I hadn’t realized it has been so long since I updated the page. I’ve been at the computer a lot, but most of it has been working on my novel for NaNoWriMo. I finished the book, actually. It was on November 21 that I finished it. It’s a small book, but happily I was able to get just over fifty thousand words in it to meet the NaNoWriMo goal. In the end, I got 56,516 words. The crazy thing is that this is the smallest amount of words that I’ve written for NaNo but the first time that I’ve completed a book during November. The first year I did NaNo, I worked on the third novel in my series and got four-fifths of the way through the book with just over one hundred thousand words typed by the end of November. The second year I did NaNo, I worked on the fourth novel in my series and got about a third done with just over seventy thousand words. This year, I got one hundred percent through the book with the word count above. Madness. Of course, this book is vastly different from the other two, which are linear (more or less) stories told from one perspective whereas the book I wrote this year is a “pick your path” book from four different people’s perspectives.

So, this book is finished, and it’s a sort of inter-book that takes place between books three and four (which I really need to get back to and finish). I still need to edit it though, but I’m taking a break from it so I can get a little perspective and distance before launching back into it. There’s that, and well, Ian has distracted me with something that’s related to the books but which isn’t the books. He set me up with a wiki!

Apparently, through the internet hosting site that provides us with our domains and all that good stuff, we have the capacity to set up our own wikis. Mine’s at www.writingingreen.com/wiki, and I’m using it to keep track of all the random characters, events, settings, etc. in the novel series. I’ve been wanting a program that was capable of something like this for a very long time. I have notebook after notebook full of notes that cover single issues but also notes that span multiple volumes and therefore have to be indexed and referenced and good grief it’s a hideous mess of paper and computer documents. For the first book alone, I have somewhere around fifty pages of notes scattered among a half dozen different documents. It’s messy. Having this wiki means I can simply make names, locations, and all that into links and give each one its own page or redirect to the parent page so I can just search for names or dates and find it within my notes on-line. It’s neat, but it’s going to be incredibly time consuming. I already have about a dozen pages written up, and I figure I can get a lot more written today just using the information in my head and without having to turn to my notes yet.

See, I took yesterday, today, and tomorrow off from work as vacation days because I figured I’d need the time in order to work on the novel for NaNoWriMo. The funny thing is that I finished the book on Sunday, a day that I would have had off anyway. Regardless, there’s a lot of work that I need to do like working on presents (I’m crocheting a bunch of little people for Katie’s kids), clean the living room (heh, not high on my list of priorities, though Rook might be coming down soon and will need some place to sleep), and well, work on the novels. I really ought to get back to the fourth book in the series because I left it high and dry after NaNo last year. There was just something odd about it, and it might have been the tone or the fact that so much of its storyline was left up in the air, but one way or the other, it has been gathering dust on my hard drive for some time. I might poke at it when taking breaks from working on the wiki. Hell, working on the wiki might give me the inspiration I need to get back to it. Oh, and I need to make some corrections to books two and three and also add quotations to all the chapters of book three before I can publish it. What a mess! Maybe what I need isn’t a wiki but a damned to-do list, lol.

At any rate, I think I’m gonna need some Bengay for my wrists (the weather is wreaking havoc on my arthritis) before I can get into the notes in earnest. I might play my new Crafting Mama game as a diversion. Yesterday, I made earrings in the game with beads and wire. It’s the fun of crafting without the chance of bodily harm! Hooray!

OK, time to get back to the novels.