She blogs, finally

My buddy Neil in his salad days (1971).

I think this is the longest I've gone not blogging -- and that includes those three weeks in South America two years ago. I have become a bad blogger (insert self-deprecation here). As a friend of mine would say, "My badsies." How did this happen? I really have no excuse since it takes, what, maybe an hour to write a decent post? And it's not like I'm traveling through a third world country on the hunt for inconvenient pockets of spotty wi-fi; RATHER, I am sitting in a tony suburb having the occasional glass of Veuve in the afternoon (there's always a right time for champagne) and...writing.

What have I been up to lately? Listening to a lot of Neil Young and doing a lot of writing. Yesterday I freelanced all day, not because I had to but because I wanted to (that house down payment is ohsoclose). By the end I was nearly cross-eyed from staring at my computer screen all day, but I was satisfied. So I put on some Neil Young and danced to unwind. Right now I feel like I should be freelancing as much as possible since these summer months are crucial for us to save the last of our down payment. Our apartment lease is up in July, after all, and we don't want to have to rent month-to-month for longer than a few months. Hopefully we'll have at least put a bid on a place by the fall. Real estate is definitely my porn, so it's very exciting scoping out Redfin every day, obsessively taking notes from HGTV's My First Place and balancing our budget to make this happen.

When I'm not freelancing, I'm editing the manuscript (can I just say writing it was a lot more fun than editing it? I've already gone through all the ink in my first red pen and the pages look like they were used to clean up a murder scene -- they are bleeding red). When I'm not writing and editing, I've been reading Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (hilarious book -- read it), and working on my fitness. I do power yoga on Mondays, pilates on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and two hours of tango on Thursday night, which is a workout in 3-inch heels. Last week my tango instructor invited me to his salsa class, so I'll be adding that to the mix as well.

The children are doing well. Gidget (aka Cacahuete) has adapted to her surroundings swimmingly, as Lola did when I first adopted her. The other day it dawned on me that I've created a makeshift animal sanctuary of sorts, where homeless pups (and a cat) are spoiled rotten, given warm, fuzzy beds and blankets, and are hugged and petted incessantly. This has done wonders not only for their well-being, but also for my stress level. Ten bucks says a highpoint of Lola's life was when I picked her up yesterday and we danced to Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" while Gidget danced around at my feet.

Neil aside, the only complaint I have is that J's been MIA the past few days with a mad rush of billable hours. But then I step back and survey the situation, and honestly I can't complain. It might not always be like this, since nothing is permanent, but every morning I wake up so thankful that this is my life. I love what I am doing; J loves what he is doing. We are happy together and excited about our plans for the future. I can't help but be appreciative. Every single day.

Editing begins

I haven't blogged that much this week because I've been going cray cray with a certain red pen. I've started unmercifully editing my book and let's just say this type of editing takes much, much longer than writing. Which is surprising since conventional wisdom says writing down made-up ideas is the harder of the two but conventional wisdom, like most things, is wrong.

I'm happy to report that I've put my book away long enough to now see gaping plot holes, problems with character development, and straight up bad writing in more than a few areas. (I think reading Updike's four Rabbit novels last year gave me an education in the art of consistently good writing and how much more practice is needed to get even close to his level, if that's even possible. The dude is a master.)

Anyhoo here's what they looked like before, all pristine and happy to be sparkling words on a clean white page:

And here is the aftermath:

So far a couple pages have huge red X's through entire blocks of texts, and some pages need to be rewritten entirely, but it's coming along swimmingly and is -- dare I say -- actually fun? It's empowering to be able to truly criticize your own work, call it shit, and change it until it looks like a shade of its former self but is made into something much better.

On another note I have been listening to this song nonstop today and I suggest you do as well. After the first couple listens I was hooked. Apparently over 5 million other people were too:

NaNoWriMo = MIA?

I'm two, no three, days into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I'm already starting to lag in blogging. How are there enough hours in the day to novel, blog and work at a day job?? Ugh. All I'm saying is this better not increase the frequency of suspicious gray hairs on my head that have become a tad more prevalent and just a smidge less hidden in the last few months. (When I go all gray is when I'm going full-blonde. Look out, Marilyn.)

Anyway I'm about 10 pages into my third novel and things aren't going as splendidly as they were last November. But I suppose this is to be expected since I now constantly feel like I'm under a debilitating time crunch with...well...everything. My commute takes FORever (two hours each day), and once I get home I need dinner. So I either settle for something canned or bagged from Trader Joe's (hopefully along with some semblance of a salad) or D and I hit up our favorite eatery (Taco Bell). After that, daily tasks like walking Fluffhead and taking a shower are in order, running any errands like toilet paper trips to Target come after, and by the time I'm ready to sit down and crank this puppy out I'm already stressing that I have to wake up early (6am, ouch) for my hour-long commute the next morning and my subsequent 9-hour day. 

Oy. Just chronicling it exhausts me. 

But I keep plugging away anyway. I refuse to let it be an excuse to not do NaNoWriMo. I'm still on par with where I should be on word count and I do love my story (even if it's not being told as perfectly as it should). That's why they call it a first draft, right? I've got an amazing title for it that I'm a bit secretive about, but I will let you in on the fact that I'm attempting a chick lit book (it's about time, right?). Here's the gist:

Main character loses her marketing job (like most of America) and decides after months of no good job leads to market herself as a brand to try and find a rich husband. Then comes a makeover after which hilarious dates ensue. There are winners, losers, extraordinarily excessive hedge fund banquets and upper-crust sailboat regattas with the disgustingly wealthy. But through it all, in her quest to secure her future with a rich man, she begins falling in love with a handsome barista -- more so than with any of her rich Harvard- and Stanford-educated prospects -- who may be hiding just the secret she's been looking so hard to find.

Phew. Basically that's what it's about and I know it sounds totally cliche but the comedy is in the details and I'm not writing a Pulitzer here, just what I hope is a fun beach read.

Thank GOD today is Friday

This is how I feel:

P.S. If anyone would like to buy me this vintage Mercedes I would not be opposed to the idea.

All light and airy and polka-dotsy. Why? Because you're lookin' at a lady with a three-day weekend on her plate. I decided to take Monday off since I needed a nice pajama-clad day of R&R, but ALSO because Monday is November 1st...and you know what that means -- NaNoWrimo begins! (I will not give up on novel writing just because I have a 40-hour (50, with commute) workweek. Repeat 10 times daily.) I've got to hit the ground running with this third novel, which I don't want to give too much away about but will say is going to be awesome. So I'm devoting Monday to kicking off this book right. I am totes looking forward to 30 days and nights of literary abandon.

Fear and loathing in November

I'm both excited and so-anxious-I-could-puke over the fact that November is right around the corner. Why? Because it's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which is, like, only the coolest thing ever. Sears. It's like a global literary movement that makes you feel like you're part of something, well, important. It really is "30 days and nights of literary abandon."

I'm still a relative newbie when it comes to NaNoWriMo, having only participated last year when I first found out about it. And last November I rocked it. The contest calls for writing 50,000 words in one month and I wrote 10,000 MORE than that, just because I wanted to prove my awesomeness to myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. My thinking was that if I could that, then I could practically do anything -- at least in the writing realm. I'm still proud of winning and writing (what I believe to be) 60,000  above-par words in one month. I worked hard for those hours, stayed up many late nights in a row, wrote through dinners and breakfasts. It was amazing and intoxicating. I was drunk off the written word and the story arcs I came up with it.

But now, this year, I'm more hesitant than I was before. This time I have a full-time job, one that takes 11 hours out of each of my weekdays (if we're counting commuting time here). And this is where my current anxiety comes in; if I do NaNoWriMo, I want to be in it to win it. My husband laughs that there's really no ramifications to losing, but I disagree. To lose at NaNoWriMo, for me, would be to admit that my day job has gotten the best of me. That it's taken away the one thing I love to do -- to write.

In essence, to lose at NaNo would be to embrace defeat, to throw in the towel and let conventionality reign supreme in my life. And I don't want to be that girl. The one who's got a trillion excuses as to why I couldn't do NaNoWriMo, or, if I got as far as entering (which I have), I don't want to be that person who then has a panoply of reasons why I couldn't finish. "I was too tired from work," "There was a Rachel Zoe marathon on," "My husband wanted to take a long weekend with me."  Excuses. All of them. They will only tell me that I simply didn't work hard enough. That I didn't want it that bad. Which is BS. I want it so bad I can taste it.

Which leads me to wonder: What compels one to do that one thing they love so much? Sure I love other things -- reading, dancing (was looking into flamenco classes today), classic films, poodles, etc. -- but what is it about writing that would make me actually take on the maddening endeavor of stressing to create and cram 50,000 well-crafted words, the skeleton of a novel, into 3 weekends and the 4 or so hours I have every weeknight after work? I'm not sure, all I know is that writing is cathartic for me. Little known fact about yours truly: I also do charcoal sketching. Which I love, but writing allows me to express myself more than any method I've tried. It's a release, it's satisfying. I'm curious to you all out there: How do you express yourself? Food? Fashion design? Tango?

Last week when people were betting on who would win the Nobel Prize for literature, a top contender was novelist, post-colonial theorist and social activist, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who's currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the UC Irvine. Apparently, according to The Guardian, he began writing in English, but following his arrest and imprisonment without charge at a maximum security Prison in Kenya after the performance of his critical play I Will Marry When I Want in 1977, he made the decision to work in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. He then wrote the novel The Devil on the Cross on toilet paper during his time in prison. He wrote a novel on toilet paper, people. That's incredible. I've never read any of Thiong'o's work, but simply hearing that fact is such an inspiration. It shows how much this person loves their craft, and what lengths they'd take to practice it. It's that primal urge to create. (By the way, Thiong'o lost the Nobel to Mario Vargas Llosa, who himself is very deserving of the prize.)

So yes, I am reticent. I don't know how this November will turn out, but I know that I entered and I. Must. Win. If this Thiong'o fellow (and countless others) can hunker down and write a novel on toilet paper, then surely I can punch out 50,000 words on my laptop...