books

November was an interesting month at Elf land. Fifty percent of our family members were participating in the National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. Tanya and I took it up and had a great time with it.

I only came to know about NaNoWriMo mid October when I was trying to educate myself about book sales and other stuff. Someone mentioned NaNoWriMo in their youtube video. It looked exciting, but wasn’t mid October too late to jump into something like that without any planning?

The NaNoWriMo challenge involves writing 50,000 words in the month on November. That amounts to about 1667 words a day. Writers take part in this self regulated challenge with the hope that they will have their novels completed at the end of the month.

I told Tanya about NaNoWriMo. On October 31, we were driving to Tanya’s friend’s place for Halloween, when she suddenly asked what I thought of NaNoWriMo. I told her that I was tempted to give it a try, and she felt the same. So the NaNoWriMo challenge was on.

Tanya surprised me. She said that she had a novel in mind since a long time, with characters and everything. I had no idea! She was also methodical in her approach. She downloaded a format for her novel. For the entire month of Nov, she kept up with it and managed to get through her 50,000 words on Nov 30. This was a major challenge for her since on Mondays and Wednesdays she is busy from 8 am to 7 pm with her trade school and kickboxing. I know she wrote 3000 words in a day more than once! That is no mean task for anyone.

As for me, I had no ideas to begin with. So my plan was to write a bunch of short stories, blogs, research on trash and anything else that I wanted and see where I would get. The challenge proved to be a most rewarding and an amazing learning experience for me. I am still in awe with how much one can achieve with such a simple activity.

To begin, I had nothing to go on. My picture book, “A flying boy” is already written. So I spent the first couple of write ups on making sequels for the book. The sequels were different characters’ points of view of the same story. Finally, I rewrote the entire book in a poetry format! This was the most fun. But after redoing the same story four times, I was absolutely done with it.

I then moved on to my second book, Animal Diaries. This book is proving to be a challenge. To move further, I had to get an opinion. Unfortunately while the editor worked, my book couldn’t move.

I then moved onto trash research. My plan is to ultimately research trash generation and alternatives to plastic generation and hopefully come up with solutions to our trash problems. However, I realized that trying to research as well as write was very time consuming. On a couple of days I worked for four hours. That wasn’t sustainable. So I had to put a lid on the trash!

Now I finally had to pause and think about what to write. When one actually pauses and thinks is when the ideas finally come! To my delight and surprise, stories came as I spent time staring into space.

My second picture book, named “Mili finds her voice”, was the next story that I wrote. My hope is to create a picture book with this story. Of course, picture books are very expensive to produce, so this can become a chapter book if “The flying boy” does not end up generating revenue.

After this I drew a blank. And then a most surprising thing happened. I sat to write a story with no thought in my head. It’s called “Emily’s day”, where Emily doesn’t have any thoughts on how to spend her day. As my story went on, so did Emily’s day. At the end of my story, and Emily’s day, a sweet story came to life. This was an intensely satisfying experience.

Finally, after fifteen days of wandering, jumping from story to story and generating smaller ideas, I had an inspiration that resulted in a 30,000 word book. So far unnamed, this is probably my favorite story that I wrote so far. It’s about things that happen to a ship in a bottle and to various creatures that are linked to the ship. The story that I worked on so far is haphazard, since there was no initial plan and the book came to existence as it moved. In fact, this book is so far like a dream, where things happen and then other things happen, and nothing is planned. So, for instance, the kids started off as 8 year old, and then mid way I had to make them 12 and 13 year old!

Both Tanya and I are very happy to have met the challenge of writing 50K words each. We are, however, leery of what we have written. I can safely say that my 50 K is a lot of garbage (so essentially I did deal with trash!). However, the trash holds great treasures and I am quite optimistic that It’s not going to end up in landfill!

Tanya and I agree that we need to redo a lot of our work. So we are going to be doing a 420JanWriMo, which will be a second writing month in Jan where we redo our work, and hopefully get it to a more reasonable place.

There’s a lot of criticism of NaNoWriMo online. It allows the use of AI for the challenge. People found this very upsetting. However, it doesn’t bother me. AI is here to stay, and we may as well accept the role of AI in writing. I loved NaNoWriMo, because it was a path of self discovery for me. What an amazing challenge. In fact, I looked at it as more of an indulgence to my creative energy than a challenge. Looking forward to repeating such a creative indulgence next year!

Life has been slowly moving on here. We feel the void Rosie left. Lots of little things remind us of her. Simplest things such as shopping for lesser food, not having her sleeping in the most unhandy locations, not taking care of her little needs, come back and haunt us.

On to more positive happenings. Halloween came. We did some seriously good pumpkin carvings. Halloween was quiet because both the kids went out with their friends. I must say I was glad. I am not big on trick or treating. We plan to pick up on art and things now that winter is fast approaching.

One big happening is that both Tanya and I are participating in the National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). So plenty of writing and research going on at our end.

Johan has been working on the camp. He and Tanya are putting roof panels. Other than that, he has worked on cars and houses.

Tanya is busy with her solar tech classes, her barista job and music.

Leena is busy with school and her many projects. She is majorly into face creams, oils etc and keeps coming up with recipes. I am trying to keep up with the supplies!

Kylo Ren the dog: Hello, one and all. Thanks so much for stopping by. I have been lonesome without my lovely wife. Sometimes I visit her grave, but I never know what to say.

Life has been moving along. Rosie rarely moved at all, but her absence is very much felt. The humans mope about. I try to keep them going. It’s working well. We have gone for nice fall walks. The other day mom, Tanya and Leena took me to the park. They started playing basketball. Man, that’s some huge ball. I tried to catch the ball by jumping atop it with my fore paws. It’s not easy, let me tell you.

As far as shooting the hoops is concerned, best leave it to the humans. I don’t get it. Why would you try to throw the ball through some basket far above in the sky? It makes zero sense. Since you humans seem clueless about how a ball works, allow me to clarify. I will describe the structure and purpose of a ball. Any dog will tell you, a ball should be small, ideally the size of a tennis ball. It can be a bit smaller or bigger, but no bigger than what a standard dog snout can hold. Now, some balls are pointy at the edges, almost like a pillow. They call it a foot ball in these parts, even though that ball never touches a foot. If you have been following my posts, you know what I have to say to that. Humans are strange. Why would a hand ball be called a foot ball? That football is not entirely undesirable. Dogs like to bite it in the middle and run around with it. When we get tired, we drop it and sleep on it like it’s our pillow. So the foot ball, or the pillow ball, is a versatile toy loved by dogs.

But to continue, a standard ball is round and should be sized to be held in a dog snout. Why, you ask, must the size be appropriate for a dog snout? This brings me to the purpose of a ball. No! It’s not to throw into a basket. It is also not to fall over like dominoes having a bad day. The sole purpose of a ball is to be thrown as far as possible so that a dog such as me can run fast and catch it.

Today mom got a tennis ball and threw it at me. It was early morning. I was still groggy. I wasn’t upto running behind the ball. Guess what she did next?! She dipped the ball into my water and then threw it. Wow! Juicy ball! I caught it with glee and played with it for a bit.

The one thing that I notice is that now that Rosie is gone, I feel outnumbered. The human energy is overwhelming the house. I am missing the dog energy. Also, my job of protecting Rosie is gone, which makes me feel lazy and bored. What I miss the most is troubling and playing with Rosie. She never actually played but would bark loud complaints. I used to enjoy our back and forth. Oh, heaven help me.

Daisy the chicken: We saw the day Rosie was sick. We were pasted to the fence, staring at her. The humans were trying to revive her. But the animals always know. This was not looking good. Rosie was taken away. I am a bit upset about this. No one asked for my opinion. At the very least, I should have been allowed to say good bye. I think in their worried state, the humans forgot. Rosie was my girl. She and I had that special bond going. But I could only wish her from afar. Once she got back and was buried, I spent time hanging by her grave.

Lazy Laurie the chicken: Ok Daisy, that’s enough. You have been dustbathing by her grave! Oops sorry. Looks like I hurt Daisy’s feelings. Actually, it’s true. If you have read our previous blogs, you will know. Rosie and Daisy were very close. It was a special animal bond. Rosie loved having us around in her old age. But ultimately she just got too old. I can relate actually. At the ripe old age of 8, I can empathize with how Rosie felt. I am the last left from our original brood. I know my time will come soon and I will reunite with my sisters Baby, Dandelion and Chocolate Sprinkles.

Paisley the chicken: I barely knew Rosie, since we only came here in July. I never thought she was to be feared. In fact, my sisters are more ferocious and scary than Rosie ever was.

I wanted to tell y’all how miserable it is to be the lowest in the pecking order. I am constantly bullied. The humans have actually noticed my compromised status in this group. To help me out, they throw feed in various directions. Unfortunately the chickens chase me wherever I try to get in. The only thing that is in my favor is that I am super fast. I grab food and then I dart right off. Crazy Cookie mentioned the other day that I reminded her of Chocolate Sprinkles, who used to dart about in a similar fashion. All I can say is, Chocolate Sprinkles must have been smart, and the lowest in the pecking order! Oh, wait. The human is here. Run!!!