to flesh them out into legitimate parts of the story.

Hours later, we stopped for a quick snack, and then headed upstairs again, back to the computers to write – both determined to break a certain word count set only in our heads for this evening. We turned off the lights downstairs, knowing that from writing we would go to bed whenever we become too tired for fingers to type.

At the top of the stairs Richard paused, heading not for the computer room but instead into the darkened bedroom to the other side of the hall.

“Shh,” he whispered, one hand raised as I was about to ask what he was doing. He knelt down beside one of the windows and leaned close to it.

I joined him, not sure at first what he was doing. But then, together, we opened two of the windows.

We knelt there in silence, on the floor in the dark room, to listen to the sound of the rain. It was a gentle fall – certainly not a storm, but harder than just a faint damp mist. The only light on our street at night comes from the streetlamp one house away and it reflected off of newly forming puddles below. The rain fell steady, a quiet stream of noise only audible now that we had opened the windows to listen.

In the dark I turned to Richard, knowing by his smile that he’s thinking the same thing as I, as usual, even as I opened my mouth to speak.

And so tonight, we will leave the windows open. It does not matter that it might get a bit too cold. We’ll burrow beneath extra blankets and – as they usually do when there is a chill in the night air – the cats will burrow around us as well.

Sometimes, we just need to be able to hear the rain.

If Collab – November: If you were given one cosmic ‘get out of jail free’ card that would allow you to undo one act from your past, which would you use it on? What outcome would you hope to result from that decision?

There was a time in my life when I did a lot of wishing for exactly that sort of thing – the one-chance time machine that would allow me to go back and redo the past. I knew exactly when I’d start over and what I would do differently: freshman year in college. I’d study. I’d find help for inorganic chemistry. I’d focus more and do whatever it took so that by the end of the year I wouldn’t be sitting there with a little note saying “Subject to Disqualification By the Dean” that I knew I had to show my parents when I went home that summer.

For a very long time afterwards, I looked back on that year with regret. My poor grades that year and my delay in learning how to study effectively, or at least get some tutoring help kept my overall GPA low, so that even two years of hard work prior to graduation couldn’t pull it up to anything more than a 3.1. The too-low GPA meant I had to spent two years jumping through hoops to get *into* graduate school, and then once there, I quickly realized that although I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I knew for sure that this wasn’t it. Perhaps in desperation, I turned to my original college goal and toyed with the idea of applying for veterinary school. I was quickly dissuaded of that notion, however. The advisor was politely and apologetically blunt. My disastrous grades were back to haunt me yet again, and I hadn’t a shot in hell of being admitted.

I used to fantasize about going back somehow, and changing things. It certainly wasn’t the only mistake I’ve ever made, but it was the biggest and the one that had the most far-reaching consequences. I wished and dreamed for the ability to reinvent the past for ten long years. It wasn’t until I left graduate school and research behind to see if I could make it as a database nerd that I finally stopped hoping for the impossible. Because my desperate career switch dumped me into something I actually had aptitude for, those college grades no longer mattered.

During the decade when I wished for that second chance, I was absolutely certain that somehow, if only I could reinvent the past, I’d be in a much better place. In retrospect it seems a bit naïve of me. Better grades would not have made graduate school any more bearable. I loved the writing and the teaching, but I knew such a career could only come with a doctorate, and that meant research – the part that bored me literally to tears. And even if I’d had the grades to get into veterinary school, I realize now that I wouldn’t have been happy there either. I came as close as I ever want to veterinary medicine during my years as a foster home to orphan kittens, and while the experience was an incredible one, I’m not sure I could handle a lifetime of what I went through with those fragile little creatures. No matter how much I hoped it would, death never gets any easier when you’re the one who has to make the final decision.

Perhaps if I’d made better choices that first year of college things would have been a bit better in the short term, but in the long term, I’m not honestly sure it would have made much of a difference. Besides, the disappointment and difficulties that resulted from doing so poorly in those early college years helped to shape how I react to things today.

If you’d offered me that ‘get out of jail free’ card five years ago, I would have jumped at the chance, no question. But now? No thanks. There’s nothing in my past so horrible anymore that I would really want to change.

I made chicken fried rice the other night. Of course I didn’t discover that we have no soy sauce until the very end. Chicken fried rice actually tastes pretty decent with teriyaki sauce. Really. But it tastes *soooo* much better with soy sauce. Sigh.

The lack of soy sauce wasn’t the main reason for our after-dinner grocery run, but you’ll be happy to know that we did remember to grab a bottle while we were there. Actually, the main reason was to get milk. Oh, and cereal, since *someone* (we won’t mention any names) went and ate all the Caramel Crunch Crispex before I got more than a handful or two.

And while we were searching the cereal aisle for a replacement box, I had to pay a visit to the Pop Tarts. I gave a little sigh of fond remembrance to the days when I used to be able to eat them without caring that two measly tarts would ruin my meager allotment of Points for the day. However, my trip down calorie-laden memory lane was momentarily disrupted by the discovery that Pop Tarts now come in even more fun and fascinating flavors – Oreo Cookie, and Chips Ahoy.

Richard and I have officially decided that food eaten in the name of scientific research has no points. Our most recent scientific research allows me to report to you that while the Chips Ahoy Pop Tart is certainly tasty, the Brown Sugar Cinnamon ones still beat it hands-down.

So anyway, speaking of Pop Tarts, Richard and I are members of the church choir. He sings bass and I sing tenor. Yes – not the usual part for a female, but what can I say.

The alto part just ends up being too high, and while I can’t always hit the bottom notes of the tenor range, it usually suits me just fine. However, this does leave me in the unique position of being the lone woman in an otherwise completely male section of the choir. Every once in a while I make a half-hearted stab at equality and try to get the director-of-the-moment to *not* refer to the tenors and basses as ‘the men’, but usually I just let it slide, or crack jokes about how I always take my testosterone shot before I sing.

Sunday morning, however, the director was leading us through one of the more difficult parts of the anthem. After having just the sopranos and altos sing for a while, he finally turned to us, and in an attempt to avoid that whole male/female issue I was harping about above, he said:

“All right. Now I want the men and the tenors to sing.”

Amid the laughter I turned to the rest of my section – all men.

“You know,” I pointed out, “I’m fine with that, but I think you all might want to be offended.”

That poor choir director. It just isn’t a real practice if we haven’t managed to get him doubled over in laughter at least once.

I wish I could say that I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been so busy writing. But the truth is that I haven’t been doing much writing at all – at least not until today. I’ve picked at the novel in bits and pieces here and there over the past few days, but ever since Saturday morning I just haven’t had any motivation whatsoever. I’ve been mulling the plot pieces around in my head, and last night I think I finally figured out the whole structure of the novel – or at least this week’s version. This morning I woke up actually wanting to write. Of course they don’t let you take days off of a job you just started less than a month earlier just because you’re feeling a bit creative, so I scribbled down everything I could at lunch. Thankfully, it ended up being a lot of scribbling.

One of these days I’ll grab all the pieces out of my Palm (hooray for collapsible keyboards!) and drop them into the actual novel and maybe update my word count on the NaNoWriMo site. Probably ought to fairly soon, before everyone thinks I’m a big slacker for sitting at barely 4000 words for days on end. I’m sure that I’ve at least doubled that by now, and I hope to get a fair bit further by the end of the week. Of course I’m rapidly approaching the end of my creative spurt as far as this story goes, and the novel may make it to 50,000 words on painfully detailed descriptions of the potholes in the city streets if I’m not able to come up with anything further. Hmm.

Things at work were a bit slow, and that always makes me antsy. I like being busy and productive, and even though I knew we are brand new and still in training, sitting idle and twiddling my thumbs gets old after the first half hour. So it was a bit of a relief when I got an appendix to write yesterday evening. Today I got to sit across the desk from a CPA-type and we played ‘who can confuse the other fastest’ until I finally hashed out the whole accounting logic I’m supposed to be writing about.

I still look at everything from a programmer’s view. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that for quite some time. This seems to confuse some of my coworkers. I’ve had several conversations already about the product where my brain is merrily running down the code-foo tangent, and the others involved sort of stare blankly at me because they have no idea what the heck I’m talking about. I’m getting better at it though. I’m starting to keep my database-blather to a dull mumble in my cubicle. Considering that all my neighbors also talk to themselves quite often while working, I fit right in.

We watched Buffy tonight, because once I heard that they were going to do it musical-style I absolutely insisted we watch. I just knew I couldn’t miss this. Despite our best efforts we’re starting to get really in to this show. Gee. Before you know it we might end up watching up to three whole hours of TV per week. Will the slacking never end?

One of the very best things about NaNoWriMo so far is that, because of it, we successfully avoided making plans for our weekends for the entire month of November. Yes, folks – an entire month where the only time we’ll actually be leaving town is for the yearly turkey-related feast later on this month. Other than that, our weekends are our own, to do with as we please. The hope, of course, is that we’ll be doing a fair bit of writing on the weekends, but just the knowledge that there are four entire weekends back to back, where we can sleep as late as we want, is an overwhelming bit of happiness.

We went to Starbucks for breakfast this morning and set ourselves up at a corner table away from the direct sunlight, nibbling scones and sipping lattes while typing furiously away on our little portable Palm Pilot keyboards. We were the picture of married nerd bliss, in other words. Our twin set of fascinating gadgets drew the attention of one of the baristas, who came over to ooh and aah over the size and convenience of the little foldable keyboards. Meanwhile I ran into the size-limit of the default Memo note on the Palm several times in the course of my typing and, later on, ended up uploading a series of notes titled simply with the number order for the chapter I was working on.

It was relaxing, being able to sit there and write and not have the usual worry about having to transcribe my barely legible handwriting onto the computer later. Heck, we were there long enough that we even scored a free large chai tea latte, which we split between the two of us. I’m not sure when I last had a chai latte, but it’s been far too long!

The rest of the day has passed in the same sort of relaxed state of enjoyment, impossible to spoil despite even a brief rush of house cleaning. The sun is shining outside and as we pulled into the driveway from our trip out for coffee, I saw a cluster of tiny bright yellow butterflies dancing around the flowers in the front yard. The cats are puddled around the house in various states of sleepy, and Richard and I are camped in front of our computers, writing, emailing, doing nothing useful at all.

Such a marvelous day!