Novel Maestro

My family came up for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t make time for Nano during that time so I lost a few days. Whoops.

During that time, I assembled a cat tree for Edgar, and Edgar LOVES it. He sits on his little pirate perch all day like he’s king of the castle. Definitely worth the money.

Edgar spies on the neighbors.

In this episode of Edyn Jacks’s “What a Fat Vegan Eats in a Day”, she visits a cat café. I only watched the video about an hour ago, but it might be my new life aspiration. I have a colleague whose aspirations include starting a food truck. I’m going to tell him about the cat café and see if I can change his mind. Who wants a food truck when you can have a cat café?!

Well, I better get back to making up for lost time. That drivel won’t write itself. In the interim, here’s my “Novel Maestro” playlist.

1. NOFX – Six Years on Dope

2. Siouxsie and the Banshees – Spellbound

3. Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun

4. A Radio With Guts – So Damn Beautiful

5. Anti-Flag – When the Wall Falls

6. Powersolo – Baby You Ain’t Looking Right

7. Against Me! – Sink, Florida, Sink

8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps

9. The Cranberries – Zombie

10. Bikini Kill - Rebel Girl

Still Behind (I made dog biscuits)

I made dog biscuits from scratch for the first time.

Also, for the first time, I converted oats to oat flour in my blender. It worked really well!

I used this recipe for the dog treats. Instead of flour, I used the oat flour, and instead of non-dairy milk, I used pumpkin puree. The dough didn’t hold together like a dream, but it held together pretty well.

At the time, it seemed like a good idea to double the batch, but that’s not something I would do next time. Of my two untrained brutes, Saffron is the most food-motivated. It took a while for me to roll out all of the dough, which gave him a lot of time to get increasingly excited about what I was doing. When I ran out into the hangup of having insufficient cookie sheet space, I ended up halving the remaining dough between the two dogs because I felt like the dogs would find the dough anyway before I had the chance to make space on the cookie trays that were in use. One batch will suffice in the future.

Hey, I heard you were making cookies...

Perseverance.

Even Bartleby got in on the action, but he was a little calmer about it and easier to call off.

I used Santa Cruz organic peanut butter because it’s just peanuts: no crappy additives. I was very excited when I discovered this! Mind you, I’ve fed my dogs peanut butter with sugar in it before… but it’s nice to avoid it, if possible, since they don’t metabolize it in the same way that humans do.

I used whole wheat flour to flour the rolling pin and roll out the dough. I made thick biscuits and thin ones, and found that the thin ones held up better in the oven.

I’ll be doing it again, and I’d recommend it to people who like to pamper their dogs. I liked that the ingredients were simple: pumpkin, good peanut butter, oatmeal, and traces of wheat from using whole wheat flour to roll out the dough.

Nanowrimo has personal achievement badges that Wrimos can award themselves. One of these badges is “Novel Maestro” for putting together a “writing soundtrack” for your novel. Perfecting such a soundtrack has been a welcome distraction… but oh so distracting. Once I’ve tweaked it to unnecessary perfection, perhaps I’ll publish the list of songs here.

I also discovered “word sprints”. I love word sprints. They’re helping me a lot.

My family is coming up for a few days this week so I’m hoping to get caught up with my word count by then before I get too far behind (I’m still behind, btw).

Gay Rude Boys

Coming up on a month ago, my bestie Sophia and I were driving down the highway on the way to look at rescue dogs. A car passed us that had a bumper sticker with a dog paw and a rainbow flag inside the paw. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sophia asked. “Do they have a gay dog?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Is that possible?”

Well, Gentle Reader, after having acquired a rescue dog and having him meet my other rescue dog, I can tell you that it’s possible. One of Saffron’s and Bartleby’s favorite pastimes so far is to happily take turns humping each other. We could get into a debate about whether or not that means they’re actually gay, but I like to think of them as my gay rude boys. Gay, because they hump each other, and rude because they are both virtually untrained. We’re working on the “untrained” part, but in the meantime I find my untrained brutes to be quite charming indeed, even when I wake up to the carnage leftover from the night before. Bartleby is crate-trained when I’m not home, but I cherish my late-night cuddle parties with the gay rude boys, so they find ways to entertain themselves while I’m sleeping in. For instance…

• Knock over the water bowl and bring it to the foot of my bed
• Play tug of war with my Hello Kitty pajama pants
• Play tug of war with my Jack Skellington scarf
• Play tug of war with and destroy a knee sock
• De-stuff a novelty pillow
• Destroy sketchbooks
• Urinate on the floor

This has been a long-winded way of saying that I am even more behind in my Nano word count than I was last week, but I’m prepared to take a leaf out of one of my untrained brutes’ books. So far, I have been enshrining my Nano novel as a place to escape to, but I think my story will be more interesting if I set fire to paradise and give myself some betrayal to write about. I will break my own heart in the process, but making the word count will be much easier.

Behind

It is Day 6 of Nano and I am currently behind about four thousand words.

Back when I used to write for realsies, about ten years ago, I used to draw heavily from my day to day life. I remember writing pretty well, too. I remember writing vivid imagery and all that stuff, but my skills are rusted so I’m basically churning out drivel. Which is fine, I think that’s one of the functions of Nano: it’s an exercise of quantity over quality. It’s like going 90 miles per hour on the freeway and giving the cop who’s chasing you the finger, only in this situation the cop is your internal critic.

I did not do adequate research in the weeks approaching Nano, so I’ve been forced to draw some from my life. However, I’m trying to draw inconsequential details from my life so I’m not setting myself up for stewing in a tedious cesspool of personal drama. I do that enough already.

They say to write what you know if you want to write something good. So I figure if I’m intentionally writing what I don’t know, one of the potential consequences is not-great writing. I am trying to provide myself an escape, so if my writing is not-great at the end of the month, I’m okay with that. When in Rome, spew drivel if that’s what’s required to keep up with the word count.

This means, of course, the inconsequential details of my life that appear in my story are mundane details such as eating more Sour Patch Kids than a doctor would recommend and cleaning up dog vomit. In that regard, I’m surprised I haven’t yet written at length about my piles of dirty dishes. The piles of dirty dishes are real: let me tell you…

Anyway, have you tried Tropical Sour Patch Kids? I had some last night. I like the watermelon flavor better, but I would buy the tropical again.