Roxy training diary month 66

November 2008

Nov 29. A nice visit with Lisa, Doug and Dad ended this morning, so it was time to go run off some of Rosemary's Most Excellent Turkey and have some fun.

About 200 of us showed up for the annual Santa Run, a 5K, but you had to run in a hat and beard.

Next weekend, I am running the Las Vegas Half, which runs up and back on The Strip.

Tired but Santa

Santa Sighting

If You Can't Run With the Santas,

Stay on the Porch

Northeast Santa Gang

Southwest Santa Gang

Nov 25. Today was the first day that one could validate NaNoWriMo word count, so I did. I got a cool icon for my efforts.

To celebrate my "victory", here's an oldie-but-goodie, one of the original LOLcats.

Nov 20. An article about NaNoWriMo, which quotes me extensively, appeared in the student newspaper today.

I got a rejection on Seven Deadly Synapses in today's mail, but the agent suggested another who might like it. So, my hopes are up, since this will be the first semi-solicited query I've sent.

I wrote some more on Broken Jaw of the Lost Kingdom, the first writing I've done since Saturday. It is a dark, Kafkaesque piece, befitting my mood. I like it. After some editing, it might make a good short story.

Nov 16. Thanks to everyone who supported me for the 2nd Annual NaNoWriMo "Night of Writing Dangerously" Write-a-Thon. I hit the goal of 50,000 words at the Write-a-Thon (just barely) by writing 7800-odd words (and some of them were really odd words) on Saturday alone.

One of the devices they had there was a jar with creative prompts. I got stuck, and picked up one that said, "Your main character finds a monster in his closet. Extra points if the monster is real and not imaginary." That one worked, and even gave me some new ideas for the last part of the novel.

The picture at right is me collecting on the Triple Dog Dare, and rising to shout "BINGO!" at the Write-a-Thon. I was getting worried, and there was only a half-hour left when I finally hit 50,037. That's where it will hold for now, until I get my mojo back. I still have more to write.

Sunday morning, I ran for the first time since my humiliating Denver Marathon experience — 6 miles from the motel to Pier 39 and back.

Getting out and running felt nice, so nice, in fact, that I updated my running calendar to celebrate. Plus, as I've been doing all year, I wrote some more of the novel in my head. Running is good for that.

I have decided that five marathons in a year is stupid. I shouldn't have done it. I will run one, perhaps two, marathons next year. The next one will be Ogden on May 16, 2009. I may do a fall marathon; I haven't decided yet and there's plenty of time to settle on a plan for the second half of 2009.

Jim FTW

Chris Baty addresses the group

SuperKristy and CloseWriter

LyndaEllen and CaliforniaMaggie

Nov 12. I told you the updates would be sporadic.

Work on this year's NaNovel, tentatively titled The Broken Jaw of the Lost Kingdom, is proceeding. As of today, I've got 33,205 words, so I'm right at 2/3 of the way through. I am flying out to San Francisco Saturday for the great NaNoWriMo Write-a-Thon and I hope to pick up the "win" there. (For NaNoWriMo, a "win" is writing 50,000 words in one month.) If I can get into the low middle 40s by the time I board the plane, then I think I can make 50K at the event, which runs 5 hours. That means I will need to write about 10,000 between now and then, which will be rigorous, but do-able. I can write some more on the train to the airport and on the plane.

My writing friends have triple-dog dared me to stand up and say "Bingo!" when (if) I hit 50,000 at the Write-a-Thon, so that's my incentive — to make a public spectacle of myself.

Roxy's Jerky Herding Dog (Silly), or JHDs, certificate came today.

Nov 2 (cont'd). Anyone here read Welsh?

It's the best one of these since Jimmy Carter expressed the "lust in my heart" for the Polish people. Or maybe since John F. Kennedy was a jelly doughnut.

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Nov 2. It's November, which means, of course, it's National Novel Writing Month. This will make the fourth year I've done NaNoWriMo, and I "won" the last three years, so I have high hopes for this year.

That means, of course, that updates to the RoxyLog will likely be sporadic. I only have so many words in me, after all. If you want to follow my NaNoWriMo progress, my individual page should be here. It will load slowly (or not at all) the first week of November, so if it hangs up, just keep trying until it comes through.

There's an excerpt from the middle of Act II on this page, for your reading pleasure. (Click on the tab "Novel Info".) Notice the title of the chapter is "clickable", and you can listen as you read to increase your enjoyment and get extreme value for your entertainment dollar. The tentative title of the book is The Broken Jaw of the Lost Kingdom, which is from TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men".

This year marks a departure in several ways; I'm not writing the scenes in chronological order, but rather in a sort of random order. Over the last year, as I went on long runs, I plotted out scenes in my head, and I'm putting them on paper now. That makes for a fairly rapid writing process, so as of 36 hours into it, midday Nov 2, I'm at 7836 words.

To use up space, what better than a leftover Halloween picture of Roxy in her cheerleader costume?

Rosemary ordered a calendar from Michelle Page's Nepalese Danger Dogs. Imagine our surprise when we flipped to June 2009 and saw our very own Danger Dylan, blithely jumping through the tire with the smoking ruins of a bombed city behind him. If you need a 2009 calendar, I recommend this one.