Win prizes from the Inkies (MG/YA fantasy): see here.

I should be in bed.

Instead, I've been calculating how I can spend the least amount of money on books and still buy everything I want to for Christmas. Each kid needs a book, right? But how to cut down the list...so hard.

Also, I've revised through chapter 4. I have my original word count at the top so I can compare. I'm less about 3000 words. Yay! Alas, tomorrow I'll be too tired to write anything but gibberish.

Ooh--it looks like DH has an article coming out in the Journal of the History of Astronomy sometime in the future. He works with early printed books and occasionally finds rare manuscripts that people chopped up to use in bookbinding. His most recent find is a hitherto-unknown work relating to Copernicus. Cool, huh?

I've got two chapters nearly done. So far so good. Now I'm going to take several chapters/scenes and crunch them into one. Hopefully that will remove a lot of nonessentials and excess wordage. (The professional commentary I've gotten says that it isn't necessarily wordy, but apparently the pacing is slow. So, I'm getting out the big pruning shears.) Wish me luck!

I've been thinking about tribes lately, and how I seem to belong to a number of them. I get people here like my husband doesn't because they ARE my tribe. I probably attended sports and band events they were present at (representing different sides, of course. :) DH can't quite reconcile that with the NJ tribe--which involved going on vacation to places like Martha's Vinyard (and no, we didn't see anyone famous--but we did see a rabbit and Plymouth Rock, eat clam chowder and act up while visiting church on the island, which resulted in my mom getting her wallet stolen...Those are the important things when you're five. :) The tribes I share with DH are the LDS culture/intermountain west one (my mom and both his parents are from Idaho--we said we're Idahoans born in exile) and the expatriate one. And I guess the grad school/academia one. And of course I'm part of the children's writing tribe. What tribe(s) are you a part of?

And sort of, but not really, tribes-related, I've realized that a lot of love triangles in books don't work for me. It's not that I can't believe someone would end up in that situation--I've known people who have--but it's hard for me to sympathize. You might get entangled if you like someone and someone close to them likes you, and you don't want to hurt any feelings but everyone is sewn up in an unhappy circle of unrequited love. But I can't sympathize with a character who honestly thinks they're wildly in love with more than one person at the same time. I mean, hello? I want to shake them--if you are in that deep, sweetie, you should have figured things out by now. But then, I was not the girl who liked a different boy every week. I rather suspect that I'd be in Hufflepuff because loyalty is rather important to me. (But not at the expense of integrity, I add. "My country, right or wrong," as I once saw on a billboard, is not my motto, for example.) Anyway, I was trying to think of ways that a character could be in a triangle without making me want to throttle them, and I thought that maybe they could have been in two different tribes, each time not thinking they would be anywhere else ever again, and then the two worlds collide, and now they have a problem. I do find Facebook confusing for that very reason--too many worlds in which I was very submerged, and now they appear all at once and I don't even know what language to post in, let alone anything else. The same topics are not equally interesting to all tribes.

Thoughts on tribes, triangles, and tossing useless scenes welcome!

Okay, so November was good and bad for writing. I got halfway through NaNo and sort of outran my headlights. The effort wasn't wasted exactly, but it's not a novel yet, either. I'll let that one simmer and see if I come back to it. In the meantime, it was a good distraction from the book I am querying, as well as a mental break from the book I'm revising. I spent the second half of the month (when I wasn't holidaying) working on an outline in which I dig deep into this revision. I think I've made some progress. If I can set the beginning right, I think I'll be much better off as far as focusing the rest of the novel's core. I've been thinking a lot about the characters and the relationships between them and what they really want. I've worked with the first two pages and I'm pleased with how it's going. Um, that's only the first two out of 350? So, a lot of work to do still...

Today Little Sweetie had her playgroup at the house that is on the other side of the next town, down (or up, I should say) a dirt road, on the top of a hill that has a funny name like Frizzly Mountain or something equally odd. Which meant I spent most of the morning driving, but I always like that drive because it's a chance to just take in nature. That's where the buffalo are, and wide green fields, and tree-covered hills with hawks soaring overhead, and forks of the White River that are not white, but the color of green-tinted copper. Now that the leaves are off, you can see that they were only covering the scars of last year's ice storm. It's kind of like the economy--you can do some emergency measures, but true healing is going to take time.

This weekend was DD1's birthday, as well as baptism (she is 8). My parents came, which made the kids happy. PMB even remembered them and went to them, which isn't something you can always count on with a one-year-old. That on top of Thanksgiving sort of made for a food-intensive week, even with my parents' nonfat diet. I think we'll be doing carrot sticks for a while...
What else? Oh, my kids are all in the nativity play. DD1 is Mary, the boys are shepherds, and Little Sweetie is her choice of barn animal (she wants to be a sheep). They are all looking forward to it. Several times a day they tell me they need costumes. Um, first I need to take care of the Christmas shopping and deal with PMB the resident orangutang. And see if I can come up with a violin descant to What Child is This.
Okay, off to stuff kids with macaroni (every 4-year-old's dream cuisine, right?) and make some phone calls, and then if there's any time left, sneak in a bit more revising. I realize full well that agents are either reading over the holidays, or hiding from their tottering pile of hopeful material, and no matter how much I might hope otherwise, there are no radio signals in December. Which means that I am going to dig in on the revision and get it right this time.

Happy December!

Yesterday we were relaxing and looked out the front window to see a deer on the front lawn. I went out with the camera and found there were actually two of them. They spooked when my feet crackled on the gravel, and this is them running off across the street into the woods.

It's a lot colder today than it was supposed to be! But at least it was sunny, which made for nice driving conditions when we went to see my parents for Thanksgiving. We drive through quite a good stretch of basically uninhabited, very rural land on the way, and even without leaves on the trees, it's lovely in nice weather--so green, with either forested areas or hilltops that are mostly grassy but with sparse trees that make it look like a park. It reminds me a lot of specific places in Germany around where we used to live. It was nice to be able to visit with my parents, and the kids had fun wandering around in "Grandpa's Woods," which is the part of my parents' acreage which was clear-cut when we first moved there, only now the cedars have totally grown up and really made woods. They used to be small enough to cut down for Christmas trees when I was living there. Not anymore! We also saw a LOT of deer--on the roadside (living and dead), as well as in my parents' front yard. Apparently they LOVE the salad bar my mom runs every summer. So do the squirrels. And the rabbits. My mom doesn't believe in guns, but if she did--it'd be game stew every night.

The weather really helps it feel like the season it is supposed to be. Which is good, since I like this season! We listened to Christmas music on the way and back (Tallis Scholars, Cambridge Singers, and David Lanz--DH always calls that album "Kevorkian Christmas," but the rest of us like it). And I thought about things I'm thankful for, and despite the precarious academic job search and my yet-unrealized writing dreams, I'm so, so thankful that those are my challenges instead of other ones that I mercifully don't have to deal with right now. I'm thankful for an awesome husband who is my friend, who respects my mind, who has a weird sense of humor, who I feel equal to and complementary with. I'm thankful for smart, funny kids and the chance to have five of them. I'm thankful for all the interesting experiences I've gotten to have as a result of um, constantly looking for a permanent academic job. Some people would hate having to move all over, especially to other countries, but I love it. (Well. I don't love the moving itself. Or the constant change of jobs. But I do love the expatriate travel!) I'm thankful for a great family and awesome in-laws. I'm thankful for the on line writing community, because without you, this whole academic nomad thing would be a LOT harder!

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving!

When I was a kid we never got the whole week off for Thanksgiving. Even in grad school, we had to go up through Wednesday. One of my professors--who had a class at noon--would always schedule an exam for that day so you couldn't skip. My kids get the whole week off, though. Today wasn't too bad--we just played happy contented slugs. I considered taking people to the Christmas lighting event (complete with pony rides), but er, this isn't the season to go around dumping money on the ground, so we didn't. We still had a nice time, though. And the girls even cleaned their room!

The NaNo book is simmering for some future, unknown moment to pick it up again because despite all the words, I wasn't hitting the heart of the story, and I don't have time to purposely write something I know I'll have to throw away. So I've been working on a revisionary outline. It's not done, but it's developing, and I like it so far. I just need a few moments of uninterrupted time (read: NOT this week) to work with it. But it's also the sort of thing that can sit nicely in my mind as I'm walking around doing other things, so just because I'm not writing this week doesn't mean I'm not writing, if that makes sense.

And speaking of simmering. I have another story (not the NaNo book) that has been slowly developing in my mind for the past couple years. I have a setting and a set of characters and know the interactions between them. But the plot has been somewhat of a blank. Last night after getting PMB to bed finally (he is getting molars and didn't get to sleep until 11), when I was drifting to sleep, the pieces came together. There are some other things I need to figure out, but the big parts were just there. So now I have something to work with (or maybe even two somethings) once I'm done with this revision.

In the meantime, though (ie, this week), I think I will be doing a lot of reading. It takes faaaaaaaaar less mental energy to read, and I can do that while holding Mr. Squirming PMB. I know I'll also be reading a lot of Harry Potter aloud because daughter 1, who was too small (and too loud) to hear most of the series the last time we read it, has gotten bitten by Harry and is really interested. We're in the middle of The Goblet of Fire right now. (What I'm trying to keep her from being bitten by is Edward, which means I really should move that book, as she keeps looking at it with great interest--I really liked Twilight, but I am simply not ready to live it 24/7, especially as DD1 is only almost 8.)

Happy weekend, everyone!

Know what's better than your kids all talking to you at the same time in different languages?

Your kids talking to you in Ubbi Dubbi--but in German.

All I can say is, they'd better figure out fast that if they want an answer, they have to pick a language I can process. English--check. German--check. English/German at the same time--check. Ubbi Dubbi, any language--no check.

Today it smells like this:


Neuhaus an der Pegnitz

This after a week and a half in the 70s. But the neighbors' wood stoves are going and the sky is this color and it's cold (wellll--cold enough to feel a chill as you run from the house to the car--the kids can't understand why we want them to take their coats to school, especially the oldest. They have no recess in 6th grade, so he is literally not outside at all.)

I woke up with great thoughts about revising this ms that needs help. Like, I could almost taste the solution. But then I spent the entire day running errands (not once, but TWICE to the next town over to the scout store--and I don't even have a scout responsibility! I just hope the parties on both ends understand the lists I'm ferrying back and forth...). PMB is being very cute (and knowing it), climbing, dancing, showing his knowledge of body parts like "button" (which involves tickling his belly button), and standing on the pot he swiped from the cupboard and applauding himself. I wonder...is there a hidden battery compartment somewhere? Will he ever run down? Is there an off button? Better yet, can I get me some of those batteries that never run out??

Here's a chance to win an ARC of Sarah Williams's (pixiechick_sw ) midgrade novel Palace Beautiful. Just hop on over and follow the directions!

Our week or two of sun is gone. :( It was cloudy this morning, and then when I was following PMB through the halls at church (he is just a few months too young for the nursery, and he can't sit still in class with me), we stopped at the glass doors to watch the rain. Wow. It was raining so hard it was bouncing off the pavement, and going on in waves. Now it's dark and while not particularly cold (that comes on Thursday), it looks like mid-November. So we ate off our Christmas dishes for dinner. Gotta use them sometime, right?

We gave PMB a haircut. I only meant to trim the back and take some off the sides, but he wouldn't sit still for the scissors so we used the clippers. Um. It's a bit...short. Too much off the front. He looks like a convict now, poor guy! And it's lighter underneath. This happened with Oldest Son at this same age--we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa and his uncle gave him a quick buzz with the clippers. I'm fairly certain that if you took the background away, the two would now be indistinguishable in photos. Well, hair grows back, right?

I keep hearing this faint rumbling and thinking it's thunder, and suddenly I realized--it's probably fireworks from the football game. I drove past the stadium today, hours before it started, and it was like the Quidditch World Cup, or a Weihnachtsmarkt or something, with flags flying and red and white tents set up all over campus, food carts, Hogs paraphenalia, people manning parking lots ($20 a car), etc. There go more fireworks. Too bad we aren't sports fans--we'd be in hog heaven (pun intended). Last night I took the kids to a school fundraiser carnival, and as we were leaving they were reading out the winners of the silent auction. One lucky winner scored a football autographed by Bobby Petrino. (He is the Much Revered football coach, so that's kind of like getting a Bible autographed by the pope--or as DH said, maybe even higher up.)

Meanwhile, it's the monkey pit around here. PMB has learned that he can push the organ bench away and replace it with a low folding chair. He can turn the organ on and adjust the various music books on it all by himself. And, of course, play the organ now. He is VERY proud of his organ playing abilities. He's also started a climbing phase that lets him get all kinds of things we don't want him to. I am scared. (Not to mention tired--it's 10 pm and he's still at it.)

NaNo is flatlining. I feel like every time I get an idea that might be good, it's time to pull orangutans off of more danger zones, and then I'm out of the story again. I have written almost nothing this weekend. DH has had events nearly every single night this week, and I am really exhausted! Luckily, my older daughter had a birthday party today, and it was short enough and far enough away that it didn't make sense to come home in between. So I took her and then spent the next hour and a half ALONE. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing that was! Even if I was just running errands. Hopefully this week is better.

Uh, yeah--final score, 56-20 our favor. No wonder there were so many fireworks!

I hate it when you've written 28k and realize that yeah, you really do need a different setting/time period than the one you're doing. Ah, well. My characters have enjoyed their 26k vacation in the modern world. Or is it the 2k vacation in the past that they needed? In any case, I have yet to figure it out and write any words today, despite the fact that I've been awake for a hundred years already (sort of an inverted Sleeping Beauty. I'm the Waking Hag?). Four of my five kids woke up at 5:45 this morning for various reasons. The only one who didn't was awake until ten or so last night reading. So I'm feeling a little wasted. I really, really, really want to write or at least daydream about the book--since if I give up the idea of finishing NaNo, I maybe could make it into a real book--but alas, all three boys are still awake. There was a school carnival (middle school fundraiser) and everyone's on sugar high now. And PMB has discovered that if he says words (mouth, ball, book) that everyone will applaud him. So it's going to be a while.

Well, part of writing is daydreaming, so maybe I can at least do that. I hope everyone has a nice weekend!

Twenty (eek!) years ago, I was a freshman in college, minding my own business and doing my homework in my dorm room. Suddenly, my roommate's twin sister burst into the room, crying and yelling about something. Eventually we understood her words: the Wall is down!

We followed her downstairs to watch on TV as thousands of Germans climbed on the Berlin Wall, crossing East to West and West to East, in the largest display of euphoria I'd ever seen. In the days that followed, demonstrations continued in the surrounding Soviet bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia, where my grandfather was born and where I still have cousins.

I've lived in Germany since then. I realize that the effects of East vs. West and the resulting unification have positives and negatives. I know that the economy of the East is still weaker than the West, and that the cost to rebuild the East chafes. I get what Wolf Biermann says in his poem "Der Westn ist besser, der Westn ist bunter, und schoener und schlauer und reicher und frei/und trotz allerdem, ich sag' dir die Wahrheit/der Westn ist auch nicht det Gelbe vom Ei." (The West is better, the West is more colorful, und more beautiful, and cleverer and richer and free/but in spite of it all I tell you the truth: the West, it isn't the yolk of the egg/cat's meow.)

Still.

It's easy to look at our Greatest Dream, our personal Promised Land, and think that if only *sigh* if ONLY I could be *there* then the streets would be paved with gold, and all my troubles would be over (in the land of Solla Salloo). And then you get there and realize--the streets are polished with work, not existing gold dust, that a happy wedding is a beginning, not an end, that a book contract is the base of the trail, not the pinnacle, that finding your Life's Calling is the first step of a worldwide journey.But yet it's still worth it to celebrate that spark, that beginning, because it's the chance that makes it possible.

We don't love (and need) freedom because it solves all our problems. We love freedom because it gives us chances. Because it opens doors. Because it gives us--and sometimes forces us to develop--power we didn't have before. Power to change our lives and bless others and make something of the world around us.

Die Mauer ist gefallen. Let freedom ring.

I wrote a section I actually like! So, one scene out of 18k....well, I'll take what I can get. :) And I have to work out the details, but it looks like I should have some exciting action coming up later.

Must write about 300 more words to keep on track, though...

A large thanks to DH for taking PMB outside in the Grand Leaf-Raking Event, and leaving me inside to write!

ETA: There was another home game today. Arkansas vs. South Carolina. Little Sweetie (who is a South Carolina native, thank you) decided to cheer for her home state. So er, it was a difficult moment when I had to tell her that Arkansas beat them. Seriously, she nearly cried! I had to explain that in this case, she was a winner no matter which team won, since she had lived in both states. She is funny that way--she likes sports events because she likes to stake out her loyalties. (When she was three, she was devastated when Spain beat Germany for the European cup--soccer--title.) Meanwhile, the men in the family couldn't care less about football...

Overall we had LOVELY weather. I know, it's not seasonal. Well--for Arkansas it's perfectly possible to have it in the 70s in November. As possible as it is to be snowing. Still. After a year of rain (600% of normal?), darkness, ice storms, and cold, a little cheery global warming is FINE BY ME.

Okay, so it's Friday, and I realize that I have a whole lot of words in NaNo. Crazy. Um, they're pretty bad. But I have figured out some plot things by doing this (this is NOT the way to get character development, though!). The words--man. It's a mix of past and present tense, flat-out telling ("Fen says X, only cooler than this"), and some third person I haven't quite changed to first. Right now I'm looking at the section I'm starting (the middle third) and thinking how cool it would be to read it and know the answers to all these things! You know--the things in the outline that are like, and then they decide what to do from here, or, and then Coren overhears something she shouldn't--and they discover her secret, and she's toast! Only, my subconscious hasn't had time to figure out what those secrets are yet. Um. So far I might end up racing through this to get to the end and mark what *kind* of thing should happen--and then go back to write, you know, real scenes. The one thing I'm learning from all of this is that no matter how much I fight the barbarian within and try to appear civilized, I am teeth-baring, snarling competitive underneath. No matter how bad it is, I can't seem to give up until I've matched my word count from the day before. Not that my sister hasn't known this all along.

The sun continues to shine, which is lovely (although, as robinellen says, it would be prettier if all the leaves hadn't fallen off first). Our house is coming to pieces around our ears, though. The garage door opener is possessed--it will start to go down, then pause, and go back up. So we had to unplug it, so basically I'm glad we have good weather, because I don't want to deal with it in stormy weather, when we do like to put the car inside. We did fix a doorknob and plug some large gaps between the cupboards and the dead space above them, but last night the computer just up and stopped working. We have no idea how to fix it. Which is bad. DH is the computer equivalent of the guys in the 50s who would tinker with cars all the time. He can rebuild laptops, even. But it looks like either the motherboard is fried or the heat sink is destroyed, or both, or neither. In any case, we can't get it to load. And that's bad, since it has a lot of important things on it. Luckily not my writing. My laptop, such as it is, is the only working computer in the house. Sigh. This is just not the time to deal with this. I feel like Ron: "Why is everything I own rubbish?"

At least it's Friday and tomorrow we can sleep in, provided our kids let us. Or at least, we don't have to drag anyone anywhere. I'm sort of looking forward to that. Have a great weekend, everyone, and good luck to all the NaNo writers!

...than Playmobile Anubis??


Too bad son 1 is past his Egyptian stage...

1. Ran a playgroup today. Little Sweetie wanted to do Martinstag (St. Martin's Day, as in St. Martin and the Beggar), so we did. We made lanterns, watched a short video, ate Martinswecken (the rolls with raisins) and acted out the story. A Fun Time Was Had By All, and the parents were duly horrified at the concept of 3-year-olds running around out in the dark with paper lanterns with real, lit candles inside. I did glue candles inside--but I dropped a glow stick inside as well, in case they actually want to try them out at home.

2. After said playgroup I was so wiped out I nearly fell asleep. It's lucky I didn't, because I would have slept straight through picking up the kids, and would have gotten a call from the school to say, "Frau Green, your kids are wandering the parking lot. WHERE ARE YOU?"

3. However, we did get an automated call from the school district tonight, letting us know that "three students in the school district" had ingested jimson weed during school and had been hospitalized. And to please talk with your child about the er, stupidity of doing such a thing. (Jimsonweed is poisonous.) Real swift, guys.

4. NaNo continues. I'm game to continue the experiment, but I must say, this is not the way I write. Maybe it's the mental energy I've expended on the playgroup, but man, the output is dreck! I feel like I'm not able to take the time to listen for my MC's voice, and writing stupid stuff to fill the space. Is this how NaNo is supposed to be? I still have more words to take care of today; hopefully it will get better.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year.

Yes, I am insane.

However, feel free to friend me (I'm olmue).

I don't expect to write 50k words, but maybe I'll at least get a book started. Oh, and I'm cheating a bit since I have some sections I wrote already because I was trying to figure out characters--but they are not too bad, considering. It's not much, though.

Lots of rain.



Then of course there's Halloween. But the most important thing is the religious holiday known as homecoming. Srsly. (You just try trick or treating in football traffic. Not fun.)

DH took these photos on the way home from his office today.







The fireworks are for a touchdown. There have been a lot of them. The Hogs haven't been playing all that spectacularly this year, so for homecoming they searched far and wide to make sure they'd win. Well, I'm sure Eastern Michigan has had better years.

Hopefully November dries out some and the eternal job hunt takes a good turn for once and my new WIP takes possession of my fingers and just bursts onto the page (and PMB learns to sit next to me instead of my laptop), and everyone is healthy for the rest of the year and the house holds together and there are no ice storms this year. Or maybe even just some of those.

Happy November!