Do you ever get the feeling that there's just too much social networking to be done? I've been posting on Facebook lately and sadly neglecting this blog. Apologies.

The Haiku Northwest retreat at the Seabeck Conference Center last weekend was a blast! In spite of a serious lack of sleep, I had a wonderful time. It was great to meet folks from further afield (Canada, California, New Jersey), as well as to reconnect with some more local folks. I will post a few pictures soon. In the meantime, here's a link to the video that Dejah took of all of us reading one of our poems on Sunday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMKA14Imqzw

Time to attend to dinner. I shall leave you with a photo of one of the stars of the weekend:

Well, with just 42 days left to finish this draft of "The Pawn of Faery" (formerly known as "Nullum Desiderium: Book One"), I am making decent progress. I'm up to 66,746 words and am confident that it will be easy to bump that up past 80,000. I'm liking this version even more than the previous rough draft, so that's good. If anyone wants to be a first reader, by the way, just give a shout and I can supply you with pages. It's a bit darker this time around, but that just makes it all that more delightful to write (and hopefully read).

Last weekend, though, I didn't get much writing done because I was at the Haiku Northwest table at Aki Matsuri. It was fun, but exhausting (I'm not used to being "on" for so long). Here I am at the table. The colored sheets on the wall are haiku from members in our group. If you'd like to read some, you can follow this link: http://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/poems-by-members



I didn't get many haiku written that weekend, either, but I did have fun watching folks. We were right next to the Sakura-Con table, so we got to see the interesting characters who passed by there.



Well, Belle is meowing at me, reminding me that my tea is going cold, so I'd best get on with writing. I'm hoping to finish Ch. 4 today and move on to Ch. 5. I shall try to be more diligent about updating these postings. My life's just not terribly exciting, but I shall see what adventures I can have this weekend to change that.

Guess what we woke up to this morning?




Apparently, winter is hanging on tooth and nail. After yesterday's rain, it was surprising to wake up to such different weather, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's been a hell of a winter here. Maybe this means that next week it'll be sunny and in the 60s (hope, hope).

I'm debating between working on "Nullum" or haiku today. I have a week to get some haiku together for my reading at our Haiku NW meeting, but I'm thinking that can be done tomorrow at Top Pot Doughnuts. Oh, and since I haven't included this link for a while, here it is: http://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/poems-by-members/tanya-mcdonald It's to a few of my poems on the Haiku NW website.

Time to write, or at least try to, though with snow on the ground, I'm likely to spend time gazing out the window at it, unseasonable or not. I'll leave you with a shot of the corn lilies that are popping up outside my window.

The weather has returned to rainyness. Never a good sign when you get up in the morning and it starts getting darker before you've finished your breakfast. Ah well, it's good weather for writing.

Unfortunately, what I want to write is not my NaNo novel. Not this novel, at least. I have somehow, though no fault of my own, gotten enamoured with Lucian and his story again, Lucian being the protagonist of last November's NaNo novel. He also appears in 4 short stories and several others that are still percolating in my head and in notebooks. This returning infatuation would have been useful about 3 weeks ago, though what I want to write is a continuation of "Nullum Desiderium" (last Nov.'s novel), picking up from right after the climax, so I'm not sure about how I would have worked that logistically into NaNoWriMo. But had I been writing about Lucian this month, I probably would have hit 50,000 words by now. (I am aiming for 40,200 today.) Sigh. I blame Torchwood. Anyway, just needed to get that out of my system so I can return to the novel I'm supposed to be working on this month, tentatively titled, "Grab the Chickens and Run!"

On a non-noveling note, you can check out four of my haiku on the Haiku NW website. Here's the link: http://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/poems-by-members/tanya-mcdonald . Earlier this week, I found out that bottle rockets has accepted two of my poems for their Feb. '09 issue. One of them is a tanka, the first I've ever written or submitted (thanks to MDW for his help in revising a few lines), so I'm excited about that. Here's the link to the site: http://www.bottlerocketspress.com/ . So if anyone's keeping track, that's 10 poems I've gotten accepted for publication so far this year...out of 99 submitted. Granted, I won't hear back from The Heron's Nest until early January, so I guess it's really 10 poems accepted out of 89, but either way, I feel both humbled and pretty tickled about it. If next year by this time I can add a short story publishing credit to that list, I'll be ecstatic.

All right, time to put the laundry in the dryer and get on with the business of banging out a few thousand words of my NaNo novel. The sooner I finish it, the sooner I can dive headlong into Lucian's story again. :)

The novel continues! After getting no writing done on Saturday and only a couple hundred words written on Sunday, I am now back on track. This is why I wrote so furiously last week to get ahead for the weekend. Now I'll be writing furiously to get ahead for Thanksgiving. I've got 17,171 words right now (yes, I stopped there for the symmetry), which is 500 more than I needed for today, so I can rest easy tonight.

The reason I didn't get any writing done on Saturday is that I spent it in Port Townsend with fellow haikuers (haikuists? haikuophiles?). The Haiku NW group invited the Port Townsend haiku group over here in the spring (before I was a member), and the Port Townsend folks were gracious enough to invite us over there this fall. I don't know if the Port Townsend folks have a website, but here's a link to ours: http://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/ . I had a surprisingly wonderful time. I say surprisingly because I never know what to expect when I meet up with a bunch of folks I don't know, or don't know well. But everyone was very welcoming and I felt right at home. Even the weather cooperated. The rain stopped, the sun appeared, and by nighttime, the stars and moon were even peeking out. It was truly a wonderful experience, the whole day, and I came home glowing and jabbering about haiku and related topics. In fact, it carried over to the next day, and I spent more time getting haiku ready to submit to bottle rockets (http://www.bottlerocketspress.com/ ) than I did working on my novel. (Oh, and check out the Highlights section of the bottle rockets website.)

But now it's time for bed so I can get up and write 1,667+ more words tomorrow. And wonder when I'm going to hear back from Realms of Fantasy magazine. And compose haiku.

It's been a busy writing day, and I haven't gotten a thing written.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've emailed a few folks. I also sent a handful of haiku/senryu to Modern Haiku for consideration in their next issue, then got some haiku ready to share at tonight's Haiku NW meeting at the Bellevue Library. http://hometown.aol.com/WelchM/Haiku-Northwest-Monthly-Meetings.html

Now I need to write a clever bio for my Hugo House Write-O-Rama laureate profile and scrounge up an unscary photo of myself. Check out this website, http://www.hugohouse.org/laureates in two weeks, and with any luck, I should be there. I'm no good at asking for money (I always detested candy bar sales for choir back in middle school), but I hope you'll give a bit to Hugo House. It's an amazing place and although I don't go there as often as I'd like (1.5 hour bus ride each way makes it a bit of a trek), I always leave with a bit of a glow about me. Whether sitting up in the incredible library, pouring through the journals of Anais Nin, or attending a class taught by an awesome writer, or listening to a performance in the Cabaret, it's always well-worth the journey there.

Did I mention that I'm taking Charles DeLint's class later this month? It's titled, "Heroes and Villains: Making Your Protagonist Step Off the Page." I'm rather excited about it (understatement), and am glad I signed up when I did since it's now full. But there are lots of other classes available at Hugo House, so check them out! http://www.hugohouseservices.org/home/Catalog/Catalog.aspx

I'm also plotting how to spread the word of NaNo to the masses. I'm thinking flyers in bookstore and library bathroom stalls would be a good place to start. Here's the website, though it's having technical server difficulties right now: http://www.nanowrimo.org/ .

OK, time to biographize.