Feeling Icky.

Sauerkraut, Pork Meatballs (quite yummy),
Rye Dinner Rolls, and Mashed Potatoes

Two nights ago my husband and I realized that all of our 'On Demand' episodes of the show "Entourage" would be expiring today.  We had about 10 left to watch so we had a marathon that night and stayed up until 1:30.  So since my beautiful little toddler is my never-failing alarm clock, I was up yesterday morning bright and early, feeling exhausted.  I ended up letting her watch cartoons most of the morning so I could get away with laying on the couch (I only felt slightly bad about my lazy parenting decisions).  During her nap, to my surprise, I was still exhausted enough to sleep through the whole 2 hours.  I woke up with a terrible sore throat, headache, and general overall icky feeling.  Since I was able to soothe the sore throat with a lot of hard candies, I decided it couldn't be strep and was more likely a cold caught from my little adorable alarm clock.

So that was yesterday...and I felt like that all afternoon (all the way up until midnight.  I hadn't planned on staying up until midnight, but after an exciting finale to the series we were watching the night before, we both got a second wind around 10:30).  So here I am again, very very tired and thoroughly excited for the toddler's nap time.  I'm also really gross and desperately in need of a shower. My house is disgusting and desperately in need of a cleaning.  And my book was neglected yesterday so I'm 2 chapters behind in the editing...which makes 4 chapters for today if I want to catch up quickly, or 3 today and 3 tomorrow (doing math while sick...impressive, right?).

It's almost 11:30 now, and I'm feeling a little better...the ibuprofen I took an hour ago is finally kicking in.  I'm trying to talk myself out of napping during her lunch.  Instead, my hope is that I'll shower, clean, then head over to Barnes N Noble for some more editing.

For now though...it's time for sauerkraut, pork, and mashed potatoes!  I think sauerkraut smells disgusting so hopefully it brings me luck this year, because it's the first time I'm ever trying it (I really want the luck this year!).

Update:  

Strangely enough, I'm feeling much better, more awake and alert, and the sauerkraut was actually kind of tasty....so here's to a VERY lucky 2013!!!

17 Days :D

I will be finished writing my FIRST EVER FULL BOOK in only 17 Days!!!!!  You know, as long as I keep writing a thousand words a day for 17 days (and I'm way too excited about this book to slack off this close to the end).  It's moving along wonderfully too.  Some last minute decisions were made on the ending today too...things that will help for the next one.  There will probably be about four total, I think?

I can't wait to edit it enough to be able to start submitting it to agents.  Holy crap am I excited about this entire thing...it makes my skin tingle.

Changing the subject...

It's definitely the holiday season in the Dillman household.  My husband got me my Christmas present yesterday and was able to wait about 30 whole minutes before he had to give it to me (he did wrap it though).

A DSLR Camera!!

YAY!!!!  And I'm already having a ton of fun with it :)

                ~~~~Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!~~~~~~~

I also got a wifi SD card...which I purchased for myself a couple of days earlier.  It's called an Eye-Fi SD card and when it's used in a camera, it automatically uploads the photos taken with the card to the program of my choosing (iPhoto, please).  It has been working flawlessly and is really changing the way I use my camera.

So all in all, today was a really excellent day.  In fact, this weekend has been really amazing.  I can't even express how excited I am that I'm finally accomplishing a goal I have wanted to achieve since I was single-digit aged.

50,030

Ahhhh!  At the start of November, I decided that in honor of NaNoWriMo, I would use the writing vibes from the thousands of writers in the world to get my book to 50,000 words.  I was at somewhere around 30,000 words at the start of the month (keep in mind, that's a little over 3 months worth of work on this project).  Tonight, as I'm sure you have guessed, I made it past my goal!!  YAYYYYY!!!!  And not only that, but I'm a whole crapload closer to finishing my first ever full-length novel!!!

So yea, lots of !!! these in this post.  SOOO...I wrote a whole bunch of stuff right here...well, about two longer sentences that made up a paragraph...and they're all gone because I wrote some dashes that looked like an arrow pointing at those explanation points in the beginning of this paragraph and it turned the whole paragraph into a weird internet code that I had to delete.  Whoops! Moving on...

 
Now that I'm this far into the book --and I'm just repeating myself here-- I'm worried it'll be awful.  Then I'm worried that it'll be amazing.  Then I'm worried again (and most often) that it will be just terrible.

I have a friend who is all willing and eager to read it.  I'm going to go through and do one edit before I let him though, but it has been really nice this whole time knowing that someone is going to give me real live feedback before I send it off to agents.

Once the manuscript does hit either the digital mailboxes or the physical snail-mail versions, I'm going to expect some heart break and humility.  It's hearing about books like 'The Help' that gives people like me fairy-tail type dreams though.  The common theme in this type of business is that it's totally normal to get rejections left and right until someone finally bites.  That could be after the 50th rewrite, but it doesn't mean I ever really have to give up on this particular story that I've had my heart set on for nearly a decade.  Persistence.  It's the motto I've used for my jewelry business, which has seen a real boost in sales lately (thank you Christmas).  And it's the motto I'll definitely use for this, which has been a dream of mine for at least 10 times longer than the jewelry business.

Either way, I need to get to bed now.  I wasn't even supposed to finish this many words today.  I ended up writing about twice my average because I couldn't sleep.  The story itself is really developing perfectly though and I think it's about to get even more fast paced.  I might see more late night writing sessions in the future?

New goal....
FINISH it before 2013...because 13 is a super unlucky number.  Hopefully that doesn't affect me getting someone to buy this thing but I don't want to take the chances that it'll affect me finishing it.... :-/

Still Thanksgiving

So, I went back a few blog posts (which was about how long it took me to get to the beginning of this blog...this year anyway) and I sort of regret not keeping up with you. I am currently at 64% with my book (Holy S****, right? compared to the last time I updated you) and on Chapter Twenty Two (is there supposed to be a hyphen between Twenty and Two? Shouldn't I know this?!).

My story is moving along pretty much exactly how I want it to. Somedays I feel awesome about it, and others I'm overwhelmed with fear that it'll be a flop when I'm all done and finally doing my first read-through.

I listened to that whole Audible book about the 'Successful Novelist' and loved it. I might re-listen to it soon. I then listened to Stephen King's 'On Writing', which was also a great motivator. Now I'm on to 'Stein's On Writing', which is so far my least favorite of the three, but I can't tell if it's because of the narrator or the book itself. Either way, the fact that I'm listening to audiobooks about writing, reading a book in my genre ('Matched' by Ally Condie, totally addictive and I'm loving it), still unemployed (not proud, just finding it helpful for the book), and able to drive 10 minutes to the nearest Barnes N Noble.. have all been adding to the recipe that is me finishing my first ever book.

It's not like I got to this point without a lot of dedication and struggling. Like I said a few months ago, I was a damn busy woman when I started writing this book. For example, the first two weeks of writing this involved a full-time job, a ridiculously busy two weeks of two summer courses in grad school (basically a full semester crammed into 4 weeks), Jane, selling a house, and I think there was a bout of strep throat in there too. Then, when school was done, I still had the job, the house selling, Jane having strep and me getting it AGAIN, and then actually moving to the other side of the country.

Right now, I'm getting about 750 (average) words written a day but I'm still in school and my jewelry shop had a crazy busy spurt. Plus, no more daycare (we miss them soo much! Hardest part about leaving dubois...saying goodbye to Jane's first friends :( ) ...so yea, lots more time now, but still really busy. I think all of that helps in getting me to write when I do finally have time. Then again, on some days it's definitely placed on the back burner in order to really shut off for a bit.

I guess right now I'm sort of giving myself a shout out for how far I've gotten. 64%. Damn. Obviously if I don't reach the story's end by 70,000 I'll keep going. But for all intents and purposes (I suck at common phrases..is that even right?), I'm gonna finish it if I get that far, you know? And if I go past 70,000 words, I'll be at 105%, 110%, etc. :)

64%!!!!!!!!


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Location:Litchfield Park, AZ