I am starting to come down from my zany high now and am calm enough to post here. Tonight is the last night of NaNoWriMo and I did it! I finished! What's more, I had almost 8,000 words to go tonight; I did not think it possible given that the past several nights have been very low output evenings for me -- maybe 500 words here, maybe 1,000 words there. What I had forgotten is how well I do under pressure. I was so disappointed in myself earlier that I had come so far (42k and change) only to quit, give up in the end. So I hunkered down tonight after walking the puppies and went for it. I wrote in 30 minute spurts, 10 minute breaks in between. Each time I did this, I wrote nearly a thousand words, sometimes more. It helped that while I was writing *in* a fever dream, I was writing *about* a fever dream. It had no need of continuity (although it had that, mostly) or of making sense. It just had to be original writing. My only prop was my French verbs dictionary; I used it for jumping off points to go off on various dream tangents. It worked. At the rate I was going, I probably didn't need it, but it was kind of a fun exercise. This whole thing was a fun exercise, except for the not-fun parts where I would have rather been doing anything other than writing. That was a rough patch right in the middle of the month that kind of persisted for the rest of the month; hence my lag on Day 30.

But it's all good now, and done, and uploaded and validated. I even managed to post a tiny photo and make a small contribution to the site's operation.

Now I'm just hungry. I almost bolted off to the party I was invited to tonight that I figured I'd have to miss as I'd be writing until midnight, but I knew that when the adrenalin dumped from my system I would be a menace to myself and others on the road, so I fought that urge until the lassitude I knew was coming began to set in.

It's a bite for me and off to bed, I think. Tomorrow, for all my writer's glory tonight, is still a work day, and we have partner-guests coming up from Portland, so I have to not be bleary-eyed, and even dressed up to boot.

Here, for one last hurrah, is my word count worm friend:

50,056 / 50,000 (100.1%)

The really fun tidbit is, I could have kept going. But why? I didn't need to encourage my fever dream any further. I roused the dreamer, soothed her, and she can return to calmer slumbers now.

So close!

26,566 / 50,000 (53.1%)

But, sleepy now.

I'm almost at the, "Fire bad. Tree pretty." stage of awareness.

Bed calls. I heed.

G'nite!

I just made the best fajita I've ever eaten. Words are poor vehicles to convey my astonishment and gratification at this mild feat. If pressed, I would say that I am most often a modest cook, or not a cook at all. When I cook, I tend to prepare meals that have minimal ingredients, quick cooking times, and which use as few pots and pans as possible (as I have yet to view doing dishes as an excellent opportunity for still mind meditation). I do experiment culinarily sometimes, and these experiments turn out just fine if I follow a recipe but rarely work out when I just throw something together.

On Sunday I bought a package of chicken thighs as part of a recoup diet for poor Zoey who threw up four times on Saturday (perhaps I will post the apple pie adventure Nikita and Zoey shared last Thursday evening). I've been feeding her brown rice and chicken bits and yogurt and slowly getting her back on her regular kibble. Since it's Tuesday and this chicken has been sitting in my fridge, open and uncooked, for two days now, I figured I had better do something with it. It is a rare thing that I have meat in my house, so I was unsure how to proceed. I thought I would pan-fry it or throw it into the huge batch of soup au pistou I made last night, effectively blowing the soup's original intent and turning it into a chicken broth instead. Not liking this idea much, I paused for a minute, vaguely asking the universe for guidance by standing in the middle of my kitchen and frowning pointedly, mouthing an apparently convincing put-upon moue. Then! Inspiration, or at least a tiny memory jog, turned me away from my cookbooks (for all that I'm not down with the cookin', I *love* leafing through my cookbooks, if only to look at the beautiful photography), and toward my cabinets. I rummaged and rooted around, thinking to pull out one of the various random boxed or glass jarred sauces or mixes that I somehow acquire over the years and never, ever use because I'm always just sauteeing some bitter greens with herbs and throwing them over toast and calling it good. So, I've got these preparations -- green curry mixes, hot peppery pastes, and their ilk -- and I'm always missing most of the major ingredients, like meat or tofu, or the kind of vegetable that goes along with these types of flavors (as just little corn nibblets floating in a sea of curry sauce, sad and alone, is too pathetic even for my meagre cooking prowess). And I had chicken! And I had an onion! And an avocado! And fresh crisp lettuce! And tomato! - no, scratch that, I'd eaten the last of the tomato the day before, but it was a lovely dream while it lasted. I did not have any capsicum or flat bread, but hell, I'd never see this kind of synergy of ingredients ever again, so when I pulled out a mysterious packet of spicy fajita rub, I had to go for it.

This spice rub had come with an iron fajita skillet gift from many, many moons ago, so I rummaged some more until I came up, triumphant, with the skillet. This I put on the stove on top of a very low heat. I cut up a lemon that came with my last CSA (community supported agriculture, a very cool concept that started in Japan and that Washington farmers do a great job with) box, juiced the lemon into the spice rub and marinated a couple chicken thighs. Me! Marinating! That's 10 minutes longer than I'm usually willing to spend on food prep as it is! I cut up a lovely white onion that also came in my CSA box. I grated some extra sharp cheddar onto a plate, ran the lettuce under the tap for a moment for that dewy effect -- okay, really to rinse off any tiny wriggling green worms that might have come along with it -- and put a dab of oil into the now warmed up skillet. I sauteed the onion, a skill I am fluent in.

Now, one of the reasons I love to sautee so much is that I am a big olive oil and garlic junkie -- I heat up that oil, smash some garlic with the flat side of my pleasing santoku knife, warm up that garlic in the oil until the whole house is nice and fragrant. From there it's a simple matter of tossing in zucchini, or spinach, or rapini or braising mix or kale or chard or whatever, and after about 2-3 minutes of wilting, wella! Dinner is served!

But sauteeing this onion in the once-and-future iron chef skillet instead of my nonna's treasured Farberware pan, well --! I was immediately awakened to the fact that this meal was going to be different from my usual one-trick-pony standbys -- the smell was as incredibly mouthwatering as the scent of gently simmering smashed garlic in olive oil, but in a totally different direction. Such a promising start!

After a few minutes I slid those perfectly blackened onion bits onto the waiting plate with the lettuce, grated cheese, and cut-up fresh avocado. Next, on to the meat, which had been patiently marinating while our hero-narrator was otherwise occupied. Well, the delightful sizzle that those tender bits made upon hitting that hot skillet was satisfying indeed. In my astonished delight I neglected to say so at the time, but I'm saying it now: Thank you, chicken, for nourishing me and Kita-Keats and Zo-Zo. I hope that as you were raised in an organic manner that your life ended quickly and in a far less grisly and distressing manner than would happen in a factory farm or in the wild. I truly appreciated and enjoyed you; you were not consumed in haste and disregard; you did not die in vain.

This part I did not wing -- three minutes on each side as per the spice directions. And mon dieu, what a tender, succulent, flavor-explosion little meal I had! Keats and Zoey looked on these preparations wistfully and with great hope the whole time. Of course, they do that when I sautee my greens, too, but there was something especially winsome about their peering faces as they watched me cook tonight. Keats lay strategically at my feet during the entire meal (although, again, to be fair, she always does that, even over a bowl of cold cereal, because she's a people-food slut even through I've never fed her from the table. Ever. But someone, somewhere, back in the mists of time, did, and she'll never, ever forget that. Hope springs eternal in the doggie mind.)

While the succulent goodness of this fajita fantastico swooned me into eating far more than I usually do for dinner, which means that now, even hours later, I am still very, very full, I have no regrets. I will drink much water before bed as the onion is guaranteed to make me wake up with a dry mouth, but it will be a badge of pride -- tonight, I made the best fajita I have ever eaten!

(Okay, I just waxed ecstatic about chicken and a bit of onion for 1215 words that I could have used in my NaNo writing tonight - ack. Perhaps I will make one of my characters a so-so cook who has an experience like this, *just like this*, and goes on and on about it for pages and pages. Then I can go on for pages and pages more in a rant of one of the other characters wondering why she just went on and on about a lousy chicken fajita she made... perhaps I'll just reuse this bit of overblown fluff, sic!)

I'm logging in for the evening to see what kind of stories I can coax out of my fuzzy-sleepy mind tonight.

I realize I haven't posted word count *here* since Day 1, so I thought I'd see what my little worm counter looks like now on Day 10. And by jove, it looks pretty good!

20,663 / 50,000 (41.3%)

I confess to a modicum of sudden shyness when I received an email several days ago telling me that someone had added me to their LJ friends list. My reaction went something like this: starts, looks about furtively, whispers, 'Really? How did they find me?'... then undergoes self-administered paranoia-counseling, and now says, 'Oh, hello!' *wave*.

Melodramatic, I know. Mostly I have just been reserving my writing time and energies for NaNo writing.

It's been a tough writing week for me for new, original storytelling. In the normal course of things it may have been a good editing week. But I have been thoroughly exhorted by other NaNo'ing friends that "December is for editing!", and so I have kept my peace, bit my lip, and plunged onward with all the resulting floundering that typically follows, embarrassingly, the well-meaning admonishments of patient friends who, losing patience, say encouraging things like, "You'll be fine!" before you snow plow down the sharp, bumpy-ice embankment and are stopped, face-first, by an orange plastic mesh fence and fall back in the snow, stunned.

My NaNo process so far can only be described as haphazard and wanton. That is, any phrase, phraseling, $10 word, actual sentence, character, tenuous personality, or other bit of vaguely literary effluvium that drifts across my mindscape when I am anywhere near a recording device gets hastily and clumsily drafted, which usually spawns some fevered outpouring of more accompanying word soup, only to eventually splutter, drip, gurgle and snuff out, leaving me running toward receding foamy waters with outstretched arms, wailing faintly and forlornly 'Come baaack!'

After a few days of this I looked at the mess and decided it needed some kind of coherent structure ('cause I'm wicked smart like that). So I took my most powerful character, called her the meta-narrator, and made her introduce the next character, who in turn was a writer writing the next character who was ultimately the storyteller, a la Scheherazade, of all the other little stories, snippets and vignettes.

(You can see, firsthand, by my pretentious journaling that I am really fine when it comes to word padding but why, in the end, it's actually painful to read my writing -- 'Aargh! Just spit out a simple sentence and move on!')

Even with this after-throught structure gingerly draped like a large piece of filmy gauze over the smelly dead, my stories are really all over the map at this point. The voices for each snippet are so different from one another as to seem schizophrenic if I make them all come from my Scheherazade. So, I have decided to have several of the primary characters become narrator-storytellers in their own right (with one imperatrix so far... we'll see how long that lasts before there is a revolt from the ranks).

This is all grand and good, but it's all in my head right now. I've made no move to change pieces around so they follow this not-terribly-thought-out flow I have in mind, so I have no idea if it will actually pretend to some kind of interesting and followable structure in the end. I'm hoping my theory will be a simple and beautiful construct that carries much more complex information, like the posited structure of DNA before it was really known, but I fear it may be more in the 'deluded' and 'crackpot' camp.

Such is the NaNo experiment for me!

I love it.

It's a dead giveaway that I'm tired when *everything* makes me teary-eyed.

To be fair, "Cold Water" is a very sad song.

Reached Word 5363 and posted. Then climbed to 5507. But I'm starting to nod onto the keys, and I'm getting more drawn into the music and less drawn by the siren songs of my characters.

Certain smart pups have been sleeping for *hours* now. Every once in a while one bleary eye cracks open toward me, the question clear: "Going to shut that light anytime soon?"

I bow to the wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie. Off to bed with me! Avaunt!

Wheeee!

Happy November!

I am currently enjoying a hazy, half-remembered sensation for me -- cozying up at home, writing away. Today is Day 1 of NaNoWriMo, or "National Novel Writing Month" for those not yet in the know. Participants are tasked to write 50,000 words in 30 days. As the kick-off welcome email enthuses, I should be writing to the tune of 1667 words per day this month to cross the finish line. So far today I have cranked 1545 words. For inspiration -- possibly the inspiration that comes from adrenalin -- I have secured one of the little word count write-ups:

1,545 / 50,000 (3.1%)

And now it's back to my story!

Hello, Friends! (who may one day read this, if I ever tell you about it.)

Here I am, entering the blogosphere, albeit late in the game... I always was a late bloomer. Well, past middle school anyway, when my private and public lives diverged, crossing paths rarely, and then only politely, like a quadrille.

I hope you are all well, and still sleeping, on this cool, wet-gray autumn Sunday morning. My house is quiet, just the steady breath of my machine and the intermittent tap of my fingers, and two dogs sleeping off yesterday's hike up-up-up a mountain.

A good morning for tea. My cup of water is not nearly as appealing as usual.