has another winner!

:: grins and twirls and does a victory dance ::

"The Zombie Stole My Candy Corn" was validated as a winner on the NaNoWriMo website tonight with a (very) grand total of 51,600 words!

You'll be hearing more about my novel in the next weeks, of course, and I hope to have information by early 2010 if you'd like to order a copy.

For right now, I'm very excited and pleased for and with myself, and tired, too.

I got absolutely NO writing done yesterday, due to Thanksgiving festivities such as church in the morning, spending the afternoon with my in-laws (which really was a lovely dinner, followed by watching Pixar films "Up" and "Ice Age II"). Unfortunately, by the time we made it home, I had a killer of a headache, so I stayed up too late watching TV and then put myself to bed.

Today was better.

Word count as of today: 45,323/50,000!!

And in a cartoon for children, yet! Mr Catyah and I were just watching "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," and he pointed it out to me.

Watch it here -- the part I'm speaking of starts at the 4:20 mark.

Oh, won't someone please think of the children?



*grin*

Warm wishes for a happy Thanksgiving to all of my friends who celebrate it!

I am truly thankful for all of my wonderful friends, near and far!

:: HUGS ::

41,786/50,000 -- almost there! Hopefully I'll get some writing time tomorrow and the rest of this gloriously long weekend. That's one of the things I'm most thankful for today.

41,109/50,000

Nearly 2,000 words written tonight!

Not exactly a great day today, besides the writing, but nothing earth-shatteringly bad, either. But the long weekend stretches out in front of me once I get through tomorrow at work!

39,274/50,000

(10,726 words left!)

Nearly a whole day ahead of schedule again, GO ME!!

38,014/50,000

(Tomorrow's goal is 38,341.)

A good day! 36,092/50,000

33,223/50,000

A little below goal, but I'm tired. Tomorrow will be more productive, and Sunday, too.

*SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*



(Have fun playing "Name that accent!" when Audrey Niffenegger is talking! *grin* Comment below if you can figure it out, BFF and I had ideas, but I want to hear yours!)





I'll be looking for other clips on YouTube of this same event. In the meantime, if you want more of this, check out other clips posted by "MPRDOTORG" -- I see that there are clips from when Barbara Kingsolver came to Saint Paul a few weeks ago!

31,899/50,000!

Yesterday evening's festivities are going to be rebroadcast at 10am (Central Standard Time)next Monday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm pretty sure that you can listen to it online if you're so inclined. I know I've listened to Prairie Home Companion that way.

****

There was a question and answer period at the end of the evening, and BFF suggested that I ask a question, but of course, I couldn't think of one. And then I thought of TWO last night/this morning that I would have LOVED to ask SK (and Audrey N, too).

1) Mr. King, I have really enjoyed reading books by the authors that you have helped to publicize over the years, especially Meg Garddiner and Ron McLarty. Do you have any authors that you could tell me about that you're currently enjoying?

2) A question for both of you -- as an amateur writer myself, I've really enjoyed people coming up to me and telling me that they enjoyed something I've written. It really means a lot to me. I know you've both being doing this for a long time now -- Stephen in particular -- in front of some really large crowds. Is it still really exciting for you to talk to groups and hear the applause, or would you rather be at home writing?

***

And dang -- I KNOW there was something else, but of course I didn't think to write it down, and now I can't remember again!

Little tidbits -- SK didn't do any booksignings afterward. He would have been TOTALLY mobbed, and would probably STILL be standing there right now, signing books for people and talking to them.

Audrey did, and there was a pretty decent line of people waiting in line for her by the time we got out of the balcony. I actually considered getting in line to have her autograph my program (which was a reprint of the articles about them that were in the Sunday Star Tribune (Stephen King) and Monday's paper (Audrey Niffenegger). You can find those articles at the Minneapolis Star Tribune website, I'm sure.

BFF and I were sitting amid a BIG group of SK item collectors that all seemed to know each other. I heard one guy talking about a special edition of "Firestarter" by Stephen King. It has a special asbestos cover! Interesting. But I'm not really into collecting things that can't be *read*, you know? Because if something spills on it, it ruins the value or whatever? I like *decent* copies of stuff -- if somebody borrows a book from me and breaks the spine, I'm going to want to replace it and find another one that's still pretty and shiny -- BookMooch has been great for that, btw.

One really nice detail about Audrey N. that I particularly liked -- she has cats. I don't remember how many, but she mentioned how hard it is to write when the cat is walking across or sitting on your laptop. Kerri, the host for the evening, asked if she couldn't just take them *off* the computer, and Audrey gave her the stare that certified "cat-people" give obviously "not-cat-people".

I wonder if Stephen King still has that old Corgi dog.

There was something else I was going to tell you all about it, but it doesn't really matter right now, maybe I'll think of it later.

ETA: Eee! I remembered what it was!
There were a considerable number of teenagers at this event, and the evening's announcer commented on the fact that a foundation that supports getting city youth involved in the arts had spend a good chunk of money to get tickets for them, and he just wanted to thank them for that, and thank the teenagers for coming. There was a nice round of applause.
But at various points during the evening, you would suddenly see a shadowy person rise from the seat in the darkness, or sometimes groups of them, who would then stand in the aisle to put their coats on and leave the theater. Another 15 or 20 minutes would go by, they'd come back in and stand in the aisle and take their coats off again and find their seats.
We weren't that far from the door, so when the door was opened for them by an usher, who would usually put a finger to her lips, we could see them clearly -- that they were teenagers, and they were rolling their eyes at the usher.
My BFF said later that if she'd had something heavy on hand and had been close enough, she would've liked to have hit them in the neck, with say a can of pop or something. Me too.
I'm all for introducing kids to the arts, don't get me wrong. But crying infants shouldn't be brought to concerts and plays and sullen teenagers who don't know how to act politely in public (particularly in a dark theater) shouldn't go *anywhere*.
When we left, there were large groups of teenagers and adults standing just outside the door to the theater, smoking.

ighty books so far this year, YAY!!

:: is proud ::

Another two graphic novels -- one that I read about in a LJ post by author Poppy Z. Brite, highly recommending it, and another that was highly recommended by oddmonster.

Book 79 was "A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge" by Josh Neufeld. I picked up these books from the library at the same time, they both came in for me within days of each other, which was kind of a fun coincidence. At first glance, I thought I would enjoy this book more than book #80. The immediate effect of Katrina on people from New Orleans in various levels of social standing as told in graphic novel form sounded fascinating to me, and I was really looking forward to reading it.
Unfortunately, it just didn't hold up to what I had hoped for. The artwork was flat and colorless --the artwork was printed with a variety of color backgrounds, so that some pages have squares or rectangles of aqua, some are yellow, some are pink, with the illustrations done in black and white on top of the odd colors. On some of the pages, the background is purple, with people drawn as having yellow skin, whether those people are white, African American, or Hispanic.
The stories told are of people that the author/artist actually spoke to about their experiences, but their anger and frustration and pain didn't engage me, which made me feel very sad. These people deserved to have their stories told in a better, more expansive way than this, I feel. I honestly feel like I would have felt more personally touched by the people affected by reading about them in a newspaper article rather than this book, and I honestly can't recommend it.

Now, at the library when I picked up both books, I flipped through book #80 - "Fray" by Joss Whedon, and thought "Oh, dear. It's a superhero comic, like Wonder Woman or something. I don't know if I'm going to enjoy this very much." I hoped that I would be able to find something I liked, so as not to make oddmonster regret recommending it to me.
In reading it, I was surprised at how quickly I was drawn into the story and the characters, and how VERY wrong I had been in my first judgement of it. The illustrations are *gorgeous*, and there is a wonderfully deep storyline that I really enjoyed. I grew to love some of the characters and hate others, and I only have one question.

PLEASE, oddmonster, is there a SEQUEL?

I think the title of this LJ post says it all. There were some slight frustrations with the evening, as there will always be, but they were no more than just a blip on the enormous radar screen of the night.

( Here We Go! )

28,751/50,000! Still ahead of schedule, still rocking out the words!

And TOMORROW is my evening with Stephen King!

Stay tuned for a HUGE SQUEE!FEST post tomorrow night!

Total word count: 27,593/50,000

Wow, more words tonight than I was expecting! More words tomorrow.

*Excelsior!* (Which is more than just a suburb of Minneapolis.)

Not that I was a tremendously huge fan of his, but yet another actor from the 1980s has passed away.

http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/11/16/the-equalizers-edward-woodward-dead-at-79/?icid=main|htmlws-main-n|dl2|link5|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tvsquad.com%2F2009%2F11%2F16%2Fthe-equalizers-edward-woodward-dead-at-79%2F

Terrible to say, but I was fond of him especially because of his name, which he always seemed to pronounce as "Ed-wood Wood-wood".

Sorry if that's too flippant, but this has been a long, strange day. Maybe I'll even post about that tonight. But I'm still trying to get around to working on my NaNo novel! I just want so much to go take a nap...

Staying ahead of schedule still!

Today's total: 26,869/50,000

Tomorrow's goal WAS 26,672, but I'm going to aim for Tuesday's goal of 28,339 instead.

Word count as of today: 25,318/50,000

(The word count goal for today to be on pace to win was 23,338. Tomorrow's goal *was* 25,005.)

:: victory dance ::