Carol Moncado

Sigh. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen to me often, but it is today. I wrote 530 words yesterday and most of them are going to get deleted. (Okay, probably not deleted. Probably moved to a different section outside of the manuscript and possibly recycled for a bonus scene for the newsletter or some such thing.)

Sigh more.

But the scene doesn’t really work. I had Benjamin and Katrin going to a birthday bash for the king with dancing and all of that, but I have specific reasons for Katrin not dancing with a bunch of people yet, but I don’t want them to give some excuse like a sprained ankle for her to sit out. So it’s changing to something else.

Which means 530 words out the window, but I have a plan for the replacement. That will take me to about 53K words or so. I have some of the end planned and am guesstimating it’ll take 12-15K words to write, but I think I’m going to jump ahead to it (I really do rarely write out of order) and then I’ll know exactly how long it is and it might give me some hints as to what actually happened in the middle there. Plus, I think it’ll write quickly and I need 9800 words or so to “win” NaNo. That might do it. I’d love to finish today.

I DID get the calendaring done yesterday. So Reclaiming Hearts is all on the calendar and so is In Concert with the King, at least what’s already written. So that’s a yay!

Leaving the official stats for now, but will make note of it tomorrow…

Yesterday’s Stats:

In Concert With the King
Yesterday: 530
Total: 50772

NaNoWriMo 2017
Yesterday: 530
Total: 41485
Anticipated Completion Date (50K words): November 17 (up a day)

50K for the book that is. Not for NaNo. Yet. Tomorrow or Thursday most likely, though today is remotely possible (but not probable because I have other stuff to do).

I got the above book today. Research you know! But my other packages won’t be here tomorrow instead of today :(. Guess I looked at the date wrong. Sigh.

Today, I’ll post a discussion question for A Kaerasti for Clari in my readers’ group. I’m also going to read Reclaiming Hearts (or at least skim it). I think I said I was going to do that yesterday, but didn’t. I did clean my desk and find a bunch of calendars for other books.

We had a band booster board meeting and general meeting last night. It was a small group which was kind of nice, though I missed those who weren’t there.

Benjamin and I were also surprised by Katrin last night. We expected her to react one way to something he did, but instead she got mad. Silly girl.

What? You think I have control over the characters?! Pardon me while I literally rotfl ;). Sometimes it amazes me how little control I have. I can TRY to write something the way I THINK it should go, but if the characters have a mind of their own, it just doesn’t work. Then I have to rewrite it. So I usually just let them do their thing and it almost always works better that way ;).

Okay – time to get to calendaring RH and what I have of ICWTK so far.

I keep forgetting to point out the stat at the bottom of the NaNo stats. Over 600K words written during NaNo over the years! WOW!

Yesterday’s Stats:

In Concert With the King
Yesterday: 2736
Total: 50242

NaNoWriMo 2017
Yesterday: 2736
Total: 40955
Anticipated Completion Date (50K words): November 16

So I decided to be industrious while my husband was out of town and replace the fixtures (except the shower head) in our shower/tub combo. So I buy everything I need (including the correct – allegedly – new knob/faceplate) and have the kids turn the water off yesterday.

Then I disassemble the old one (not paying too much attention because why would I? I’m putting a new one one…) and go to put the new one in place.

And realize that the hole in my tub wall isn’t big enough because apparently the standard size when our house was built and the standard size now isn’t the same.

Sigh.

So I go to Lowe’s and they don’t have it. They send me to a contractor supply store about ten miles away. They don’t have it (and weren’t very friendly, but they don’t deal with the general public very often either) and tell me about a couple other places – all the way across town and I have to pick up kids in thirty minutes so that won’t work. I call one who thinks he has what I need but isn’t sure. The other doesn’t answer. I give up and decide to just clean what I have (because the insides of the handle etc have gotten all gunky over the years). Which means I’m not replacing any of it because if I’m doing it I’m replacing them all not just part.

So I get home and get it reassembled. Have a kid turn the water back on and it runs like a sieve. Turn it off. Decide to disassemble the one in the kids’ bathroom carefully because they’re the same one and I can make sure it’s put back together right.

Realize I’ve broken the inside of the knob. Sigh.

Put the kids’ on in my bathroom. Turn the water on. It’s right. So put the knob back in their bathroom. Turn the water on to fill up my tub to soak some other stuff. Realize the kids’ water had been running too so that knob has an issue now.

Decide crying might be viable as an option. Go vote. Go back to Lowe’s and get two new knobs (one brand name, one after market because that’s what they had) in case I’d also broken the kids’. Go to guitar lessons. Hang out with Tory. Yay!

Get home.

Manage to strip the screw in the knob in the kids’ room. See pic above.

Text the neighbor who works construction. No answer. Call a friend who built his own house. No answer. Call Lowe’s. We’ve got a doohickey. Go to Lowe’s to find out someone had bought the doohickey at one point and returned it and it’s probably not any good. Get home to drill it out following Lowe’s dude’s instructions. Break the smallest bit I could find. Apparently, we’ve broken the other small ones before. Text the neighbor (who had texted me back by then).

Sure. He can help. Today, which was tomorrow at the time. After he gets home from work with his tools.

Commence crying as the viable option.

Sigh.

I texted him back that I can go get drill bits and have a drill, but have no water until I get this done.

He takes pity on me and comes over (in his pajamas, poor guy!) and manages to somehow use a thingie to turn the screw into a flathead and gets it out. The knob isn’t broken, just on upside down. Get it fixed. Thank him profusely. Offer to pay. He refused. Promised him cookies next time we make some. He said he’d originally thought it was just the water to that bathroom that was turned off. Told him I could have lived with that (we haven’t had water in our bathroom sink since August because the one in the kids’ bathroom took three hours to change and we just haven’t had time). He agreed water to the whole house was a different issue.

Put the new knob on in my bathroom. Good thing the kids’ wasn’t broken because the aftermarket one didn’t work. New one was upside down. Turned it over. Put it back on.

Yay! It worked right!

Ugh.

So I didn’t want to write last night, but I did anyway. Not as much as I would have wanted, but more than I would have if I had just curled up with NCIS like I wanted.

Today is chiro and massage and I think lunch with a friend. YAY! Then words later I hope.

Yesterday’s Stats:

In Concert With the King
Yesterday: 2049
Total: 36364

NaNoWriMo 2017
Yesterday: 2049
Total: 27077
Anticipated Completion Date (50K words): November 13 (up a day)

 

Once again, this shouldn’t surprise anyone…

My oldest daughter’s boyfriend was over last night and we were watching the movie MAX about a Military Working Dog whose handler dies in battle and goes to live with the brother. At one point Max, the Belgian Malinois, is fighting off two bad guy Rottweilers. As dog fights go, it was fairly tame, especially compared to what it would have been like in real life.

But my dogs wigged out. Mr. Benny shook like crazy and Jett ran around barking at everything. Finally, I snuggled Benny close and, well, Jett kept barking and occasionally checking to make sure Benny and I were okay.

Today’s post is much later than I have been the last few days, in large part because I was trying to do a home improvement project that Just. Didn’t. Work. Sigh. More on that tomorrow. Maybe.

To answer a question I got on yesterday’s blog (I saw it, but haven’t approved or replied yet… your first comment has to be approved, but after that you should be good to go)… In Concert with the King is King Benjamin’s story! I’m so loving it! But it’s book 5 in Crowns & Courtships. It’s being written before 3 & 4 because it’s dedicated to my cousin who is quite ill and I want to get him a copy ASAP. As soon as this draft is done and winging it’s way to him, I’ll hop on book 3 and hopefully have it out by the end of the year.

You missed book 2 you say? Well it released TODAY! A Kaerasti for Clari is in the Out of the Blue Bouquet collection that released this morning! Be sure to check it out – it’s a super fun set where each book has a misdelivered bouquet of flowers and the in the last book you find out why for each of them! Plus, these are some AMAZING authors!

Yesterday’s Stats:

In Concert With the King
Yesterday: 3290
Total: 34315

NaNoWriMo 2017
Yesterday: 3290
Total: 25028
Anticipated Completion Date (50K words): November 12

To anyone who knows Mr. Benny, this isn’t news.

But the dog is crazy.

For the last few months, especially at night, he’ll only drink his water if I’m looking at him. Occasionally, he’ll get desperately thirsty enough to drink anyway, but not usually. He stands there and huffs, then growls, then barks at me until I turn around (the back of my desk chair is usually facing his bowl).

He’s nuts.

I didn’t end up in my friends’ rec room as long as originally planned yesterday, but I did get some words in. Only about half as much as I originally planned. I took a kid to work this morning and recorded most of a scene while I drove back. Transcribed it after I got home. While texting with my first reader today, I had some ideas on how to get to the next already written scene and it should be a lot of fun. Hopefully, I’ll get a lot done today around doctor’s appointments for all four kids today (two checkups, four flu shots).

I might have changed my time zone on the NaNo site to Alaska so when I input my daily numbers at 1:45am, it still counts it for yesterday (since I count “before bed” as the day). I’ll change it back and anticipate winning LONG before Nov. 30 anyway…

Yesterday’s Stats:

In Concert With the King
Yesterday: 5364
Total: 31025

NaNoWriMo 2017
Yesterday: 5364
Total: 21738
Anticipated Completion Date (50K words): November 14 (but this is now not last night…)