To Go or Not To Go

Almost finished the novella begun during National Novel Writing Month, whose finish line I passed last Wednesday. The book like a weight, now, with no deadline. So I decided no more than 6000 words, to be finished sometime Wednesday night.

I was going to go to the Toronto NaNoWriMo TGIF (thank god it's finished) celebration tonight, but it's cold and raining, and I never did connect with anyone else doing NaNo here. I could read a snatch for 2 minutes, which I did last time I went in 2005, but.....

Lazy, perhaps. And, oh, some of the writing read at that tgif was real bad, oh it was hilariously bad, deliberately bad, and everyone laughed as they were meant to.... but, oh. Bad.

Yes, I'm lazy.

And older than most of the Toronto NaNo participants who party. Last time I sat with a woman in my age range and she was a self-admitted alcoholic who was so drunk she swayed as she sat. It was hard to understand her since she was slurring her words. If I recall she had written about 3,000 words in total, but loved to party...

If I ever got my wherewithalls together to realize I'm gonna do NaNo and go to the Toronto NaNo launch party at the beginning of November, I might meet some fellow nutcases who actually drove themselves to write like maniacs for the month.

So, staying at home, lazily lounging...

And writing, finishing the loose, wordy draft.

Sigh, no partying for this lady tonight, work continues...

Belle de jour

Saw Belle de jour (1967) this evening at a Revue theatre with the beautiful Catherine Deneuve as a frustrated surgeon's wife who becomes a prostitute in the afternoons. Bunuel's film is deliciously ambiguous - the sequences, reality or fantasy/dream, we don't know, & perhaps in the end it doesn't matter. Deneuve a frigid doll with a wicked sex life.

Apparently Bunuel didn't know if the last scene was reality or dream either.

Will have to watch this one again in a year or two.

Post-NaNoWriMo

After the effort of the last month to produce 50,000 coherent words, which I chose to do as 2,000 words a day, prefering to give myself a little leeway for the inevitable crises in daily living that occur or to finish early, both of which happened, and having crossed the finish line yesterday, I found I was truly exhausted today.

Yesterday I also managed to disable the wireless network and not having an hour or more to deal with technical assistance got a long internet cable out of the doldrums and plugged it into my computer to cross that NaNoWriMo finish line!

While I did attend Kaeja d'Dance's fundraiser last night, and showing of dance films by local students, and had tickets to Kaeja Mad Screen this evening, I had no energy. But my novella isn't finished! Instead of resting, I wrote my daily count. Another 2500 words! Crazy or what.

Now he's almost out of the mountain cave where condors nest having recovered his memory & I have to get him safely down & home... :)

Official NaNoWriMo Winner

It's official. I am a NaNoWriMo winner - just logged in at 50,042 words, and still writing... whoopee.

Now off to Kaeja d'Dance.

Almost at the NaNoWriMo finish line...

My nights are spent avoiding then struggling to write, hours, agonizing, then bursts of a clicking keyboard as a new scene emerges, now at 46,658 words.

That's, so far, 223 double-spaced pages.

For someone who started NaNoWriMo on November 1st to break through a writer's block, it's an explosion of writing. And I'm actually not displeased with what's happened in the pages that have spun out during the past few weeks. It's a fascinating process, writing under a deadline.

I recommend it, along with the writing we do when inspired of course. Both are valuable.

I'm very tired, so time to turn off the computer.

'Night everyone!

Sleep for a Thousand Hours

Passed the 40,000 word mark . Only 10,000 words to go. Groan, Groan, Groan, Groan, Groan... ::wan smile from a NaNoWriMo moll::

When this is over, I'm going to sleep for a thousand hours.

Or years, whatever comes first.

Don't I look like I'm writing maniacally, not having a life! Squirreled away, pounding the keyboard, reading glasses hugging the nose, hour after hour, night after night... sleep for a thousand hours, I say!

How's it going? Really and truly I can no longer call it 'erotic fiction.' Ah, well. I tried but ya know writing trash is difficult and beyond my capacities to keep up for any length of time.

Here's a snatch from tonight:

At HIL (House of Ill-Repute), Orsola and Mœdello sat at the great wooden table next to the kitchen surrounded by the five Madames and whoever else drifted in and out, various children of varying ages mostly. The Madames were dressed in old velvets and chiffons of deep and warm colours, dark purples and rose pinks, and some wore rhinestone beaded bandannas and they all wore dangly shiny costume jewelry from their ears and around their necks. They were more opulent than when they were younger, and exuded even more sensuality.

Perhaps it was the insular way the city had developed, the Bordello more-or-less aging with its original occupants. These were older women who laughed easily and who were comfortable with who they were, how they looked, in themselves; even if some might say they looked a little batty, to Orsola and Mœdello, they were colourful, warm and beautiful.

But it got worse in tonight's writing.

The Bordello was like an apothecary. A pantry at the back contained an array of herbal remedies, not just many bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters and walls, but shelves of tinctures.

And then my rampant muse, oh! My rampant muse made an outrageous assertion.

For, besides being hookers, the old Madames were as knowledgeable as trained midwives.

While they laughed often, they were jovial women, particularly hearty laughter shook them when they said they were women from the ancient religion and were high priestesses who were sacred prostitutes, midwives and healers. Of course, no-one took such nonsense seriously.

The Writing a 50,000 word novella in a month challenge continues...

The NaNoWriMo novella is progressing on schedule. I wrote till 2am last night, this is becoming normal, especially yesterday, a day of kid crises that were finally all resolved at midnight followed by two hours of intense writing, and then an hour to unwind. Slept from 3am-8am without waking, then onward with the day. Day after day of these hours and I do get rather tired, but I'll sleep late on the weekend and catch up. I should finish the 50,000 words five days early, and so I'm considering spending those five days on a 'clean-up' edit for consistency and spelling etc., I don't think it'll be possible to do a rewrite (at 10,000 words a day, uh uh - I'm |insane| but not that |insane|!)

Is it fun? Maybe the first hour was!

Since I have no predetermined plot, no outline, nor is it autobiographical, each day is fresh and a surprise to me. It's hard work, dragging this rather plain and ordinary story out of my imagination. I mean I started out trying to write trash but there's not a whole lot of trash in it, more long social conscience scenes with some erotic interludes, which I try to juice up, really I do, but I actually don't have much or any experience of the sort that I write about in some of the erotic interludes. Really imaginary! No matter, writing creates its own story. 

And I have been rearranging my apartment and it's beginning to come together, still a couple of corners of papers to sort - moving from a 3-bedroom house to a small 2-bedroom apartment continues to be challenging and I've given away or thrown out masses of stuff.

Been at it with my power drill too- hanging curtains, multiple coat hooks and kitchen shelves and masks and paintings, and now I have to finish two paintings that I've hung, so it's all good.

Tonight a Slovakian movie, Return of the Storks, part of the European Film Festival in Toronto.