The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I know it has been an age since I posted something on this blog. Life has been rather full of late and although ideas and a desire to post have floated around incessantly in my head I have not had time to sit down and get to it. A couple of Saturday mornings ago I sat in my favourite coffee shop and wrote the draft of a post in my notebook. Did it get typed and posted? No. I have done this twice now. Like Charlie Brown I can't quite get it together. 'Good grief!'

I do have at least one rather good excuse, though. Some of my regular reader friends will remember I began working on a novel on November 1st, 2013. I am happy to report that my novel's first draft was completed on November 25th of this year. I was, needless to say, relieved and delighted. When I originally wrote about completing NaNoWriMo (see linked post above for an explanation) I thought I only needed to write about another third to complete my draft. I was wrong. My word count ended at 103,000 words, more than double what I had written as part of National Novel Writing Month. Still, I was happy with the outcome and look forward to the editing process. I have been advised by an editor friend to let the manuscript rest for a while so I can look at it with fresh eyes. Completing my first draft was a Christmas gift to myself, I suppose, and one I was happy to unwrap early, for now I can concentrate on making the house clean beautiful and the upcoming Season as delicious as possible for my family and friends. My husband also just started three weeks of holidays from work so I know much will be accomplished in the way of tedious long-neglected tasks around here. My three living-away kids will be home for varying lengths of time for the Holidays and even though I will be spending a lot of time ferrying my youngest daughter to her rehearsals for the production of the Addams Family Musical to take place in January, I will enjoy every minute of having a full house once again.

The first Christmassy thing I do every year is bake fruitcakes. In the early days only my husband and I enjoyed eating these boozy, rummy fruit and nut cakes. Then, I began sending my parents one, too and they asked for the recipe. This year I received a message from our twenty year old son which said, "I am looking forward to eating Christmas cake with a glass of port." My eldest daughter now enjoys the cake as well, so it looks like we will have no trouble consuming the two large and three small cakes I have baked this year. Today I will bathe the cakes in rum and rewrap them in cheesecloth to marinate for another week when I will bathe them in rum again. They end up very well preserved by Christmas week. I have also already made a double batch of another family favourite: cheese ball. I coat the cheese balls in chopped walnuts harvested from the tree in our back yard, and serve it with a variety of crackers. We have already attended two events at which cheese ball was our contribution to the food table; we are becoming rather predictable at parties.

Christmas is not Christmas in our family without certain food related traditions, but new additions are always welcome. Last month, my youngest daughter and I made Maple Toffee Popcorn for the first time. It was absolutely delicious and would make a great gift for gluten-free friends. We will be making a big batch again. I will make fruit and nut chocolate bark as well, but I will leave the rest of the baking to my husband and daughter who has been away at college and surviving on stove-top cooking. She is longing to bake when she comes home next weekend.

Last Friday we and our eldest daughter attended the year-end concert at our son's university. He is in his second year studying violin in the Orchestral Performance program and we are always happy to go to any concert in the university's beautiful concert hall. Our son had worked very hard to get a top seat in the orchestra for the second half of the concert when they would perform Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5. Shostakovich is one of his favourite composers and the piece is also a favourite. The first half of the concert featured an extremely accomplished young pianist performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, but it was the second half which earned a standing ovation - or perhaps a cumulative effect was the cause. Either way, the concert was wonderful and we and everyone else in the packed house were so proud of all the young musicians up on the stage in front of us. When we came out of the hall at the end of the concert snow was falling in earnest. A group of students had run outside to play in the snow and were visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby. I love snow, too, but driving in it is not my favourite activity. After dropping off our son at his dorm building we drove to our eldest daughter's apartment and said goodbye to her. We made our way slowly and carefully all the way to Langley where the snow had come and gone already leaving the roads bare for the rest of the journey home.We munched on chips and listened to the radio to keep ourselves awake, arriving at home well past midnight, but we both felt it had been worth it.

Speaking of fine young musicians, I am a new fan of twenty-six year old pianist Yuja Wang. I am happy to share a video of her playing one of my (and her) favourite composers, Chopin. Have a listen during this month of hustle and bustle of the Holiday season, and I guarantee it will help you catch your breath. Until next time, enjoy December as it speeds by at its customary alarming rate. I know I am.

Back from NaNoWriMo Land

No, I have not disappeared off the face of the blogging sphere, in case anyone was wondering. As I wrote at the end of October, I was signing up for National Novel Writing Month with a goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel by November 30th. Well, I am happy to report that I achieved my goal and earned the digital badge (above) and certificate (which I had to download and fill out myself), and watched the 44 second congratulatory video featuring the staff at the NaNoWriMo headquarters shouting "You did it!" and other such things. My husband took me out for lunch to celebrate and my kids, as well as my friends and family, cheered. I felt a goodly amount of satisfaction on November 30th, but the reality soon hit me and I still have about a third of the first draft of my book to write, without the motivational help of all the NaNoWriMo hoopla. I got back to my book this morning and slogged away for a couple of hours. It was as hard work as it was all November, even without the daily pressures of a certain word count to achieve, but just as rewarding, and I am determined to round out the plot and get the bones down at least, so I can start revising in the new year. The last thing I want to do is lose momentum. That being said, I also have to get ready for Christmas.

The reason I have not written on my blog, or read the blogs of my fine blogging friends at all since November 1st, is because after I spent two to four hours of my day writing, I did not want to look at the computer screen for any other reason than to catch up with family and my volunteer work colleagues via email or Facebook, and even that I kept to a minimum. I still had to cook and bake and talk to my family. The house was somewhat neglected as was my exercise routine. Writing a novel is very absorbing work. I spent a good part of most nights lying awake in the wee hours of the morning, working out my next scenes before I could go back to sleep. I drank a bit more coffee than usual, but I was honestly high on writing for the entire month. I was as happy as a pig in mud. I have no idea if what I wrote will be appealing to anyone else but me, but I admitted to myself that I am loving this time when it is just the book and me, working together to reveal the characters and the plot. I know I will want to share my book with others at some point, but I am not there yet.

Would I recommend NaNoWriMo to others? I would, but only if they have the basic elements of a novel revving and raring to go on October 31st. On Halloween night, between answering the door to trick-or-treaters - there were so many cute little kiddies at my door this year - I worked at my outline, fattening it up and fleshing it out. I am so glad I did. If I had started the month with no real idea of where I wanted to go with my novel, I may not have gotten as far as I did. Every writer is different, however. Some just need one character in mind to get started, but I am not one of those. I have to 'feel' the novel, and the whole idea of it has to stick and have traction. I did surprise myself on more than one occasion. I would intend for a scene to go a certain way, and the characters would take it in a different direction. I would finish the scene and think, "Now where did that come from?" That is a good feeling, because I was doing as Hemingway advised, which was to let your characters speak for themselves - if you force them, they end up as caricatures. Every second day the NaNoWriMo website would post a pep talk from a published author. I found most of these talks helpful and encouraging, as well as relateable which was encouraging in itself. When writers talk about the inner workings of the job of writing and you relate to it, it makes you feel like a writer, too. Sticking to my goal was a bit gruelling at times, but it was all worth it, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I will visit all my favourite blogs over the next week. I won't hope to catch up, but I am looking forward to reading what everyone is up to. 
Cheers, 
Rebecca

A Novel Idea

So, I've gone and done it. I've signed up for NaNoWriMo, which serves as a catchy and much shorter way of saying National Novel Writing Month. For the month of November I must, if I am to achieve my goal of writing 50,000 words, write an average of 1666 words per day. I have registered with the website, written my novel-to-be's summary and provided an excerpt. I have subscribed to the Facebook page and disregarded anything to do with Twitter. I don't do Twitter. This coming Friday, day one, I will take a deep breath, trust in the process, and dive in to a solid month of typing out the story that has been building in my mind for over a year.

I first heard about NaNoWriMo a few years ago at a writing workshop. At the time I had no concrete ideas for a novel and shelved the idea until now. I wrote my first novel years ago after the idea for it was inspired by a painting I had done a few years before. Over a few weeks I wrote the entire thing in long hand when my kids were napping and then typed it out, editing as I went, over the next year. I tried to get it published but gave up after a while when I took to heart a couple of friends' opinion that the novel had a point of view problem. The thing is, when I read the novel again I enjoy it, even though I know it has its faults - a fact which encourages me to try writing another one.

A couple of weeks ago, when I announced my plans to my husband and daughters one of them said, "That's okay, we're used to being ignored." I am shamelessly guilty as charged. I have become quite good at ignoring everything going on around me when I am in the writing zone. For years I have been the butt of many family jokes starting with something like, "Have you ever noticed that when Mom is writing and you ask her a question, that when she finally answers you it's always, 'Mm?' I think, in some ways, I have had to fight for my right to write, mostly with myself. I only started taking myself seriously as a writer a couple of years ago, even though I have been writing since 1996. I finally had to accept the simple fact that 'writers write' and that is that. The more I write, the more seriously I take myself as a writer, and the more seriously my family takes me as one. We all now accept that writing is simply something that I have to do.

If I am already writing regularly, why take part in NaNoWriMo? Because I see it as both an opportunity and a do-able challenge. I have a novel concept ready and waiting, and if I do not make time to work on it and get the basic words down, it will not be a priority. So many other things in my life are vying for priority and notice, but for a time I have chosen to shove these aside for a couple of hours per day. I do not see my participation in the event as really any different than my husband's training for his 100 mile race back in July. We all supported him as he ate, drank and slept everything-to-do-with-cycling in preparation for his event, and in the end he was very successful and happy with his results, finishing somewhere in the front-middle of the pack. I'm hoping to feel the same way at the end of November. I realize that what I end up with may very well be 50,000 words of drivel, but it's a risk I am willing to take. What I am hoping for is what writer Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird affectionately calls 'a shitty first draft,' which may just be enough to work with to make a better second draft...and third draft...

Wish me luck?!

P.S. I'm not sure how the event will effect my blogging for the next month. I'm not making any decisions about that right now. I'll just see how it goes.