Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

Every year I go to the doctor and have what’s called a Heart Echo (not to be confused with an Echo-Cardiogram) to check me out and make sure the old ticker’s doing it’s job right.  I have a heart murmur, you see, a routine and very minor sort of health problem which is not dangerous and has no real negative side effects.

If you need to have a heart disease, this is the one to have.

A heart murmur basically means that, when my heart beats, instead of going “Lub-Dub” like most other folks’ hearts, mine says, “Lub-D-Dub.”  An extra half a noise, maybe less.

Still, we live in the 21st century and even the simplest of ailments can decide to rear up and kick you in the seat of your pants.  So every year I make an appointment and a lab tech rubs a cold, Vaseline-covered wand over my chest.

And I get to watch my heart on TV.

Have you ever seen your heart?  It’s an eerie experience.  During the Heart Echo, the tech will tell me to take a deep breath and hold it, and then to exhale.  Blow out all your air, but don’t inhale for ten seconds.  While I’m doing these respiratory calisthenics, I am absolutely hypnotized to watch the screen and see my heart rise and fall with the position of my diaphragm.

And it beats away.  In real time.

The tests take a total of about fifteen minutes and that whole time, as they’re examining my heart from all different angles, I just get to watch it there on the screen, beating away.  Beating, beating . . . how many beats do each of our hearts have in it?

I’m not going to get all introspective here, but I will say that my annual visit to the doctor is an affirmation as much as it’s a checkup.  Watch your own heart beating and try to not think about how many beats you’ve had in your life.  Try to not think about how many more you might have left.

Are you doing everything you could with the beats allotted to you?  Could you be doing more?   I realized that, like New Years, this is the time of year where I look at myself and decide I need to make changes.  Get myself moving.  Write more.  But this year, I am writing more.  I’m going to finish a solid draft of Beautiful Handcrafted Animals in the next few weeks and then I’m going to write some more.

I’ll be honest: there have been times in the past year or so when I’ve thought, okay, so I just don’t write anymore.  The intention was always there, but my discipline was sorely lacking.

Even if I miss my 50,000 words for the month of November (not happening), I’ll still have sat down and plugged away at 36,000+ words (that’s where I am at this very moment, so if I didn’t write a single word the rest of the week, I’d have that, at least) and that ain’t hay.  More than “not hay”, it’s proof-positive that I can still do this, that I do still do this.

As I watched my heart beating there on that thirteen-inch screen, I realized I didn’t need an affirmation, or a kick in the seat of my pants.  I already got it.

We tried to see Beowulf Sunday night but the Imax theater was broken.  Get that, the whole theater was broken.  I have this mental image of a collapsed ceiling, and rubble, and 3D glasses scattered everywhere.  Pretty gruesome stuff, eh?

We’re going to try again this week, though not before Friday and my NaNoWriMo deadline.  This week is all about those 13,000 words and putting that together.

When we actually get to see Beowulf, I’ll let you know if it’s as awesome as reputed, or if the dead-eyes of the MoCap people made us squirm in our seats.

Another 1,082 words tonight. Much less than I wanted, and we’re really getting down to crunch time. I need a little more than 13,000 words by midnight, November 30th in order to meet the requirements of National Novel Writing Month.

Some notes on that:

First, even if I make 50,000 words by midnight Friday, I doubt very seriously if the book will actually come to THE END in that span. It feels more like I’m about half-way through the story. Things might close up faster than I think, but this isn’t a 50,000 word story.

Do you still “win” NaNoWriMo if you meet the word requirements, but your story is still going? I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, they’re looking for 50,000 words and I’m going to give them more like 75,000 words (though not by December 1st, unless I really put the pedal to the metal). On the other hand, isn’t that a triumph for NaNoWriMo? If a writer’s book becomes more than was asked for, how is that not a victory?

Second, and I want to state this for the record, I could “win” very easily, if I wanted to cheat. I’m at a point in the story where I could very easily, and very reasonably, steal a pile of pages from one of the previous drafts. I’m not going to, though. Already what I’m writing is working out better than that old stuff.

Finally, it is my intention to keep doing on Beautiful Handcrafted Animals as if NaNoWriMo was still going on. I am enjoying this approach to writing (a first draft, at any rate). It’s working well for me, keeping me honest and writing. I would like to get this draft of the book done before December 22nd, nearly a month from now. If I can pull that off, I’ll leave the draft sit for a month or so and then revisit it in January. I know the text is going to need a pile of spit and bailing wire to pull it together, but I really think I can make it something worth reading in a very reasonable time frame.

So, that’s where we stand with things. The next five days will be dedicated, in part or in whole, to banging out another 13,000 words and change. When I get to 50,000, I will mark it down as a success, have a moment to myself where I marvel at how much actual work this was, and then get right back to Galen, Kara, Joe, China and the rest.

The site and servers were down last night, so I didn’t get to post, but we’re 3,153 words richer now.  I’m closing in on 50,000 words and we’re writing about one of my two favorite characters in the book, so things should, fingers-crossed, go smoothly from here on in (not like they haven’t been smooth, but the last few nights have been a sort of a transitional period in the story, and we’re out of that now).

Jessy and I went to see the new Stephen King / Frank Darabont film, The Mist tonight. We went to see it at the Cross County Multiplex in Yonkers.

That’s the last time we’ll make that mistake.

So, how good is The Mist? It’s good enough that we could manage to work through all of the following and still enjoy the movie. Please note that we are persnickety bastards and not the sort of people who overlook stuff like:

• Somewhere between three and SEVEN crying babies. All with the same family. Said, “babies” seemed to have ranged in age from sperm to about age five, but ALL of them were noisey and ALL of them kept it going the whole goddamned movie, except for when the manager came in after several folks complained. When that happened, our best guess is the mothers either muzzled their kids or half-smothered them on their enormous bosoms (these were not small ladies).
• A fistfight, started when one gentleman asked the group of mothers (by the way, this was a gorey-as-hell R-rated monster movie that started around 7:30 at night — fine fair for infants) to please quiet their children down. Yes, a fistfight started over this, and passed within inches of my face. Both men were removed by security BUT THE MOTHERS AND THEIR KIDS STAYED BEHIND TO FINISH THE MOVIE.
• The woman in front of Jessy and one seat over keeping her Bluetooth headset connected. If you are not familiar with this technology, such contraptions have a blinding blue light which blink about every other second.
• The guy in front of me, in addition to having ants in his pants, wearing a baseball cap. His specialty seemed to be figuring out where I was sitting and moving to cap to that exact location.
• The theater failing to turn the lights all the way off.
• Popcorn. Never mind that the popcorn is usually sub-par at this theater, we like popcorn with our movies. I went out to the concessions area fully thirty minutes before the film was supposed to start to pick up some popcorn and a drink. Thirty minutes later I had moved exactly three feet. And every other line was as bad, if not worse.

So, with screaming babies, blinking blue lights, the house-lights on, no popcorn, a baseball cap blocking my view AND a fistfight in the middle of the movie, we still enjoyed the hell out of the actual picture.

I really can’t think of any better way to review it than that.

Go see it.

It’s 4:27 a.m. as I type this, regardless of what the time-stamp for the blog says.  Jessy went to bed about four hours ago and I just finished writing 895 words for Chapter Ten.

They weren’t the hardest words I’ve put down for this book, not by a long shot.

But I needed to get something rolling in just the right way here, and it took freaking house to come up with what that was, exactly.

We’re starting to head into somewhat familiar territory with things, right now, but I don’t want to fall into old, bad habits.  I’ve worked out most of what I didn’t like in previous drafts and I’m only just now working out how much of the “old” stuff I want to keep in here.

For the uninitiated, the folks who didn’t read the old blog before it got recreated more times than the Gabor sisters, the OLD story was not much more than a quest narrative.  Go here, get this stuff, come back, win your goal.  In fact, the old story was going to have some of the very literal stuff that happens now, be very allegorical.  Galen went on a quest and that quest was much more metaphorical than it’s become.

What happened was my “What If?” button got pushed by mistake.  I started thinking, “well, that’s cool, and has some nice messagey-type stuff, but what if . . .”

If it hadn’t been for that “What if?” I would have finished this book, well, back when I finished it.  The first time.  Or the second time.  I got about 3/4 of the way through the fourth time.  These were draft/editorial passes, of course, but it took that third time through for me to realize, “crap, this isn’t about what I thought it was, at all.”

I also realized my writing style had changed drastically.

A big reason for me starting back from scratch.

And here we are now.

I came up with a nice way to make this transition, and move along the next few sections of story.  There is still at least one gaping hole in the plot which I need to fill.  I also need about 17,000 words to make my NaNoWriMo goal.  I’m not worried about that (I’m hoping to have very, very productive days tomorrow and Sunday), and I think the finished produce will be more like 65,000 to 80,000 words, when all’s said and done.

I will tell you, though, that I thoroughly creeped myself out, writing tonight.  I’ve said it before, but it always bears repeating; the nights you give yourself the willies are among the best writing nights an author can have.  It’s not pleasant walking to the bedroom in the dark, of course, but it’s satisfying thinking, well, if that got to me so easily, what’s it going to do to folks who have ZERO idea what comes next?

Which is nice.