After at least ten minutes of debate, I have decided to put my own personal spin on NaNo this year.  Yes, I signed up a few weeks ago as an official participant, but at this point I really don’t need 50k words in a new project. What I need is my manuscript revisions finished.

So here’s the deal: I must polish a certain average number of pages every day this month. It’s a lot, in keeping with the NaNo tradition, but Matt’s the only one who knows what I’m supposed to be doing.  The goal is to fill in the holes and smooth the rough edges and polish and check everything to end up on November (oops) December 1 with something that’s ready to send out to agents and editors.

So that’s my version of NaNo this time around.  Here’s to winning!

I have decided to stop apologizing.  So hah!  Take that, guilt!  For those who wish I would update a bit more often, I’ve added a widget to display my twitter feed in the right-hand column at the bottom of this page, so you can keep up with goings-on even when I’m not finding much time for blogging.

The last few weeks have been busy ones.  I’ve been writing, Matt’s been super-busy with work and classes, and we currently have almost two feet of snow, and it’s supposed to keep coming down for another 12 hours or so.  I do like snow, but this is really early for winter to hit like this.  I have a feeling we’re going to have a whopper of a winter.  Also, we need to get new tires on the truck.  I thought that could wait for another month or maybe two, but with this much snow we can’t put it off much longer.

As I browsed through a bookstore earlier this week I came across a copy of Elaine St. James’s Simplify Your Life on super-sale, and since I usually do better when I have a checklist of sorts, after I paged through it a bit I brought it home.  (I did pay for it first. I’m not always a book thief.)  I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been updated since it was written in 1994, so there are some pretty great time/lifestyle gap things, but the concepts are all very solid and easily modified to apply to life 15 years later.  And the first thing is to clear out the clutter.

You see, we have a LOT of stuff.  We’ve acquired it in the usual ways: purchased back in the day when we had extra money, gifted by well-meaning friends and family members, swapped with friends, salvaged from other people’s trash, and generally accumulated so slowly we never realized how it was piling up.  We even clean out every time we move, which has been once a year lately, and we STILL have tons of stuff we never use and probably never will.

So, following the first two suggestions in The Book, we have been cleaning out the house during the last two days as drifts of snow piled up outside.  So far, we have almost two 18x18x18-inch boxes of stuff to donate and at least two 30-gallon trash bags to throw out.  That’s from the office (and closet), our bedroom (and closet) and two bathrooms.  We haven’t touched the main living area, the kitchen, or the garage.  It feels really good to get rid of stuff that’s just been sitting there, being moved from apartment to apartment.  It’s amazing–there’s room in the closets for things that have been “living” on the floor, getting kicked out of the way all the time.  Crazy!

Also, we bought some cheap plastic drawers for my quilting fabric, which means now it’s not all piled in big boxes, so I can actually get to what I need without taking over the whole office.  There are drawers for my projects-in-process and all sorts of loveliness.  See?

So today warrants hot chocolate and cozy writing time, at least until Matt gets back from his youth ministry symposium.  Then I suspect there will be snowshoeing.  I’ll try to get video of Shiloh–she LOVES the snow and has tons of fun.

Oh, and I am signed on as a Official Participant for NaNoWriMo 2009, but honestly I haven’t figured out how serious I am about that.  I suppose I should decide, since it starts in two and a half days.

Also, my good friend Venessa Giunta has asked a good question over at her blog:  Do you [as a writer] tell people what you do?

Finally, for those who use Amazon Wish Lists and/or those who wish they could get their hands on a Kindle without paying for it, don’t miss the Kindle Love Sweepstakes.  You can enter through Saturday for the Kindle, and then it moves on to another kind of prize next week.

That’s all for now!  Time for hot chocolate!

Today has been one of those days. You know, the kind that start out with lovely intentions of rising when the alarm first sounds and gleefully attacking the to-do list like the ninja I sometimes am. And then gets derailed by sleeping in an hour and a half and puttering around not getting much done aside from thinking about everything I need to get done, and reading a book instead of dealing with it all.

It’s frustrating. I have an excuse, and it’s a pretty valid one too, but it seems lame when I type it out so I’m not sharing. :-P

But seriously, now. It’s time to shake things up a bit. Get things done. Now is the time.  Today is the day, and all that.

Thanks. I needed this pep talk. You’re such a good friend for giving it to me.

Theory:  No matter how much cold cereal you eat at one time, in no less than two hours you will be hungry again.

Discuss.

(Note: If you’re reading this via Facebook or LJ, click through to the original post at betsywhitt.com to consolidate the comments onto one forum.)

I have been lax in my bloggelation duties.

Yes, I totally made up that word.

No, I have not been lax in everything in my life.  In fact, I have gotten quite a lot of writing done and read several books and played quite a bit of Diablo 2 and rearranged the office and done other worthwhile things, I’m sure.  You should know by now that I can never remember many specifics very long after the fact.  I can hardly remember our wedding date (no, seriously, I had to think really really hard about it just the other day).

Suffice to say that I have been busy.

Also, I have not been very good at getting to bed when I really should, which means I wake up a bit later than I really should and don’t have time to blog before I start the day’s writing.  And I have finally placed working on the novel above blogging in the priorities.  That’s good, yes?  Yay noveling!  But it does mean the blogging has suffered.  Next goal: Getting to bed on time so I can do EVERYTHING!

But I digress.

The real reason for this post is to fill time before I have to pick Matt up from class and we go to a meeting at church tonight.  No, wait.  That wasn’t supposed to be the real reason.  I mean, it’s part of the reason, but. . . . I should stop babbling and wander around to my point.

My point is, where has been a recent addition to the Whitt Household!  That’s right, folks, something else for me to kill!

She’s a very pretty flower plant in a pot, and I’ve named her Georgette.  Here’s a picture of her (with Shiloh, who looks slightly annoyed because I made her sit there and stay while I took a photo and she can’t imagine why):

Yes, those are Matt’s psychoanalysis textbooks on the table.  No, as far as I know he is not psychoanalyzing me (we can all hope).

At any rate, Georgette was gifted to me with the instructions that I was not to intentionally kill her.  My friends know my track record with plants.  I did not feel it was appropriate to point out that I never intend to kill any of my plants.  She’s lasted out her first week and a half, though, which is pretty good in terms of flower-plant lifespans in this household.  I have no idea what to expect in terms of her annual life-cycle, though.  Will she bloom all the time?  How much water is too much?  Her blooms get wilty when I don’t water her every day, but are some of those yellowy brown leaves a result of too much water?  I just don’t know.

Georgette sits on the TV table near the porch windows because she seems to do better with a bit of light, and that’s the most consistent place for her to get it without being frozen on the porch.  I will keep you updated on her progress or decline, as the case may be.

Bob2, for those who are concerned, seems to be doing fine.  He’s still a bit sunburned from where I left him out on the porch this summer, and I’m not certain he’ll ever recover, but he seems to be plugging along just fine.

And now I will think about cleaning the kitchen, which is a mess.  Or maybe I’ll read a bit more. . . . Decisions, decisions.