Amen, she finished the first week! She’s 1,334 words ahead of schedule. Not bad for a galumphing slumper. Not bad at all.
And, oh gee, only 23 more days to go. 🙄
Holy shit, we need a vacation in here! This working for circus peanuts from a cranky, overly-caffeinated author is frickin’ insane. We should be getting hazard pay.
Ah, but she’s nearing the end of Sutures, and we happen to know LAC 14 is going to be a blast.
Well, we kind of got off to a bad start today. We sort of took over her bath tub, nearly drowned her with LAC 14 ideas. But, she yelled at us enough that we finally got with the program. For some odd reason, she is bribing us with circus peanuts. Who the hell eats circus peanuts?
And all those ideas… Well, she’ll thank us if/when she’s scrambling to start LAC 14 with the NaNoWriMo clock still ticking. Authors do not always know best.
Okay, which ones of you doubted we could behave? Come on, raise those hands, you big chickens!
Look at that orange bar! After three days, she’s even a bit ahead of the game. No doubt, that is courtesy of the yours trulies, also known as the DWD.
But, holy shit, it has been really hard staying on task! She has proven to be a tough taskmaster when she needs to be. We caught hell this morning for zooming ahead to LAC 14. Yeah, we know she’s right: 14 can’t really take place until 13 owns its own pages. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, we are getting there! 🙂
The LAC 2012 wall calendar is ready for ordering! You can get it here. Come on, you know you want us staring at you every day of the next year. Who the hell wouldn’t? Plus, this is the last year our books will fit perfectly in 12 slots. Okay, that’s assuming—majorly assuming—the author actually finishes LAC 13. Yeah, I know: She will.
This could possibly be a first…
We are rescinding the D Double D dare issued to the author. It’s not that we don’t think she can reach the half mil by Monday; she’ll force herself to out of a sense of obligation. But doing so will not cause her to galumph. We need her to galumph, and for that, she needs to feel a sense of triumph. She’ll get her groove back—in her own strange way. We’ll work on patience (and a whole lot of whispering) while she does her thing.
Or just pissed off that I put a bad song in your head?
Anyway… Watching that orange bar is a real sleeper, huh? It is moving, though! She is plugging away, despite the slump that is driving her mad.
She’s got 4,711 words to go … and a week to get them from gray matter to screen. I probably should rephrase that. It’s not much of a stretch to see her bashing her head into her monitor. 🙄
Keep those digits crossed, you guys!
Drum roll please…
The orange meter over yonder gets a bump!
And, Nora Butler gets to see the light of day. You can find her short story, “Cookery,” in the LAC Bookstore.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That orange word-counter bar thingy over there has not moved at all today. Commas aren’t counted so it could have been another of her Wilde “one of those days,” but I happen to know that’s not the case.
I am happy to report that she got Nora Butler off her desk. Um, now that I think about it, maybe having people on her desk is why she can’t write. Okay, bad joke. Let me rephrase.
ahem
She completed Nora Butler’s short story, entitled “Cookery.” She lets stories sit for a spell to age or something before she’ll give them the heave-ho, but it is done. I’m thinking by week’s end.
I’m also thinking the D Double D dare we issued had a lot to do with her finishing the story. If it’s off her desk, what else does she have to fret over now but LAC 13? Huh? We figure it’s a tactical maneuver on her part. She has quietly cleared the battlefield. She’ll lie low, act like we didn’t hook her, and then when we least expect it, she’ll come out typing. Ya think?
Oh, and a little trivia from Professor Bleeker… Galumph is a Lewis Carroll portmanteau word from Through the Looking Glass. It’s a super-sized combo of gallop and triumph. And, yes, just to be clear: I think the author actually did gallop triumphantly when she finished Nora’s story. I know we did. You feel free to galumph, too. Go ahead. We promise not to laugh … at least not loudly.
Shh…
I snuck out.
Okay, truth be told, Ginny shoved me out here. I’m sure you can imagine what that was like.
Anyway, Ginny has an idea to get the author out of her slump. A challenge. A spitball gauntlet. Dare I say, a dare?
See, the author is obsessed with her word counts, which is half the reason she’s miserable: she’s been falling short. She’s got this weird spreadsheet thing that I’m sure only the Anal Retentive One could appreciate. Individual book totals, series totals, etc. divided by years. That big cumulative total passed 860,000 today, and the author got a fleeting thrill from it as she slogs to a million.
And that little thrill was what got Ginny thinking…
The official LAC series (books 1-13) total is 491,762. Ginny said that’s awfully, awfully close to half a million words. Kris called it striking distance. I called it spitting distance. My favorite project manager called it approaching a milestone. The schoolteacher called it 8,238 words to go. Maggie called it cool. Janice called it flippin’ cool, even though she was “excluded” from the first book. Alison wanted to know what having half a million words actually meant. Holly and Laura … well … the artist and the detective took it as an excuse to slink off and kiss that many times—no surprise there.
Do you see where Ginny’s going with this? Even I do so I suspect it’s a piece of cake for you. The slumping one needs a kick in the ass. She needs to stop fretting over the Wilde commas and remember what’s important. Write, writer! Right?
So, at Ginny’s behest, I am taking my life in my hands…
Hey, Roz, we D Double D dare you to hit 500,000 LAC words by Monday the 26th!
Okay, now I’m running the hell out of here. Hey, but keep an eye on that meter thing in the left menu over there. I promise to keep updating it.
Well, hello, light of day!
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the one who crabbed at the author about my silence as of late! I get to come out and play! High-five!
The bad news…
The author is in a slump. It is not pretty. She’s miserable. She makes everyone else miserable. Oscar Wilde said about his own writing: I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out. Yep, that about sums up our author, except that the comma insertion/extraction is preceded by many swear words and major deliberation about where she is going to write. Sometimes it’s her corner cubby. Sometimes it’s the desk. Sometimes it’s the back step. But wherever she ends up, there’s that damn comma. She ordered a drafting table, and she’s strangely convinced that this is what will get her back in her groove. Jesus, I hope it’s coated with comma-retardant.
Kris says we should hush for a bit, give her a break, cut her some slack. Laura says we should haul her ass into a clinic. She figures that if they run a brain scan, there will be LAC 13 in its entirety. It is all in there. Even the author knows it’s all in there. Do you guys read brain scans?
The good news…
She has been writing most days. It’s just not her usual strides. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless. She’s almost done with Nora Butler and her short story. She hit the 10,000 mark on LAC 13. She’s meditating, eating brain food, exercising, journaling, groveling, etc. I’ve been reading over her shoulder lately as she’s pored through a bazillion author self-help books. It’s normal: they all say. But she’s never been too quick to simply embrace normal. However, I figure that if they don’t cart her away, she’ll be fine—we’ll be fine—and LAC 13 will be completed.
Still, everybody cross your fingers!
