Another Nano Update

Hey all. Been working hard on the book the past two weeks. Fell behind a little last week when most of us caught a stomach bug. Everyone's fine now, thanks for asking.

So, we're a little past the halfway point. Which means I should have more than 25,000 words written. And how many do I have? Pause for suspense.... 31,000! The story is the same premise I started out with, but it's not going the way I thought it would. A secondary character has jumped out and demanded attention. A beloved character came to a shocking end. And my murderer is not who I thought it was!

Thirteen more days to write 19,000 more words. Yep, pretty sure I'll get there and I may have even wrapped the story up by then! They group that sponsors this every year announced that another sponsor will print and bind any novel written this November, so I might actually see my book in print!

NaNoWriMo Update

For those following, November first was the first day of NaNoWriMo. (For those not following: Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Basically, I signed up to write a fifty thousand word novel between November 1st and November 30th. All for nothing but the knowledge that I can do it.) Did it start off with a bang? More like a fizzle. The girls bowl on Saturday mornings, so I wasn't around to work on it. Then Jason came home. Then my parents came back with the little kids, who wanted to go outside and play while Daddy and Grandpa worked on getting the rest of the fence up. Then after dinner, Jason used the laptop to play games all night.

I have a calendar that has it all worked out how many words per day you need to get to reach fifty thousand. It's basically one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven. My grand total at the end of day one? Thirty. Yep, I'm smokin' up the keyboard!

After venting to my mentor, I got a fresh start on Sunday. On and off through the day, I would sit down at the computer and type out something. The expected total at the end of day two? Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three. My total? About thirty-one hundred. Not so bad. I might catch up.

This morning dawned early (could have to do with daylight savings) and in between getting kids fed and on buses, my story was coming along. I'm trying to work in the names of family and friends, although :disclaimer: any similarities between characters and real people either living or dead is purely coincidental. I was IMing my sister in law Julie about just having added a character with her name. I don't know if she ever got the other IM that said I think my Julie character is going to come to a bad end. :D Nothing personal, Jules!!

So, NaNoWriMo calendar total for the end of day three? C'mon math majors! Okay, it's five thousand. I know, daunting, right? My total at the end of day three? About eighty-two hundred. Woohoo! I'm ahead of the game! And I haven't even killed anyone yet!

Okay, well, I'm going to let my fingers and wrists have a break. I'll keep y'all updated on how it's going.

A New Look

Sorry about the picture quality. You know how hard it is to keep a two year old still enough to get a picture that's not blurry? Especially this two year old! Anyway, Larkin's had a runny nose for like a month and her hair is forever getting stuck to her face. So here was our solution:





Okay, so if I had an uploadable picture of Caelyn at age 2, you would see how close the haircuts are. I always said that Caelyn and Wyatt look alike and Piper and Larkin look alike, but man, with this haircut, Larkin's like a mini-Caelyn! She is just too darn cute. And it was her first haircut and all the curls in the back are now gone. :( She'll probably get the curls back in ten years. I did.

NaNoWriMo

In the past couple of years, I have several people say to me that I should be a writer. And not just family members either. So, when someone mentioned NaNoWriMo to me, I thought it was a great idea. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Basically, I signed up to write a 50,000 word novel during November. That's only 175 pages. Or 1667 words a day. I don't win anything but the satisfaction of completing a book. I don't have anything to lose but my sanity and lots of sleep. But who needs those?

So, in the next 26 days, I'll be busy with ideas, characters, plotlines...And if anyone has any ideas for a title, feel free to send it to me. I know many songwriters think of the title first and then write the song around the title. I figure if someone sends me a title I like, I could do that, too.

And in November, I plan on sitting in front of this laptop for hours on end. Okay, that's not really any different than what I'm doing now, but I'll be doing something productive!!

Where's the Tambourine?

If you follow the blog at all, you'll have read the post about Larkin's birthday earlier this month. She got a tambourine from us. Except, I haven't seen it since the party. I'm thinking Daddy hid it away, but he swears he doesn't know where it is! I didn't realize there was a black market for tambourines and now have decided one of my kids sold it for lunch money.....

Wyatt's been Tested

This morning, we got Wyatt up at 6:30 to travel to downtown Indy to the Riley Children's Hospital's Autism Clinic. They told us to arrive an hour early to fill out paperwork. Which only took 1/2 an hour to do and we just had to sit around for the other 1/2 hour. Then the doctor and her med student shadow took us to a room to interview us for an hour. I am assuming she also watched how Wyatt interacted with everyone. Then the doctors left to consult with another doctor about all she talked about and all the reports I had brought with us. After another half hour wait, they came back in and told us their diagnosis. They said that of 100 kids with autism spectrum disorders, 20% will have autism, 30% will have Asperger's and 50% will have PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified.) And Wyatt falls into that last category. And since he's on the autism spectrum, we can apply for Medicaid which will pay for medications, schooling, therapies... Only catch is that there's a six YEAR waiting list for it!!! So, we'll be applying for that here soon. So, now we have a "real" diagnosis. If we can get more services for Wyatt, it was worth it.

Monkeys, Monkeys Everywhere!

THE MONKEY HAS TURNED TWO!! Hard to believe that Larkin's birthday was Saturday. Even harder to believe that it was her second one! We actually celebrated her birthday over Labor Day weekend as Jason's parents weren't able to make it the 6th/7th and I was also working out at church all weekend. So it was just a small party with the family and both sets of grandparents.

We had a Curious George theme. I was going to go with Elmo, but then decided that Larkin and George look a like, so we went with him. I've decided to give her a monkey for every birthday and Christmas. Should have a good collection soon. Here she is with her first present:



She loves her monkeys! In case you're wondering, she also treats the cats like that -- hold 'em by the head and squeeze....Larkin got the monkey, a tambourine and a nubbie ball from us. She got two puzzles and some stacking boxes from Grand Os. She got a Mr. Potato Head Spud Buddies from Grand Bs. Grandma also got her a magnetic letter book where she sticks the magnet letters to the book. She's gotten pretty good at matching them up, considering they're lower case and the b,d,p & q all kind of look the same.

After presents came cake. She was very excited about it. It had a monkey, a Curious George figurine and then we left it in front of her so she started to stick her fingers in and eat the frosting. Very cute! Wasn't so cute the following morning when she realized she could reach the cake on the counter and had all of the frosting off one side before we realized it! Made me think of Bill Cosby's story about chocolate cake for breakfast.



Not too much going on here, but I'll try to post just a little more often than every three months! Starting to look like D. Turner's blog...... :D