Friday Forays in Fiction: NaNo Tip #1 (A Quote)

moar lit kits
NaNo Tip #1: Look for victims, find your story.

NaNoWriMo Day 1: word count estimate = 3-5 hundred. Far from record shattering but it was something and not nothing.

But because the words were trickling and splattering all over pixel and paper pages I often got restless and instead of sitting in place with my hands in my armpits I got up and continued the endless project of decluttering, organizing and rearranging the spaces in this room:

• cleared the mini-tramp again and the path to it so I can go to it on impulse to clear the fog and webs and daydream the storyworld.
• unpacked my winter clothes and found homes for everything but one heavy coat.
• created more elbow room at my desk so I can swivel freely
• cleared off the desk on my left so I can spread out papers and reference books.
• corralled and organized my art supplies so I can draw maps, floor plans, structures, clothing etc
• made space for and set up a third desk surface on my right for writing by hand on paper.  I discovered recently that the world building work I did thirty years ago comes back to me clearer and quicker when I'm holding a pen or pencil and scribbling or drawing.  Probably because that is how I did it before.
• made minor rearrangements with the 'desk' my laptop sits on: a board atop a swivel piano stool.  The board had been stationary with items blocking and weighing it down.  Now I can swivel it towards which ever desk my focus is at.
• and I reorganized the front half of the middle drawer in Mom's desk as I got tired of looking at the mess every time I lifted the board laid across it for setting my food and drink tray on.  And I was responsible for at least half of the mess as last spring I'd rummaged around in it to look for Mom's braille punch and since then have been dropping in small objects I found loose in the room as I moved things about--pennies, paperclips, photos, small slips of paper with writing, business cards, gospel tracts, memorabilia, membership cards, state ID cards, pens and pencils, rubber bands.

I don't think it's an accident that working at that project while thinking about The Wailing Womb coincided with the flow of new ideas and old memories of the story.  After all both require being in problem solving mode in the order of a puzzle.  Each time I got frustrated or blocked (literally physically blocked with the room project) by one puzzle I switched back to the other and the problem I'd turned away from with a mental Charlie Brown "Arrrrgh" was  either already solved or the solution came within minutes.

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Arrrrgh!

I was falling asleep over the keyboard at 11 last night as I was prepping this post.  Had to walk away before I could edit or get the pic in place.  I also didn't get to update my word count on NaNo first.  Came nowhere close to the daily quota but it wasn't zero.

By the time I remembered it I was too brain numb to play with numbers and my words were scattered in multiple topic windows between two aps (WhizFolders and The Marshall Plan Program) and multiple pages in two notebooks.  Some said topics or pages containing a single sentence or less and a few several.

I'm going to need to come up with a system for keeping track of all that or that will become an issue all month and by the last week I won't be able to collate it all for the word verifier.   I have a concept but I want to set it up before I talk about it.  I'm hoping that will be by the time I prep my ROW80 check-in this  (Saturday) evening.