Why I chose to take this long and torturous approach to making flashcards, I’m not sure, except that the answers show through the printer paper, and I couldn’t find the printable sheet of double sided flashcards I’d used at the beginning of the year. These will be very pretty, at least. I still have to laminate them, too. Whew.

But on to the real subject of this post, look!

Look at that stack of paper!

Look at it again! Now in its pretty binder.

It’s my finished rough draft of my novel. It even has an ending that makes some kind of sense. Even though it’s only a rough draft, and far from finished, it’s still a finished novel! This is a first for me. I’ve started stories before, and I’ve done NaNoWriMo before and made it to 50,000 words, but I’d never actually finished the story. I’m excited to revise it, and fix everything that needs fixing, but for now I’m going to follow the oft-repeated advice of taking a break between drafts. Have a nice rest, novel!

p.s. I forgot to mention that I printed them double sided. So, if you think about it, it’s actually double that amount of pages. Just sayin’.

I took some iPhone pictures of the cool ice over the creek. You can hear the water running under it. This is the section of trail alongside Tischer creek between 4th street going up to St. Marie St/Vermilion Rd.

On top of that, the Destination Imagination tournament is coming up fast (on March 10) and in trying to schedule extra meeting times for the teams, I’m seeing just how few calendar weeks are left for these kids to work on their projects, which they’ve barely started. I also had hoped that none of my teams would make it to the state tournament, because the fees get expensive. I found out, though, that one of the teams is almost guaranteed to go to state, because they are the only elementary team to pick the challenge category they’re in! So they are competing against noone and will advance by default!

Here is a picture that I like:

I brought up the topic of building a writing habit, and they jumped all over it, defining “habit,” mentioning that you can have good habits and bad habits, and then describing what it might look like to have a writing habit. A couple of them seemed to have a pretty good plan for when they could fit writing into their daily life. Whether or not they do it if I don’t decide to bribe them with candy in exchange for pages written, time will tell.

I also love doing NaNoWriMo style writing with kids because it’s all about them, and what they want to write. A girl raised her hand and asked, “Do we have to write cursive?” then sighed in relief when I told her she could write however she wanted. We’ll get to the revisions, but for now they just need a story to work on.

We played a game that I learned this weekend at the Destination Imagination theater workshop. I’m not sure if it’s actually called this, but I called it “Yes! and…” It’s a cooperative story game where one person says a statement, then the next person says, “Yes! and…” and adds their own statement, going on around the circle like this. I like it because by having to say “yes!” you are automatically reaffirming the previous persons’ idea, essentially forced to take the wacky story in stride, and then you add something of your own. The kids begged me not to stop after we’d gone around the circle a few times and it was time to talk about something else.

Best part? I was totally swamped and discombobulated today, and hadn’t planned the class at all. I was totally winging it. Apparently kids who sign up for a class called “Novel Writing” aren’t the type of kids to cause much trouble

So excited!!

Aaand, sweater:

My afterschool program starts up again next week.  That means I’m receiving signup forms, processing those, and sending home signup confirmations while at the same time I’m still training volunteers, and even recruiting volunteers.  Tonight I had to bring home work in the form of handouts for my trainings tomorrow night and Thursday, and also afterschool signup sheets so that I could enter all the student info into an excel spreadsheet.  And I still need to get those confirmations home.

Something I am excited about:

Supplies for our Destination Imagination meeting tomorrow.  I bought a bunch of craft sticks and am going to let the kids practice gluing them and making a structure.  The wood is probably too heavy to actually be used for their structure, but I think these kids will need practice building a structure that stands up, let alone one that holds weight.  I love giving kids hands-on activities, because then I just get to sit back and watch the magic happen.

Ready to Revise

We stopped at Target yesterday for some other stuff, and I just had to stop in the notebook aisle (I always have to stop in the notebook aisle). I had a mission other than browsing, though. I purchased a binder and some post-it notes, and now I am ready to revise! Well, I’m not actually ready in a writing sense. But I have the stuff for it! Awhile back, I read Rachael Herron’s blog post about revising, and I liked the idea of the post-it method for keeping track of stuff as you revise. Now that I’m so close to the end of my novel, I’m itching to print it out, 3-hole punch it, and stuff it in a binder to start paging through! I love having Scrivener, but I need physical copies of things when I really need to get down to work. I don’t know what it is, but being able to physically flip pages, whether it’s a textbook or a piece of writing, helps me to visualize things better. I am looking forward to this phase so much that buying the binder and post-its is like a little extra incentive to keep going and finish the novel. I have a problem, though. It has to do with my process during NaNoWriMo.

My NaNoWriMo Process

I never plan ahead for NaNoWriMo. At least not on paper. I usually get some sort of vague ideas, maybe scribble down a few brainstorms, but I don’t outline or anything. I’m not really an outliner anyway, but it could help me if I did tried it. More than usual, NaNoWriMo snuck up on me this year. In October, I was in the middle of singlehandedly starting up an afterschool program that was brand new to our school. I had to recruit and train volunteers, organize all of the classes, promote them at conferences (in which I sat at a table until 8pm 3 different nights and nobody came), organize all the signups, send home signup confirmations, find out how to deposit and then access money gotten from donations to my little startup program, and so on. Since one of my afterschool classes was NaNoWriMo, and I was teaching it, I couldn’t let all this being busy stuff let me off the hook for NaNo. So, when November rolled around, I had already had a couple of prepping for NaNo classes with my two groups of kids.

They may have been ready, but I wasn’t. So, my “novel” during November, or my “word count” as I should probably call it instead, ended up consisting of a lot of brainstorming, freewriting sessions about the story, and not so much scenes from the story itself. I’d say maybe a good solid half of my wordcount was actual narrative text, and the rest was character sketches, settings sketches, and just me talking to myself in general about what my story was about. Planning stuff. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if I were to do all of that kind of writing BEFORE November, then I would probably get a whole lot more actual novel written by the end of November.

What this all means is that, while my novel is definitely going somewhere now, and knows a little bit more about what it wants to be, it didn’t know that in the beginning. The beginning has gaping plot holes, scenes that haven’t been written, and characters who have changed gender, geographic location, circumstances, and motivation. The type of magic my world uses has evolved and developed its own set of rules that I now have to go back and make sure it follows. It’s supposed to have been winter for half of the book but I keep forgetting to describe scenes as if there’s snow on the ground, breath freezing in the air, or any hint that my characters get cold when they go outside. Maybe that’s just a symptom of our own practically snowless winter up here in Duluth, where we’re normally buried this time of year.

So, revising is going to be a whole lot of fun. I say this with the sincerest of smiles, I assure you. Still, as soon as I write that final scene, I’m considering the rough draft all roughed out for now. I’m going to print it out and slap it in that binder, then worry about the fixups. I may take a break and write a short story. They say it’s good to do that. Take a break between the rough draft and revising, I mean.

And while I worry about that, Tashi has occupied my sweater.