My pal Andrea posted this link for Basic Instructions – How to Write A Haiku which gets the award for most awesomeness thing of the week! Be sure to read the comments!

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come. – Dalai Lama

So, wrote a few hundred words at lunch. I could almost hear Tatia’s gears working in her head, but I was not at all sure where it was going to go next. There’s a bunch of things going on in the story right now and I am beginning to wonder – what’s the main story being told? what’s going to tie in? what’s going to be a small distraction?

A few hundred words isn’t all that much but it’s a pretty amount of time. If I leave off in the middle of something it’s easier to get more done but I take what I can get in the time I have.

Walking back from lunch I had a thought and then another about what the problem REALLY was all about. OH. So THIS happened. Then THIS happened. And now look at where we are. I have no idea how the characters are going to figure it out. I guess I’ll keep throwing out clues for them to sort out and see what they make of it.

In other news, I called the doctor’s office today and cancelled the two appointments they’d scheduled for me (blood work and physical) because I just wasn’t happy at all with my quick trip in yesterday. I’m not the most compliant patient but there wasn’t a single thing about the visit that made me feel good. And I told the person doing the cancelling that. I told her I didn’t want to rearrange my as yet unknown work schedule when my real question was, should I find a new doctor. She apologized and I know what it’s like to get those phone calls but I wasn’t yelling etc. Just not going to show up.

So I thought, let me read a few pages of The Island of the Mighty by Evangeline Walton before I go to sleep. I started with the dedication, looked over the table of contents and moved on to an essay/review “On Evangeline Walton — and Magic” by Patrick Merla.

When I got to the end, I pretty much gasped (see below). My whole NaNoWriMo 2011 and 2012 has been running with a troubling undercurrent: something I dubbed ‘tywyllwch’: the forgetting or more literally, the darkness.

Amazing.

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Today I went shopping for all things family T-day-ish. Came home, set up the small turkey I’d gotten for myself and cooked it. Later on I cooked a couple sweet potatoes and a pan of white potatoes and it turned out that the turkey wasn’t really done yet so I had a pretty much veggie pre-T-day dinner. But that was fine. In between all that, I just kept pecking away at the #NaNoWriMo story.

It’s an odd thing about characters, but sometimes they do things you, as the writer, aren’t really expecting. So, sometimes you’re left surprised. At least I am. Like “huh, I didn’t expect it to go this direction.

A few times this month though, the protagonist Matt has just done or said stuff that made me laugh. I hope a reader would laugh too, but I laugh. I wouldn’t have really thought I’d be able to write anything laugh-inducing but what can I say – turns out Matt can be a pretty funny guy. And the last scene I wrote had some silliness in it. The people who knew what was going on went with it, the people who didn’t dealt with it. One didn’t know what was going on, but recognized that silliness is a good thing. Bingo.

It struck me today that the answer to my question of “how will it be when Matt is secure in who he is” may include the ability to be silly and impulsive. So tomorrow, onward and upward.