Tag: nanowrimo

Two Weeks to NaNoWriMo

So I need to come up with some kind of plan. I remember telling y’all (or yelling into the void, whichever) that I need to write about eight 200-word posts a day to make my goal. Eight and one-third, to be precise.

In addition to travel and book blogging, I think I may add a round of food blogging as well. You see, I’ve got a whole bunch of cookbooks and I’ve hardly ever used them. So since Alex is grown and hardly ever home, I’m going to start to, well, use them.

I cooked Diane Seed’s version of Pasta al Boscaiola, which is the rosso version. The rosso version uses tomatoes and the bianco version uses cream. You basically sautee garlic in olive oil, then add mashed up tomatoes, salt, pepper and parsley. Then you top with sauteed mushrooms. I love sauteed mushrooms.

I knew that the recipe I was following was supposed to feed six people, so I cooked a bunch of mushrooms and then realized that the mushrooms were a topping and not an ingredient in the sauce. So I topped the spaghetti with a few mushrooms and ate the rest as a rather odd dessert.

Today’s gratuitous photo. I took this at the San Antonio Botanical Garden in 2009. The sculpture there is one of my favorites. I don’t know if the gardens own it or what, but I look for it every time I go to the garden. Speaking of which, I haven’t been there in more than a year, I don’t think.

It was really delicious and an excellent way to start my exploration of these cookbooks.

Not-so-gratuitous Amazon Link this time. The book I got the recipe from is The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. I’m going to try posting my Amazon link with an image. Let’s see how it turns out:

ETA2: It didn’t. It was just a big block of HTML. So, back to just text links for now. The Top Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed.

ETA: This post was 253 words. If I can do that consistently next month, I’ll have over 60,000 words for the month

I’m Going to Try Writing Again

I actually had a point when I first opened this editor, like, two days ago, but I can’t remember what it was.

I’ve tried, off-and-on, to “win” NaNoWriMo, which is, on the surface, writing 50,000 words in the month of November, but in practice, is about turning your brain off and not worrying about what you’re writing and just writing. So, in September and October, I’ll try to have some kind of point to my posts.

But in November, on days when I don’t have enough idea (and since my blog posts tend to run, you know, 200 words or so, I’ll have to come up with about eight blog posts a day), God only knows what I’ll end up writing about.

I’m also thinking that November would be a good time to take some kind of trip. If we can leave Texas by then, maybe Carlsbad. If not, maybe Big Bend?

Actually, if I take a four-day road trip in November, that’ll only give me 26 days to write. So nine blog posts a day.

Maybe I’ll come up with some kind of pattern. A travel idea first, a reading topic next, something from Google’s I Feel Lucky button next, a mobile phone gaming idea next, unpacking a childhood trauma next, something, I don’t know, music-related next, another I Feel Lucky result. That’s, oh, dear God, seven blog posts. What can be my eighth and ninth? Foreign languages? Art? That looks like a good place to start.

There has to be more to me than travel, mobile phone gaming, reading, art, foreign languages, music, and childhood trauma. Maybe this will let me find it.

Maybe I should dump one of those I Feel Luckies and post about trying to get my stuff together. I need to empty out my closet and find someone to gift a bunch of knit blankets to and bag up a bunch of books that I’ll never read again and shred so much junk mail.

And maybe, at some point, I will be able to turn off my inner critic and will be producing more than 200 words per blog post and thus can cut down on the number of posts I have to produce per day.

How do I know how many words a post is? I swear there used to be a tool somewhere that would tell me. I guess I can just paste the blog posts into a Word document and count them that way.

I remember what the point was supposed to be! It was reading and foreign language. But that’s another post for, probably tomorrow. I’m meeting Ray to go for a walk in nine hours and I haven’t gotten any rest yet.

Ooh! Photography! I haven’t posted an image in a blog post in ages. I think I’m just going to start looking through my old photos and picking out ones I like and pasting them into my blog posts regardless of whether they’re on-topic or not, and for the ones I *really* like, I bet I could make an entire blog post about them.

But, for now, good night.