Up To No Good

Giving this a try:

ok they are a bit time delayed (mine, for example, is over 30K), but here are the kids' widgets:

nuts, seems the kids don't have them. ds is at 2,375 and he lamely hasn't written in days. Dd's is 1,570 and she is nearly to her goal of 2K. I'm proud of both, but dd has been the best at listening and keeping up with nano consistently.

OTOH, ds did actually study a script and start trying to write one. Since script frenzy ended on June 30, he's a bit delayed ;-)

Posted by tracy at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote a bloody ton today, and got one of the kids to do likewise, but we're not done yet. Here be the region numbers, for those who are worried:

7256078 is what they are reporting for today (well, technically tomorrow, it's 12:37 am Saturday now). Hopefully that is just un-updated. We are not taking things lying down around here, are we folks?

*bump* setting this up top till the 30th

Posted by tracy at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yay us!

Ds still has 1K to go, but he'll get it, considering he wrote 1K yesterday...

Posted by tracy at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ds was dusting and knocked a vase down and it shattered--upon picking up the pieces (first of him and then the vase) I cut my finger and got some pottery shard in my finger... hope it's out now but my typing has been compromised... ugh.

Ow.

Press on, press on... 6K to go...

Posted by tracy at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I needed a magic tree at the Ballard Locks, so I have two, one is the "entry" tree, the other is the "exit" tree. This may require some revision of the Viking book (which needs CPR, it's so flawed) which is ok... I've also decided it needs renaming, so I'll work on that. Maybe Spin & Park. or Advancing the Whorl. Or Learning to Draft, or... suggestions?

Here are the trees:
exit tree

and close up of entry tree bark:

Me: 10,046
dd: 864 / 2000 (goal)
ds: 1,332 / 5,000 (goal)

Posted by tracy at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been talking about third person POV. I explained in detail to dd, struggling for words she could relate to, about knowing some, but not all of the character's thoughts, and how to avoid author intrusion when it hit me--it's like the author spoils it (You know, spoiler alert?). We had that ah-ha moment, which helped tremendously.

I'm a day ahead in word count, both kids have fallen behind a bit, not having written every day, but we'll get back there. They are astounding me with the quickness at which they learn fiction techniques... when ds came down mid-discussion about POV and author intrusion, and not writing in omniscient POV because it's not in vogue, and actually takes less skill than limited 3rd person, he interrupted me to say:

"that would create no suspense, if you wrote in omniscient POV"

Smart cookies, both of 'em. :-) As I said to them, if J.K. Rowling had told us at the beginning that Tom Riddle was Voldemort, Ginny Weasley would never have opened the diary and that whole book would never have happened, and Dumbledore wouldn't have gotten his confirmation of horcruxes as early as he did...

oops, spoiler alert, if you haven't read HP & the HBP... or HP and the COS

Posted by tracy at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Me: 5064
Ds: 765
Dd: 864

Dialogue is something of a challenge when you are six. I'm very proud of her, I am teaching her dialogue and how to "research" (which in her case is ask mommy) it and try to have your dialogue sound like real people speaking, minus all the "ums" etc. In dialogue we don't say the other person's name over and over, but the trick to figuring out who is saying what is via action. Combining the two can be tricky, but just as people don't say "hi how are you NAME. NAME, what would you like to do, NAME?" they also don't bounce around endlessly. So no talking heads, no running around without talking to one another--this stuff can be confusing!

They are both doing well. More on that later.

Posted by tracy at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

me: 3364
dd: 433
ds: 433

Statistical anomaly that they both wound up with the same word count? Priceless ;-)

We talked about dialogue yesterday, and how "Hi, how are you?" "Hi. I'm fine" is boring. Ds has been absorbing fiction technique on his own via reading osmosis, and BOY had his fiction skills develolped from last year! Dd has an awesome title: Snake Creek Road. Ds's title thus far is The North Portal. Mine? Setting the Twist

On to day two... I've been researching my historical figure, and off to the library in a bit...

Posted by tracy at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

me: 2030 words

Kids? Made them go to bed, all sugared up.

Here's from my *FREAKIN AWESOME* email (ok, so everyone else got it too) from Tom Robbins:

It's a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it's a tricky business. Try it. It'll drive you crazy. And you'll love it.

Tom Robbins

Posted by tracy at 02:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Setting is more than place or time, it evokes emotion, not only to let us know how the character is feeling but also gives us clues as to what might happen and if the narrator is trustworthy or not.

Setting can occur during a long period of time, or even a moment.

If you get stuck during nano and want to get on track, think about these words:
above
before
below
after
toward
beyond

Atmosphere is part of setting, including the time of day, period in history, the weather, and the decor of a place.

Setting can help you SHOW instead of TELL about how your character perceives the world. It can be harmonious (happy person in a cozy place) or conflicted (sad person, everyone around is happy). You can begin to learn to use symbolism here to hint about the future for your characters. Your setting can be familiar to everyone and your characters (home, forests, mountains, sea) or it can be alien (planet zooknob where the trees are pink and creatures the size of elephants hang from trees by their beaver tails).

Much can happen in the setting, or not much at all (See Edgar Allen Poe for examples of long passages that are the character's imaginings rather than actual events).

You can summarize, you can flashback, you can use slow motion or speed things up.

If you get stuck, here are some writing assignments to help you get through (based on Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway)

1. write a scene where your character is uncomfortable in a setting, such as barbie in a boy's locker room, or a dragon warrior tiptoeing through a field of flowers.

2. Write a scene where the setting is familiar to you, but not to your characters. Perhaps they transport there via magic... use lots of descriptive words and active verbs to let us know how foreign it feels to them.

3. Write a scene where your characters argue about going to a particular place. Do they go? Make sure you really have them argue it out, and one convinces the other (to go or not).

4. Write a scene where your character's mood is opposite that of the weather. Do they change their mood? Does the weather change?

Posted by tracy at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we talked about what makes a good book. I highly recommend Debra Dixon's book Goal, Motivation and Conflict (it's a small press book I think, and very readable for kids, though at this juncture I can't recall *exactly* how kid friendly it is since she's a romance writer... I'll check)

Anyway, so we are making the who, what, why and why not of our books today. Dd's characters are Amy and Anne, and she is busy working on the GMC for one of them right now, more about that in a bit.

So GMC can be broken down in more simplistic terms for kiddos, and she uses "The Wizard of Oz" quite frequently in her book as examples. We watched the beginning of the film to talk about the obvious and not-as-obvious GMC's of Dorothy... At first, Dorothy just wants to have help in defending Toto against Miss Gulch (is that her name? I don't wanna go back and rewatch again, so we'll just say it is). Nobody will listen to her, Aunt Em and Uncle whomever are working on saving chickens since their incubator broke, and the farmhands are all working trying to fix a wagon and feed the pigs. Really now, we see Dorothy wants a "place without trouble" which she interprets quite literally, but we can also see that she wants a place of acceptance. This is a very real goal for children, most of their behavior can be explained in terms of mistaken goals which really are about the motivation to feel accepted. (See Jane Nelson's Positive Discipline for more on that). Dorothy's journey is beset with conflict, first from Miss Gulch, then from the wicked witch, then even from the wizard who sends her to kill the wicked witch (what a task to send a child on!), which is really his way of getting rid of her because he doesn't think she'll succeed. Ultimately what she seeks is love and acceptance, and as Glenda tells her in the end, she's always had that right with her the whole time (as with the shoes).

My characters are El, Jer, Gav, Ginger & Caroline and I will be working on their GMC's as well as more advanced character development I need to do.

Posted by tracy at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're getting ready for nanowrimo.org's 2007 fun-strava-ganza!

So here I'm going to blog about our lessons and how we're working on our nanos.

Lesson one: Mapmaking

Both kids made maps, although ds's is still very much a work in progress. I'll scan and put them up in a bit.

Here is dd's:

Posted by tracy at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Holding their first books. Even if they are rough drafts, not finished or edited... still, yay them!

Posted by tracy at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Isn't it smashing?

Posted by tracy at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been asked questions so I thought all you boys and girls might enjoy knowing some vital information.

1) nanowrimo is not a terrible disease we're recovering from. We participated in national novel writers for a month in November. I wrote 50K (bit over, actually), which was the requirement for a "win." The kids set their own levels, and they both chose 5K. Nick completed his (with typing help from me and one night from big brother, who vows never again, since his two main characters were ∑ and µ which are *not* fun to type over and over again). Sabrina wrote 3K which was excellent, but not an 'official' win.

2) I win mean mommy of the year because I cheesed out of typing for the kids about 2 weeks in (for a week and a half) because it finally occurred to me that I had to type 60,000 words. Which sucked. Bad, bad mommy. Nick wrote through the pain (well, his brother's pain) but Sabrina wouldn't really do it (on paper or on the computer) and when I got in a position, post-turkey-day, to help again, it was a more pleasant experience to type up Sigma and Mu (I gave up on the (@#&*@( symbols) than it was to type more of the 12 dancing princesses meets secrets of droon where everyone has hippity hops and loves each other except for the bad guy evil flower who goes away and is never heard from again, and they all just love each other and eat ice cream and play with toys and nobody ever zzzzz What? What's that? Oh yeah, bad mommy of the year. Red rover red rover, pass the award right over.

There's always next year, right? What happened to my original kid, whose first short story will be posted below? (We're taking donations for her therapy now)

click on "continue reading Hi There Mouseketeers!" to read her first short story

Continue reading "Hi there Mouseketeers!" »

Posted by tracy at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, for the kids...

Posted by tracy at 02:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by tracy at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

oh, the tryptofan curse...

My word count sucks. Just a few days ago I believed I might finish early--but now I spent the day sleeping, researching, and discovering just how wrong I was about the Vinland landscape. Curses!

The kids aren't going to "win" I don't think. I don't have time to do theirs and mine, and neither of them will actually get it together and write it themselves. Bad, bad mommy. :=( Still, they should be commended for making a hearty attempt, and I hope they will let me put excerpts here.

Posted by tracy at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click here to find out your viking name

I'm _insertmyname_ the ruthless.

Sorry, internet privacy act. I can't admit my true identity (see spidey post)

Posted by tracy at 02:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

18666

hehehehe

I may leave that wordcount... I'm getting left in the dust by snarktarget and tinybites. Sigh. MUST KICK ASS...

Posted by tracy at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

zeldaguy wrote to his quota (nine words over, mom!) and princess started, but didn't finish (but it wasn't her fault, there is flooding in a good friend's town, and we got worried about my friend and started calling and trying to get ahold of her--no word yet).

In other news, we met lovely author T.A. Barron. Zeldaguy loves his Merlin books, I bought him the first book in the Avalon series and he got it signed, and princess got a picture book signed... he was everything a role model should be, engaging, magical, interesting to children without being pedantic, and he was SO encouraging when we told him we were doing nanowrimo... it was lovely. Zeldaguy just couldn't manage a word to him, and when we left, I said "If you ever would get to meet Einstein (never mind the time travel issue) what would you do?" Zeldaguy said "Probably faint!"

Best of all, Mr. Barron promised to read emails they sent (personally even!) and wants to see zeldaguy's map of his nano world. Yay! Yay for our heroes, literary or otherwise! He apparently is friends with Madeline L'Engle (lucky man!) and she helped him get pubbed all those years ago. If you can go see him speak, I highly recommend it. Check out
T.A. Barron's website

Ok so I am off to bed at 2:48 am. Yes, you read that right. Sigh. I cranked out the words, though... I'm at 11,861 by my count, and by nano's, it's 12,259.

I hope I get some sleep tonight but since my friend Alyssa lives in flooded-out Sultan, I may be on alert or driving out there to try to help. I think it's taken me a couple of hours longer than it should have to write tonight because I keep checking online to see if I can figure out if her house is flooded. It seems very likely, because the pictures are of downtown, and she lives next to one of the two rivers. Think positive thoughts for her, she's had a very rough year, and this certainly won't help. I hope she got her horses and animals out.

Posted by tracy at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hit over 10K now... it's 8:47 pm and my word count is 10095. I don't think I wrote anything good today but I wrote some words that made sense. Mostly.

The kids went to their first write-in. Mr. Spot's is a bit curry-ish for me. They made an *awesome* mocha though--so yay on that front! Zeldaguy thought the cider sucked though.

We had some fabulous prizes--too bad not many nanoers came. I gave up two devil duckie pencil toppers, and the kids got sparkly ninja gum and unicorn power gum. Zeldaguy won their word war, but Princess is still ahead of him. His word count is now 779 and princess is at 902. Hopefully their writing buddy (son of my writing buddy) will get his paperwork through soon and they can add him "offically."

I had to warn princess about being cyber-stalky. She decided to post that she loved someone on the homeschool board. I asked her what it was she liked and she said it was his name (hey she is not even 6, so okaaayyy) so I told her we should edit it to say she loved his name, so she didn't look creepy. Poor kid, I can totally see her first heartbreak and the boy will be smashed to bits (perhaps literally) when she finishes with him. Woe to the boy who doesn't love her back, as we say.

Anywhoo, here we stand. Hopefully I can even get more done before I crash. Then again, there's knitting to be done...

Posted by tracy at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The kids didn't write a word today but they did their chores, so that's good. zeldaguy's got a bit of word count envy. As have I. Look at my good buddies:

and

Now don't get me wrong, my talented and lovely writing buddies, I've "known" you both for years now... but *sob* how did you both get over 1K today? I couldn't get a thing done. Some of it was my fault (hello, I have a DPN blister on my thumb from cabling) and some was those evil vile--er, I mean joys of my life. Hee. Did I mention they did their chores? That involves threats, bribery, or, as I like to call it, network support.

Oh, and three kids plus one dirty dog=mom who realizes the bathtub should be cleaned *after* the dog. Oops.

Judging from the gas emitting from that dog's butt, I should have the kids standing, aiming it at me and telling me WORD COUNT OR WE FIRE!

Speaking of that, anyone catch SNL last week? I laughed so hard I was crying over the ghost hunters sketch. Classic comedy, that. You can never go wrong with a good fart joke.

Edit: 3:21 am. I plugged on. I just couldn't stand it... so JL, I caught ya, and L, maybe tomorrow? Man, I am pathetically competitive. I should post word counts so y'all can see what I was whining about...

mine is 8855 now at bedtime.

Day 1 I did 2668. Day 2, I was at 4667. Day 3, 7246. Day 4, 7334 (hence the whine). Now it's technically day 5, so my gain has been mostly since midnight.

Off to sleep. Or something.

Posted by tracy at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whoever wins word count today gets a sticker of his or her choice on the calendar. Mom not included :-P

princess "won" at 788 words. There is a cinderella sticker on the calendar. There is a sulking 10 year old... at 559

Posted by tracy at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Day two, princess has 539 words, zeldaguy has 371. Bravo to both, since quota for day two was 167 + 167 = 334 (princess's first triple digit addition)

Posted by tracy at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nanowrimo is where we are at. Here are some stats for ya:

zeldaguy has 250 words on day 1, princess has 290. She's kicking butt! (not bad for a 5 year old)

Posted by tracy at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)