NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow! (non dog related .gif post)

NaNoWriMo eve is upon us!

Are you going to participate? Do you know somebody who is?

(word warriors, perhaps?)

I'm going to do NaNoWriMo again (I know you're not surprised)

October is almost done, and the website has rebooted, so it's NaNoWriMo time again. I know you're excited. (Well, maybe you are. Maybe you should participate?)

NaNoWriMo update

I know some of you are fellow writers, even if you aren't fellow "WriMos".

As of today, I'm at 15,005 words. My first three days went like gangbusters, with me reaching 10k by Sunday night. I'd had the foresight to take a couple of days off of work in a row...revolutionary, I know. One of my coworkers, when I reported my wordcount, even asked me if I started early.

No dogs in this story, which has happened in the past couple. The Last Song involved no dogs (which is far better for the dogs, I assure you). My current NaNoWriMo project is untitled. Literally, the file on my computer is Asbury Park 1979 (which is three years before I was born, for those of you who only Internet know me, but it was a date that ended up appealing for the "mood" I was going for.

Mentally, Jersey Shore summers of that "era" evoke a kind of golden haze for me, which might be why I lean towards that style when editing my pictures for blogging purposes. I guess it's how a lot of the photographs I've seen end up looking, whether they looked that way at the time or not. In the course of writing this, and trying to fill in the spots on my mental map, I've found wacky things like a Flickr stream in which the author seems to have taken more than 5000 pictures of grocery, drug, and convenience stores in the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware area. And labelled what the stores were when they were built, when they changed, that kind of thing (when they knew the info).

But I can't cast aspersions on niche interests, obviously. I'm writing this on a dog blog. And people with niche interests like that fill in the tiny blanks that would otherwise drive me nuts. Sometimes, just knowing one detail is wrong can derail me for the time it takes me to go down the Internet rabbit hole and find something close enough.

An Announcement

All right. Due to my typical personal fall slow down (it's cold here now! [well, getting there] And did a rainy/snowy thing I did not like), I'm going to change my update schedule. I maintained Monday through Friday for awhile there, sometimes with Sunday thrown in, sometimes extra Tuesdays, etc. But I fell behind at some point, and have kind of done Monday through Wednesday, which strikes me as less than effective, with all of those empty days yawning before me.

So. I'm going to try switching to a Monday - Wednesday - Friday schedule, the same as I do with my writing blog. In a way, this is cheating, as we know Wednesday is Wordless, so I will make effort to maintain a Tuesday Tails contribution as well, and perhaps a Tasty Tuesday as applies (see, blog hops make things easy and motivating!)

But, especially with NaNoWriMo looming, I don't want y'all to think I'm totally ditching you. Because I'm not. I'm just writing a lot, and reading, and trying to get housework done and pay attention to this dog 'o mine and oh yeah, work. That working thing.

It's that time of year again (....almost)

So, seeing as how it's almost the end of October (finally!), I've been thinking about National Novel Writing Month.

As happens to me very often, I had an idea at the beginning of the month  (an urban fantasy novel about an occult biker gang, to put it in a nutshell). I started planning it out a bit, did some reading, started watching Sons of Anarchy again (I'm only partway through season 2, no spoilers please!), that kind of thing. So I was ready, right? Then I looked up and it was only October 16. So.

Now I'm thinking of writing something that takes place at the Jersey Shore, where I'm from (surprise, right? Writing about a place I know). But of course there are ten days left before November. So. I still don't really know. And I may or may not have already started the other novel (also urban fantasy), which may or may not be cheating if I use it (it is).

So I need to lay in some toys/treats for Elka to occupy herself with so I can shoehorn some writing time in evenings after work. Remembering to freeze Kongs will help. Getting a couple new squeaky toys will help, as they only last so long. It's funny, Elka didn't used to like squeaky toys, but she sure does now! I can just watch her play with one, and they are an enforced "No, you play with that yourself" toy.

Any of you novelling this year? How does your dog occupy him or her self when you write?

July CampNaNoWriMo: The End!

It is August now, another NaNoWriMo done until the Big One in November. This year's Camp sessions were different, because you could set your own word count goals. So, I wrote 35k in April, and 35k (well, 36 and change) in July. Put 'em together, and I need a few more chapters (still going!) and the story is done. 

A lot of interesting things happened in July, in the context of my novel, The Last Song. It's set in Detroit, more or less (there's an otherworld, underworld, Alice in Wonderland sort of questing thing going on with it). Detroit ended up declaring Chapter 9 Bankruptcy, the largest municipality to have done so. It's apparently holding an auction of some of its artistic treasures, so make up for some of that 22 billion dollars. 

But good things are happening in Detroit too. There's the riverfront, slowly being rebuilt, and the Riverwalk. There are businesses moving there. Previously a food desert, both a Whole Foods and a Meijer opened there. Real estate is cheap, and developers are snatching buildings up, including the abandoned Packard Plant. Young people are moving there, artists and innovators, because it's economically feasible to have a beautiful place to live there while building your dreams. 

That's not why I picked Detroit, initially. I picked Detroit because I wanted urban decay. I wanted a not nice city in which to place my narrator, a formerly drug addicted rock star (think Kurt Cobain), who was kind of a not nice person. And with Detroit, you get decay, and a strange sort of rugged, stubborn beauty. As I researched Detroit further, prowled its streets in Google Street View and read about its trials and tribulations, I realized the level of respect I needed to treat this city with. A great American city, formerly population 2 million, now around 700,000. A great American city, large enough to place Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco in. Floundering, rusting, growing over. This is not my city. But people still live there, and people are still trying to make it work. Cities are more than novel settings, they are living things. And sometimes, novels are more than just screwed up fairy tales, they're cautionary and end up in teachable moments.

There are no dogs in my novel. It's kind of an unusual thing, I'm realizing at this point. A lot of my fiction contains dogs. However, much like when I see a dog on the show Supernatural, a show I love dearly, I felt nothing good could happen to a dog in this story. And Detroit has its stray dog problems. In fact, Rolling Stone even did an article on Detroit's 50,000 stray dogs.  Fifty. Thousand. The numbers involved with Detroit are staggering, as a rule.

There are people working to make a difference for Detroit's strays as well, though. There is the Detroit Dog Rescue, whose mission is to create a no kill animal center in Detroit. They are a 501(c)3 non-profit dog rescue (info detailed on their Facebook page) started by rapper "Hush" Carlisle and TV producer Monica Martino.   There was originally going to be a Discovery Channel series on Detroit's stray dogs, but the mayor's office said no (perhaps not without good reason, reading that article). So, Carlisle and Martino got together and did the Youtube video, and I guess things went from there. You can view their available dogs here, and even if you're not in the market for a Detroit dog, you should take a look. They've got what appears to be a seriously talented photographer taking the dogs' pictures, which is a very smart thing to have done. They appear to do temperament evaluations (they mention evaluations in at least one dog's description, though don't appear to describe the process on the site, unless I missed it).

NaNoWriMo: And, done

Well, I didn't finish the book, but I certainly reached 50,000 words (50, 937 according to the word count validator, though Open Office says 52, 037. That's a disappointing discrepancy). And ordered the t-shirt.

This was an interesting novel to (mostly) write. I outlined most of it, for one, though there was a point at which the outline didn't matter anymore. I made some changes in the actual writing of the novel, which made some things make more sense, and made the outline eventually obsolete.

My interest in dogs has quite permeated my writing, depending on the topic. Considering this is a werewolf series (well, duology currently. I'd like to make it a trilogy, I think), I made an effort to use canine body language, even when the characters were acting as humans rather than canids. It made sense in the context, and was interesting to think about. What does angry look like? Interest? Nervousness? It's interesting to compare these things to human body language as well; have you watched the show Lie To Me? You should.

Wordless Wednesday November 21 2012

Puppy Elka, the night that she came home.

Of course, she hasn't stopped being a lapdog. She's considerably larger than the 16 pounds she was, though!

(43,811 words)

Do Not Eat

So, my lovely Elka. My mostly well behaved dog? Yeah, she tried to give me a heart attack the other day.

We got an item in the mail that must have had one of those silica gel packets in it. I didn't see the packet when I opened the package.

I did, however, see it when I found it chewed open on the couch when we left her alone in the house for like, fifteen minutes. Little bead looking things everywhere. Torn paper.

I picked it up, and immediately called the vet. Elka was still dancing around in her "yay, you're home!" fervor. 

I laid it out for the person who answered the phone, she asked how big Elka was, then asked if she was in their system. Then she said "Oh, the Dobie." I said "Yes, the Dobie," impatient but starting to be hopeful. The person who'd answered the phone sounded somewhat amused. "We just went through this not too long ago with somebody else," she said. "I think she'll be all right, but hold on, let me make sure." I waited on hold for what seemed like an interminable amount of time but was really less than a minute. When she came back on, she said "Yes, she'll be fine. I asked a tech, who also asked a vet, and there's nothing to worry about with her size."

Of course, it could be that Miss Elka never ingested any of it at all, just chewed on the paper. I'll never know. This was Friday, and she's been fine since, behaviorally and gastrointestinally. But when something says "Do Not Eat", I tend to think it's for some dark reason. According to the Wikipedia article (the hallmark for good solid online medical research, I know /sarcasm), "Silica gel is non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive and stable with ordinary usage." However, it does also say "Silica gel is irritating to the respiratory tract and may cause irritation of the digestive tract", which is in fact a valid reason not to eat the things (do you hear this, Elka? Hmm, Missy?). 

(NaNoWriMo wordcount is 40,136 words)

NaNoWriMo 2012

Well, it's that time again.

That's right, kids, it's National Novel Writing Month again. Every November, like clockwork. 30 days, 50,000 words.

This year, I'm writing the sequel to a book that I started in March and finished in September. I've noticed, since getting Elka, that dogs have found their way into my fiction pretty often. This time around, I've once again decided to embrace it. Why argue with a good deal, right? I already read and write about dogs so much (and read about wolves once in awhile), I might as well do something with that source material.

I'm writing about werewolves (though not really in a Twilight or Underworld sort of way, trying to make them my own without getting too squirrelly with the folklore), and so there are dogs. There are wolves. There are people who are wolves, but use the same body language in varying forms. It's interesting to use canine body language that many of us pet bloggers are in particular familiar with: yawning, lip licking, head turning, hard stares, hard mouth, that kind of thing. It'll be interesting to me, should these books ever get published, if those sorts of things come through to the reader, or at least the dog-savvy reader. We'll see how it goes, right?

So, if I'm not replying to comments on here all that diligently, I'm not ignoring you! I'm just making my wordcount. My goal is not only to reach the 50,000 words for the month, but actually finish the novel itself. Book one ended up being around 80,000. I've never pulled quite that many words in a NaNoWriMo, but there's a first time for everything, right? I hit 13,500 words on Monday night/Tuesday morning (midnight isn't called the Witching Hour for nothing), and that's an unprecedented and blistering speed for me.

I've also noticed that some other dog/pet bloggers are participating in NaNoWriMo, and I'm so glad! Good luck to everybody, I hope you're having a lot of fun.

One Lovely Blog Award

Thanks so much to Sue Kottowicz, over at Talking-Dogs! Blog awards are a lot of fun, and kind of a break from my normal blogging mindset. Blog outside the box, friends!

The rules for this award are:

• Thank the blogger bestowing the award and provide a link back to their blog.  
• Share seven things about yourself.
• Share the award with seven other bloggers.

Dogs and Writing, redux

Back in July, I did Camp NaNoWriMo, and had a lot of fun with it. I haven't re-read that novel yet, and though I wrote "The End" on the last page, I rather think it has another few chapters to go before I can consider it properly done. I blogged, then, about both writing and keeping the Elka happy.

But, it's November, and time for National Novel Writing Month proper.