November recap
By the numbers:
Stories out at the beginning of the month: 4
Acceptances received: 0
Rejections received: 3
Resubmissions: 0
New Submissions: 0
Stories out at the end of the month: 1
Right, so that posting during NaNo didn’t happen. And there’s a story about NaNo this year, too, but that’ll be in a minute. In the meantime, short story submissions! Or the lack thereof… I had three stories come back to me this past month, but I have not turned them around and sent them back out yet. But now that November is over, I can get those back out into the world (maybe with a few minor revisions).
As for NaNo, I did pretty well. I managed to get some words written a couple of days during AmberCon NW, which usually kills five days out of my month. I even wrote a little one morning before running off to sell stuff at a craft show!
But then came the computer problems. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, the screen on my laptop went black while I was mid sentence. But I was able to wiggle the screen a little bit, and it came back. I knew that this laptop was on its last legs. I had it before I moved to Seattle, five and a half years ago. It had already been brought back from the dead once (full system restore, added more RAM, and installed Windows 7). But after the minor screen glitch, it seemed like it was doing okay again, and I wrote on for another week.
Fast forward to the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I had just finished a HUGE two day craft show, and I had six days left to write 15,000 words. It was doable–5,000 on Sunday and 2,000 a day for the remaining five days. And when I turned on my laptop? The screen was dead. Completely, irrevocably dead. I could see the ghostly image of my desktop in the background, dark greys on black, but I couldn’t get the trackpad to do anything. So Jeremy unhooked the monitor from the desktop and we got that hooked up to my laptop. I then pulled every document I had on the laptop onto my flash drive and shut down the laptop.
And then I decided that I was not going to finish my novel in November. There were options, of course. We could have gone to the Best Buy near the mall, on the busiest shopping weekend of the year. I could have converted my novel to an earlier version of Word and worked on it on the desktop (which is on slightly stronger legs than the laptop was). But after two days of craft show selling, I was exhausted, my stock had dwindled on some key items, and I had another show that I needed to prep for. There may have been a slight tantrum related to not wanting to do anything. And then I collected my yarn, got Jeremy to put on his headphones, and watched Nightmare Before Christmas and many episodes of Firefly while I worked on restocking.
My plan now is to wait until after my next craft show, and then take about a week to finish up the novel. So it’s not a technical NaNo win, but I do still think I’m going to get a novel(-ish) out of this year!
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