I'm moving

No, not my blog. My cat and I are moving into a gated community for seniors, and it may take me some time to get settled in. Tomorrow I'll sign the lease and start moving boxes over there each time I go. Too much is happening, so don't expect to hear from me anytime soon. I really am looking forward to this, so be glad for me, but moving (as most of you probably know) takes time and effort. I'll read whatever you say in the comments, but don't expect me to say much, if anything, until I finally get things in some sort of order. Kiki, my cat, won't be happy to have to go in the car, but maybe she'll be happy when she realizes the other cat (Sammy is my roommate's cat) won't be living in the same apartment with us. They both grew up as only-cats and resent each other. Sammy and Donna will be moving into a different apartment next week. Here's Kiki among the boxes:

My ship crossed the finish line a day early

When I got within about 127 words of reaching the goal of having a 50,000-word draft of my novel (which doesn't mean it's finished, of course), I furled the sails and waited. Then last evening I went off to our region's Big Push Write-In wearing a new t-shirt, given to me by my friend in honor of this momentous occasion. On the front of it are these words:
Careful, or you'll
end up in my novel
And there, among friends, I typed the last words needed to cross the line for NaNoWriMo's word-count goal. No, I didn't stand up and cheer and shout, but it was fun to share that time with them. Then I entered the word count in the meter at the top of my profile page, confusing the wrimo sitting next to me. Yes, it was deliberate -- because I wanted to see my word-count meter turn solid green. Then (and only then) did I put the **whole** kit and caboodle through the validator to see the meter turn gloriously purple with WINNER! across the face of it. Wanna see?


Or visit my Bookbuddybonnie profile page to read all about it.

Wanna see what I've been doing?

Absolute Vanilla wrote this comment on my previous post:

"Bonnie, are you okay? There seems to have been no blogging activity for a long while - or are you just very busy with NaNo? Do so hope all is well."

Then she signed off with this: "xxx"

Isn't she sweet? Here's what I say to her (and everyone else who has wondered what's happening in my life):


On September 23rd, I got an email that said, "Bookbuddybonnie, you are now an administrator for the group
United States :: Tennessee :: Chattanooga." Here's how I felt about taking on a volunteer job that takes lots of time and energy and pays nothing ... except joy, of course:


Never fear, dear Vanilla, all is well. Actually, I have been blogging like mad over on my NaNo blog for this year ... Bonnie's NaNoWriMo* 2008.

...and monitoring and writing on the forum for the Chattanooga Region of Nano, which already has 17 threads. I monitor this board because I'm the municipal liaison for my town, what you could think of as the link between the powers that be and the 78 people here. Herding writers is kind of like herding cats. Tonight we are having a 3-hour party at the home of an enthusiastic member of our group. (We've been meeting once or twice a week and two hours at a time was not enough for these folks.) According to the statistics that accompany my user name wherever it goes on the NaNoWriMo site, I have written 71 posts, so far, on our forum.

Though these two writing projects amount to many, many words, the real BIGGIE is, of course, the NaNoWriMo project itself. Today is the exact middle of the month of November (NaNo month) and before the end of the day I expect to have completed 25,000 words of the 50,000-word, rough-draft-novel goal for all Wrimos. Yay, me! You can keep up with my progress on that link to my other blog ... I have my daily goals set out there, plus how much I actually achieved each day (see it on that blog's sidebar).

Do you suppose I've done enough writing in two weeks to exempt me from posting here as well? Ah, but my friends need to know I'm doing well ... it's just that I'm not doing it here.

Sorry. I still love you all. Oh, one more thing ... two of my grandchildren got married in October and the one whose wedding was out of town had a reception here in Chattanooga a week ago. I went. (Until I wrote this for Vanilla, I hadn't realized how busy I've been!)

Love,
~~~ Bonnie

Look at what some students wrote

I snitched this from Dewey, who got it from Elaina:

To the Woman (We Think You’re a Teacher) with the Books on the 2 Train
By some anonymous students

On the platform for the 2 train
you stand with a book in your hand
the pages open
Which is how you enter the train
Reading

Sometimes you smile, or frown
Once you even cried
on the train
when you were reading Night
and a man sitting across the aisle
said he cried too, when he read that book
and we thought,
we want to read that book
so we did

And then you were reading all those
basketball books
by Walter Dean Myers
so we read those too
speeding along on the 2 train
one time you saw us reading Slam
and you said
I love that book
and do you think Slam is going to make it in high
school?
We do, we think he’s going to make it

Then you were reading some really hard stuff
Epistemology of the Closet, Postmodern Narrative
Theory
and we tried those, but we think you have to have read
the books those authors have read, if you want to read
their books

Our favorite is when you are reading poetry
Picnic, Lightning
and you lean back against the seat
and smile
and keep reading the same page
again and again
we do that now and it’s really nice

Last week you were reading The Life of Pi
and we rushed out to buy it
So we could be in the lifeboat
adrift in the blue, blue sea
with the boy, the Bengal Tiger, and you

If we don’t see you next year
on the train
Maybe sometime we’ll bump into each other on the
platform
You’ll know us because
we’ll have books in our hands

I like it, I like it! Thanks, Dewey!

Meme and you

Absolute Vanilla has tagged me to do a meme.

*Tagged bloggers post answers on their blogs & replace questions as they wish.
*Tagged bloggers state who they were tagged by & cannot tag the person whom they were tagged by.

1. What do you do before bedtime?
Blog and/or read, usually both.

2. What is your favorite sound?
Water rippling gently over rocks, the way it did in the yard of the house where we raised our children. I call that sound mellifluous. Otherwise, I enjoy the sound of silence. I guess that basically means I like not having constant human sounds (chatter or what passes for music to some) when I'm trying to think or write.

3. What were your childhood fears?
Because of our blackout shades, I worried about planes flying low over our house during World War Two. As far inland as Chattanooga is, it seems unlikely that bombers would have gotten this far, but I can only wonder why the whole country would have had to install black shades as we did.

4. What place have you [visited, changed to:] lived that you can't forget and want to go back?
As per the instructions, I bracketed and changed one word to make the question one I like. I like staying put and getting to know the same place in depth, in various lights, at different seasons of the year. So the place I can't forget is the house with the mountain stream running through the back yard, with its treehouse for the children beside a tree (the twins were five and their brother two).

5. What has made you unhappy these days?
Noise pollution (see above), greedy excessiveness that has tumbled the markets, and assumption of entitlement ... no, not those on welfare, but those who feel entitled to park in front of doors to run in "for a minute," making old ladies on walkers have to navigate around their SUVs. These are the same people who park in spots reserved for the truly handicapped, when their only handicap seems to be mental, as in, unable to empathize with the plight of another.

6. What websites do you visit daily?
Bonnie's NaNoWriMo* 2008, Words from a Wordsmith, Weekend Wordsmith, Bonnie's Books, Banned Books ... wait, these are MY blogs. Well, it's true, I do visit them every day, plus blogs of online friends.

7. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
Vanilla is absolutely my kind of person! She has great imagination, possibly bestowed by a hen with attitude. She a great photographer who likes to play in the virtual darkroom.

8. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head?
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, after Dewey mentioned Mary Poppins on her blog.

9. What’s your favorite item of clothing?
Comfortable sweats in the winter, but in general anything with pockets. I think it's unfair that guys get pockets, but women don't usually. And that's why most women carry bags. I wear jeans year round, mostly so I have pockets for keys and money and such.

10. What is your dream for the future?
To time travel into the past ... or at least, finish a novel where my protagonist gets to do that.

Now, who shall I tag? Any of you who are interested in this one, which was actually kind of fun.

A character fault

I need help with the novel I'll be writing in November. Lilli, my protagonist, wants to time travel to the past. Nearly everyone she's told wants to know one of two things:

Why would anybody want to travel into the past?
... or ...
Wouldn't it be more interesting to go into the future?

So what reasons can anyone give for wanting to go either direction, instead of being satisfied to be here and now?

I need to know right away because Lilli thinks she's figured out what George Orwell knew and can get herself into the past without using his (or anybody else's) time machine. I don't want her to go until I find a way to go with her. After all, a character should share her thoughts with her author, don't you think?

What an author says to her editor

Susan of Patchwork Reflections has tagged me to do a meme:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your blog along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
* Tag five other people to do the same.

I started counting sentences. Let's see ... fifth sentence down ... "I think pizza should be at the top, what about you?" ... Yes, I do. Wait! That's the fifth sentence down in the closest BLOG, which happened to be Susan's, but it's supposed to be the closest BOOK, dummy. So the closest book, on top of a short stack of three I got from the library, is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. On page 56 is a letter from Juliet to her editor:

I have an idea for a new book. It's a novel about a beautiful yet sensitive author whose spirit is crushed by her domineering editor? Do you like it?

I haven't read the book yet, but I'd say something interesting must have happened on the previous pages. The other letter on page 56 has only three lines:

Dear Sidney,
I was only joking.
Love, Juliet

Okay, I am officially curious about the relationship between author Juliet and editor Sidney.

Now to tag five people. Count off as you read this post. Yes, really, count off in the comments section. The first five people to comment are tagged. (I am sitting at the computer chuckling to myself at my own cleverness. Isn't this just the best way in the world to get out of having to single out five people? Unless ... oh me, oh my, this didn't occur to me in time ... unless what happens is that NOBODY will admit to having read this post and I get no comments at all. So be it. If that happens, then the meme stops here. Ready, set, go!)

Nothing yet.

Still nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Does it seem extremely silent in here today?

Nothing ...

... nothing ...