Bought a House

Well it's done.

We finally found a house... here's the funny thing, it's the same house that I talked about in the last two posts.

Turns out they were tired of having to wait on the market for so long. Their realtor called ours and said they'd be willing to take our last counter offer. $15,000 under the original asking price (they reduced the price twice since we walked away).

It's still the best house we've seen with the cheapest price tag. So of course we jumped on the opportunity.

Last night we put in a formal offer, and they accepted (minus one small date change we were willing to accept). Now comes the Home Inspection, getting the Finances and getting Possession of the home on April 15th. That's only 5 weeks away. Wow.

I'm still not as excited as I think I should be. Perhaps it will all sink in when the Mortgage comes through and I actually have to pay for the house. :)

As for my writing, well you could say that it's suffered. The Week of February 18 -24 I wrote no words. Last week (February 25 - March 2) had the following:

Word Count:
Wednesday - 1,108 words on Ice Debt

This week I give no guarantees on my productivity, at least not until the final conditions come off the home offer (March 13). After that, I should finally be able to get back into writing.

Hope you have a great day, and for you writers out there... Have a Fantastic Writing Day!

Tina

Feb 4 -10 Word Count

If last week was a write off... this week is abysmal....

Word Count:
Wednesday - 641 words on a new short story

That's it. I didn't work on Ice Debt (my No-Plot-Project). I didn't do much of anything really.

It's all because we are starting to look at houses again. The market in Edmonton seems to have slowed down a bit in the last couple of months. Enough at least to have a few more homes in our price range. I'll keep you posted if anything interesting happens.

One last update; I am registered to attend the World Fantasy Convention 2008, which is coming to Calgary Alberta from October 30 - November 2. I'm really excited. If you're interested in going you should book your hotel room soon. When we (my writing friend Rox and I) booked last week, Wednesday was already booked up.

That's all I've got right now. Hope you had a fantastic writing week.

Tina

My Experiments

OK, I just read over the last 20 entries in my blog and it looks like I'm a little obsessed with "Experiments".

Who knew? If you're concerned, don't be. If you would like me to stop calling all my little projects "Experiments"... too bad, it's not going to happen.

Experiments remind me of Jr. High Science Fairs, where no one cares if your project is a disaster so long as you have something to show to the class... and of course if it blows up in your face, you get marks on how big the explosion was! :-)

Tina

A 30 day novel?

I have exactly 30 days... from today until the October conference, Pure-SPEC.

What am I going to do with those 30 days? Well, I'm going to try and write my novel.

I'm sure you've heard of NaNoWriMo (you write a novel during the month of November), and several of my writing friends are thinking of signing up for it. I really wanted to, but I wasn't sure if I should wait until then to start the novel I'm working on now, or start now and work on something else for November.

(Side note: I finished my outline for LLR last night, and I'm ready to go.)

So, I've decided to give writing a novel in a month a try... right now. While NaNoWriMo has you aim for only 50,000 words, I'm aiming for 100,000. Is it possible? Of course it is. Will it be hard? You bet. If I don't finish in exactly 30 days its not that big of a deal, but getting 90% of it done is where I'd like to be as a minimum.

I just feel the need to finish something big. Yes, I've done short stories, and even a novella for the 3-day novel contest... but I want to say, "I've written a Novel." I'll worry about it getting published later, right now I just want to have something I could even submit.

So here I go. I wrote the first 50 words last night, just to get a feel for it, and now I'm jumping in. Day One, Chapter One, let's start this word count going.

C

Week Wrap Up

What a week...

I am officially taking part in the 3-Day Novel Contest. I sent in my registration today.

I also finished editing my short story "Pain and Blood", and I'm just waiting on US stamps to send it out to Analog Magazine.

And... I leave tomorrow to go the the Fantasy and Science Fiction Conference "Con-Version".

"What was that? It just went speeding by?"

"That's just C M Hunt, the author. She's flying."

C

I'm Back!

I'm back, safe and sound, and I'm slowly getting back into the groove of things.

It was a wonderful week away from it all. It almost seems like a dream thinking back on it. Was I really there? (yes, and I have the pictures and tan lines to prove it)

I kept a travel log that will need some polishing (what with writing some of it very sleep deprived in an airport at who knows what hour of the day) but I plan on putting in online somewhere with a bunch of my pictures. Maybe in the fun section on my website, I'm not sure yet, but I'll let you know soon.

And thanks "Woman of Words" for the comment on my blog. I knew I had to update it, I just hadn't gotten around to it yet. It's funny because I changed my answering machine on my cell phone to let people know that I was away for the week. Well, a bunch of family members called me yesterday and left messages telling me to update my voicemail, because they also knew I was home.

Sigh, I guess it takes a few days to get everything back in order. I haven't even uploaded the pictures from my camera to the computer (its a digital). So as of yet, I have nothing to show for all this disorientation.

I was very jet lagged on Sunday, when I got home. So tired, in fact, that I cried that morning when we had to do laundry (yes, I'm a bit of a cry baby). All I wanted to do was go to bed. To be fair, I HAD been up for well over 24 hours. I took a nap that afternoon for a couple of hours and it seemed to help, but by 7:30pm I was done for the day and off to bed.

It was back to work on Monday. Back to the same old, same old. It's good though. I feel like I've had a good rest and can go for a while. I can tell you right now, I spent most of the trip on the beach, with the ocean lapping not 5 feet from my toes. Sleeping, reading, relaxing. It was awesome.

This whole trip helped a lot in terms of my novel too. While I was down there, I couldn't actually write. My brain wasn't there, but it almost was. It was like I was comparing everything around me to the world I created around Mikayla. How would Mikayla handle this heat? Would Mikayla's people have hats made of palm tree leaves? Would they take naps during the mid-day heat? Would her food taste like this or that? It was just really good to know what it feels like to be in that kind of heat, to swim in the ocean with heavy undertow and feel fish rubbing into your legs. Mostly just what it feels like to live on an island. I couldn't have asked for more, and I had a whole week of it. I'm going to take a few days to get back into real life mode and then it's dive, dive, dive into my writing. I'm looking forward to it. Like a friend you haven't seen in a while and can't wait to go for coffee to catch up.

The very scary thing is I need to really look at my plot. The story is supposed to be about Mikayla. Her journey. Her challenges. It's all about her. I think I've finally separated me from her enough (well as much as one can) so that I can look at her and say "OK, what is YOUR story?" I think she's missing something. She's not doing something she should on this journey of hers. Now I just need to know if it's major or minor. I think it'll be minor, but I want to be sure.

I'm starting this weekend. It's time to take that novel off the shelf and take a good hard look at it. My short story is easy (easier) and so I'll leave it for when I hit a wall, or need a break. Right now, I need to finish my novel. It's funny how something can turn from a want into a need.

I'm glad to be back, as much as it was fun to be away. It's good to be home.

C

Leaving Tomorrow!

I leave tomorrow for Cuba. Well actually, I catch a flight to Toronto, then pop over to Montreal (4 hour stop-over there) and then I leave for Cuba. Should be a very, very long day.

Tonight I'm packing, so I'm pretty sure I'm not going to write anything tonight. Here are the rest of the days from this week:

Monday - 0 words
Tuesday - 0 words
Wednesday - 1114 words on WC&S + a bunch plotting/developing a brand new story outline
Thursday (Today) - 0 words

Tomorrow, well you never know. I will be traveling for 14 hours, I might be able to write a few words down. Then when I get back, I get to make a choice... whether to continue to focus my writing on my short story... or to jump back into my Novel and push full steam ahead!

A difficult choice. My short story is coming along nicely, but I still have close to 10,000 words to go before it's done.... I've already realized that short stories really aren't my thing. I like subplots and developing my characters too much to just write a simple story. My novel needs a lot of work, and it's been sitting on the back burner for a while now, but I really feel it's time to finish it up. Well, I guess you'll find out soon enough.

Tips I heard Today:

1) Always Have A Twist!

2) Try writing without the screen turned on, to let your subconscious write for you.

3) Purple Spotted Pink Stamping Elephants (this is more of a reminder to always have fun with your writing - even if you are writing about serious stuff - and to create an image in your readers mind quickly, using the least amount of words. Of course some will argue that you should never use this many descriptive words in one sentence, but that's another tip completely.)

Have a great week, I will!

C

What happened to my run?

There are many things I wish I knew more about... the one foremost in my mind is why I have dry spells like this:

Saturday - 0 words

Sunday - 0 words

Today, Monday - 0 words (unless you count the ones on this blog and in my journal)

WHY, OH WHY?

OK, now that the I'm finished complaining... I've added some neat little word meters on the side of my blog. They will be tracking how far I am in my current works... which right now are my novel and short story. Looking at those little counters it's easy to feel better about how I'm doing. The little numbers underneath reflect: words written thus far/ total number of words expected. In truth I guess it looks OK, but as you can see from the daily numbers above, I'm not doing so great.

I'm going to the library again tomorrow, and I'm having dinner with some old writing friends of mine afterwards. I really hope to get some words down soon. As much as the pretty meters help me pretend I'm not doing that badly, I know I'm doing doing as well as I could.

I'm going to be digging hard these next two weeks. After that I'm in Cuba for a week, with no access to a computer (how will I survive). I had hoped to be finished my short story - or at least close to finished - before I left, so that I could polish it up and get right into my novel when I come home. That means pushing my daily word counts up into the "existent" numbers.

Smile for my. I need all the encouragement I can get at this point.

C

Aw, boff me with a flaming stick 'o dynomite!

I love fun stuff. I just added two more sites in my Fun Stuff section. Random generators are great ways to waste time... I mean, get inspired.

Actually, I found the name generators really help when your in a pinch and you need a name for that character who will be dead in 4 pages. You really don't want to spend a whole lot of time coming up with a really good name only to kill the guy. So, name generators. I don't always use them exactly as them come up. Some of them are odd.

Like Annoi (hehehe Annoy), I would use this as Annie or something. It helps just to get the brain moving.

I also like the cuss-o-matic. That's where I found the title for this post. Others would be; "Flaming mother of a salivating centipede-headed rat!" or "Well, spork me with a broken curtain rod!". Traditional swearing is just so boring, these are much better.

What a great way to spend the day... Ok, so back to reality.

What have I done lately on my writing? I've been writing. Yesterday I wrote about 1,200 words and half an outline for a new short story. Today, I wrote about 400 words and I'm going to the library after work for a couple hours to write some more.

I think my attention span for writing is about a 2 hour block of time. After 2 hours nothings happening. So I wrote for two hours yesterday, cooked and cleaned a bit then went back to writing for another two. It Worked So Well. Today, I only put in one hour at lunch, but then I'll put in another 2 this afternoon. This could really work (knock on cyber-wood).

"White Cats and Suicide" - my short story- is really coming along. It's creepy dark, but soooo much fun. I think I'm getting the hang of this.

Let me ask a question of you readers out there...
- Do you really hate it if you don't know the main characters name for the first 6 pages of a story?
- Or is it OK when on page 3 you realize it's because she doesn't want anyone to know her real name and the name you learn on page 6 is fake?

Let me know. Remember this is a short story I'm talking about. Maybe a 60 pages, 1.5 spaced. It would be interesting to hear your feedback.

Well, I think that's good enough for the moment. I'll try and keep you posted a little more often.

C