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Ready or not, last night we officially released Eden’s Fall! There are reviews! Good ones.¹ OMG, we’re so excited! Some of you have been following our saga for awhile. Some of you may have even been waiting patiently to buy a copy of this long-gestating baby. Well, now you can. Head on over to Amazon where you can buy it in digital format or trade paperback. If you don’t have a Kindle or the Kindle app and want to buy the ebook version, we will have it uploaded to Nook, iBook, Kobo, et al. in the next day or so. We’ll come back and provide links, then. Promise.

As K R Brorman mentioned last week, all three of us are participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, and that’s a pain in the butt to type so, will henceforth be referred to as “NaNo”) this November, some of us more than others … K R is a liaison for the other NaNo-philes in her area. S A Young has an 8-to-5 job and must work in her NaNo-ing around that. She reports that she’s put such trivial matters as dressing in something other than jammies, and housekeeping, on the back burner. She also lives in Boston where groceries can be ordered from the comfort of your laptop and delivered to your doorstep.

Those of us, like K R and me, who live in BFE² either have to plan way ahead, assign duties to other capable adults in the household (if you have any of those, which I don’t, and Fergus is too young, and short, to drive the car) …

or just go hungry and let the laundry pile up, or as K R said, “um, no, don’t look at the floors.” In my case, I let the Roomba deal with the floors … Haha.

I’ll be honest. I am not, exactly, on track to finish NaNo with 50,000 words racked up by November 30.

What can, or could, I have done differently or better? Well, there’s time management, in general. K R is particularly good at this. She makes an actual list each day – she’s got tons on her plate, too – and loves crossing things off. I’ve read, and listened to in the car, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I need to brush the cobwebs off those seven things and try to make them into habits again, for a start.

For another thing, I could have planned ahead instead of deciding and signing up at the end of October for NaNo. By then, I’d loaded up my calendar for the month of November with business obligations, board meetings, doctor’s appointments (Note to self: make appointment for that mammo thingy. In December), voting, tickets for events at the arts center, Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations – stuff like that.

Someone asked me the other day why NaNo picked November, which is a busy month for almost everyone. Well, the PTB (powers that be), apparently, chose November thinking the late fall/early winter weather would keep people pinned down with nothing better to do than whack out a novel. I’m guessing it was men who had this brainstorm. November is one of the two or three busiest months of the year for me and always has been. But, there we are.

The upside of NaNo is that it forces those of us “pantsers” (those who write by the seat of our pants) to plant our butts in the chair every day and write. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t even, really, have to be a novel. I’ve heard it termed “word vomit.” So long as you write 50,000 words in the month – about 1700 words a day, if you write seven days a week. You can bet I’m counting the words of this frickin’ blog post for today’s tally. If I hadn’t already written, rewritten and re-re-written my outline for Winter’s Thaw? Yeah, I’d be writing that and counting every word.

So, as I said, I’m not on track. There was all of the above calendared stuff – and I will not begrudge the hours spent listening to the oh-so-sublime Yo-Yo Ma and Katheryn Stott perform Sunday afternoon and then schmoozing with them later over wine and hors d’oeurves – the odd power outage (see: living in BFE and November miserable weather), etc. But, I’m easily distracted.

Even on days when I don’t hit my word-vomit goal, I find myself researching how to kill someone with an overdose of anticoagulants (there is a reason writers do not want the NSA looking at their internet histories) or searching an online thesaurus for alternate words for “bitch face.” I’m editing stuff I wrote for this book three years ago, which is now obsolete but maybe there’s something I can use??? Then, there are the scenes that K R and S A have provided that I need to thread into the story-line.

Here’s my goal for NaNo: do not focus on word count, but sit my backside down at the computer every day and get Winter’s Thaw closer to the end zone. At the end of the month, I’d looooove to have a draft of the novel done. I know I’ll be close. Closer. Okay, I can be happy with closer. Close.

Look at me! A thousand words to bring you guys up to date. You’re welcome!

¹ My favorite? “Fast paced, well written (you know how bad most ebooks are with typos, not this ebook), I couldn’t put it down.” Emphasis mine. We worked so hard to eliminate the annoying and distracting typos, inept and wrong word usages and grammatical errors that drive us all nuts. If you read our book and, eagle eye that you are, find any of those? Tell us immediately, and we will fix.

² BFE