I did it. 50,000 words in 30 days. While working 40 hours a week writing, receiving two rejection letters for my previous novel, making two trips to Los Angeles and, for the past week, coughing up both lungs repeatedly.

No, you can’t read it. On account of it being a novel written in 30 days, it’s a little rough.

Home Stretch

Have written 45,000 words. Think I’m going to hit 50,000 by the end of the day Wednesday as planned. I hope. Was touch and go last week, but I caught up with a relaxing weekend, coughing at my mom’s.

Went to the airport last night and was listening to the third loop of Christmas Carols in the terminal when they offered a free ticket to take a bump off the oversold flight. It was too crowded for me to bumrush the counter so I figured, eh, just take the flight.

Then they’re all, “Because of heavy winds we’re going to have to make a fuel stop in Sacramento.” and to prevent any groaning, they add, “Cus the alternative is taking 40 fewer passengers.”

After boarding all first class, MVPs and people with small children, they called for all rows. As we clustered forward they said they were looking for one more person to fly out of Long Beach today at 11, and I’m like, “Uh, OK.”

They woulda transported me to the Long Beach Holiday Inn and put me up, but it was much more fun to have my mom come back and get me and drive me in rush hour post-holiday Monday morning traffic to the Long Beach airport. And travel first-class.

P.S. Don’t believe it when they promise a “meal voucher.” Since when does $8 buy a meal?

While waiting to board today at Long Beach, I heard an oddly snide, non-recorded voice say, “Attention in the terminal, the white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.”

Ten minutes later, the same irritated voice: “Cars parked along the white curb will be towed. That includes a silver convertible Ford Mustang with rear spoiler. Your car has been cited and will be towed.”

Another 10 minutes, at least: “Will the owner of a Ford Mustang please return to his vehicle? Sir, you are not allowed to park there.”

Seriously, what happened there? They were escorting someone to the gate? Using the rest room? Had a heart attack? Abandoned the car?

Am tempted to describe scene on last pages of novel, as I do not know how to conclude, and it would be fun to have the Mustang explode, killing everyone. But I don’t know if I can write 5,000 words on it.

Love, marriage and the little monster living under my toenail

I’m just back from a Hollywood bachelorette and a fairy-tale wedding. (Two different brides.) So naturally I want to talk about toe fungus.

Except no one wants to talk about toe fungus.

I lie

I do think my novel is boring. It’s hard to write every day for two straight weeks, nevermind a whole month. I was doing so well and was totally on track as of Tuesday. And i thought, this Deepak Chopra, man, he’s really onto something. When I wake up at 7 a.m., I feel much more energized. Until Wednesday, when I wrote about 75 words before work. Thursday I dozed til 8, but still got about 1,000 words in. Friday I didn’t even wake til 9 so I didn’t write anything.

I did write last night and am writing today, with the goal of being caught up by the end of tomorrow. But I’ve lost some of the momentum and don’t really know where it’s going and whether anyone would want to read it, and really that’s not what matters, just to get 50,000 words down and I can spend the rest of the year massaging it into something with a plot and a theme, etc, etc.

In other unfortunate news, every time I go to kickboxing I get a hideous zit on my chin. I missed two weeks of classes and my skin was clear. Went Tuesday and had a zit by Thursday. So I’m not going again until at least after the wedding on Nov. 20. Though i just paid through the end of the year.

I know it has to do with resting my sweaty gloves on my face to block those invisible incoming punches, but I swear I didn’t think I was doing that on Tuesday. Argh.

Fun K

Crap. My novel has a plot problem.

I will say that I am not having the same problems that I hear other one-month novelists have, in which they hate their characters or they think their books stinks. I think mine’s coming along.

However, my main character, who is based on me, is coming across as awfully serious. Which is weird because I think that I have a reputation, at least among those who like me, as “fun.” As in wild and crazy, goofy, hyperactive, outgoing (ha!) and animated. A fast-talker at least.

People think I’m kidding if I say I’m shy or introverted.

When I write about me, unfortunately, it’s my depressive tendencies that get the most ink (or keystrokes, if you will), especially when it’s in the third person.

So I ask you, my seven to ten readers, none of whom comment on this blog, what is it that I do that gives this impression? I’m looking for ways to show, not tell, that the character of me is “fun.”

Send an e-mail if you’re wary of public comment. (I say this as a face-saving device, cus for all you people know, I’ve already received a barrage of e-mails with fun stories, even though it still says “No Comment” below.)

Regarding my first effort at novelhood, I received a rejection letter from the first and only agent who requested my manuscript based on a query letter. It was an affirmation that sometimes it really isn’t me, it’s them.

She handwrote: “Great premise, but I’m closing my agency. Good luck to you.”

Verite

I have a stiff neck. I took a muscle relaxer last night and was incoherent when Rob called. Dragged myself out of bed at 8 to write, but instead read what I’d already written, read some blogs, listened to an entire CD and basically didn’t feel like writing anything for a full hour. It wasn’t writer’s block, per se, because I know what to write, I just didn’t feel like jumping back into the narrative thread I started or starting a new one.

At about 9, while shuffling from the toaster back to my computer, I came up with:
“Lying in bed on a rainy Tuesday morning, Beth wondered if she should eat another slice of toast with peanut butter. She was trying to lose five pounds before the wedding.”

Which is clearly fiction as I was not in bed and it is not Tuesday.

Yesterday, I thought what a nice life it would be if I could sit around all day and write. But of course, the intent is to do this for 30 days with a goal of completing 50,000 words in that time. If I don’t sell the finish product, or even get it into the state of finished producthood, I still will have accomplished something.

However, I think it would be pretty miserable to slave away for months on stuff that doesn’t sell. A friend just sold her first screenplay in the seven years since college that she has been writing them and not selling them. That’s a long time to keep at it with little gratification.

Have you noticed how I somehow have more time to blog now that I have the responsibility of writing 1,667 words a day in addition to the ridiculous amount of work product my employers expect me to put out?

I’m shy of my quota this morning by about 650 words…but i have to go to work.

Versatile

It occurred to me that Jane Austen’s novels are pretty similar in nature, dealing with relationships, family and society. And confusion over who is in love with whom. Then I looked up Karen Joy Fowler’s other books. Excepting The Jane Austen Book Club, they’re all period pieces in very different settings!

I’m up to 2,000 words. Please excuse me.

Staying gold

Deepak Chopra says that I should wake up between 6 and 7 a.m. The time change is a good time to experiment with this, and the novel writing challenge is good motivation for a girl who routinely stays in bed til 9:30 or 10 on work days.

So I started the novel, which I call “Compromised.” It’s easier for me to describe character relationships at 7 in the morning than it is for me to write plot. Have 492 words so far. Am supposed to write 1,667 a day in order to have 50,000 by month’s end. When people ask me why, I call it a challenge, and it does get me in the habit of writing. I mean, aside from the 8+ hours a day I spend at work. But even then, I write two sentences before clicking onto another window and checking my e-mail or looking something up online.

While traveling this weekend, I read two books. Sort of. I grew tired of one and skipped to the end, which I almost never have done. It was “Hawkes Harbor,” an adult vampire novel by the now adult S.E. Hinton, who was once the famed 16-year-old author of “The Outsiders.” It wasn’t good. It held my interest through most of my flight to Los Angeles, but yesterday afternoon, I came to an extremely cliched section and flipped to the end to confirm my suspicion that there was nothing else in this story that I needed to know. And it was Halloween. I gave up on a vampire story on Halloween.

I got to the airport very early yesterday, because of the complications of my driver having to endure rush hour traffic both ways to LAX. At about 4:30 I started reading “The Jane Austen Book Club,” which I finished at 11:30 once back in my apartment.

The vampire story, although not well-told, made me nervous that no one would want to read a book about women doing the regular stuff that I know enough about to describe. But Jane Austen made me feel better because here was an attempt anyway at more literary fiction (I have no solid definition of this, but if it’s based on Jane Austen’s novels, how can it not be?) with a plot not so dissimilar in style and themes from my own. It even had two skydiving scenes. The writing itself was superior to that of your basic trashy chick-lit, but then I hope mine will be as well.

Heh. That was 405 words written in about 10 minutes.

Faery dust

If someone told me I could take a pill and it would cure my TMJ — and my allergies — would I take it? Hell yeah! Why hasn’t anyone told me about MSM before?

A shout out to Oscar Wilde, courtesy of my google homepage quote-a-day:
“The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.”