Moving forward again

I managed to make some progress yesterday, though it was a little less than my standard 1,500 words. It got to a certain point in the evening and hubby told me I had better go lie down and put my feet up, so I did.

I can tell I’m going to get good at taking it easier in the next few weeks, though I am hoping the things I’m doing this week will drop my blood pressure somewhat and none of the unpleasant things that could happen will eventuate. Strangely I’m not feeling anxious about it right now and I can wait until Friday and my next appointment to see what happens without spending hours fretting on it between now and then - fretting isn’t going to get me anywhere!

I had a good chat with my Mum last night and she is forcing me to realize that I might not finish this novel before baby comes - her theory is that if I come to terms with that now it will help me because I won’t be worrying about it and having that pressure hanging over me. She might be right. I can accept that it might not get done - but it won’t stop me from doing the best I can to get there.

Tonight I’ll do the ‘laptop in bed’ thing and it should mean I get myself back on track in regards to the writing. I’m still floating a little bit on where exactly the story is going to end. I have the next 5 days or so in the book planned out but it’s the bits that come after that I am unsure about.

LOL every time I write something like that an idea hits…. so, now I know a little bit more than I did before. It’ll be fun (for me), but poor Ayden. Ah well, she’s strong, she’ll deal with it.

Today I need to pack my bags for the birth, so I get to do some shopping yippee! It’ll be nice to have that ticked off the list and to feel a little more organized. It’s all getting a lot closer now. 29 days to go.

Maybe not such a busy day after all.

I’ve canned most of the things on the to do list. My blood pressure is way high, I even had to have blood tests…hopefully it’s not going to develop into pre-eclampsia but only time will tell and in the meantime I have to ‘take it easy’.

I’m freaking out that it does become something worse. The thought of hospital stays and bed rest don’t appeal to me at all. I guess the good thing is that we’re almost at 36 weeks, and every day gets us closer to that magic ‘37 weeks, whenever you’re ready’ mark which would mean the chances of baby having to stay in neonatal are slim. Slim is good, I just want to have her and bring her home. Hospitals aren’t so much fun.

I guess also it means chances are high we’ll be meeting her sooner rather than later, even if it’s because they’ve decided to induce me because of this blood pressure issue. Arg.

Anyways, lunch time, getting writing done and out of the way and then it’s feet up for me. Resting is so boring!

Ok, seriously TODAY, I’ll get back on track

lol I didn’t end up writing yesterday. I was really too shattered to do anything constructive, so I lay on the couch and played xbox with Hubby (it was his birthday yesterday and he really wanted me to give it a go, so I did, happy birthday Love).

So, notes from the Xbox360: a) car racing is really hard when you’re lying down on the couch with your feet in the air trying to look at the screen on a funny angle. b) I kind of suck at Gears of War, but we did manage to complete the final mission on casual and hubby sounds entirely genuine when he tells me that it doesn’t matter that I suck - I adore the man’s patience with me. c) Halo 3 is kind of fun (but don’t tell him that I said that), I suck far less at that, or maybe I’m just starting to get the hang of the controls! d) vibrating controllers and gripping them for several hours is not good for carpal tunnel.  oh and e) we found out you can play guitar hero aerosmith with two players! fun - it’s only the demo, but still, a little bit of fun.

I’m off to see the midwife this morning to get my blood pressure checked. I rang about my swollen feet and she just wants to make sure it’s not a sign of pre-eclampsia, so we’ll see. They are much better after lying around with them elevated for like 6 hours last night and then a solid nights sleep with them propped up on pillows - I can tell you this though, lying down with your feet up is NOT conducive to getting a lot of writing done.

Which leads me finally, back to the writing. I have got to get the house in order today, get the washing from the trip done etc etc etc… fun times. But then I do need to get back into the writing as well. I feel like I’ve slacked off a little and while I realize that a weekend away is a pretty valid reason for not writing a whole lot, I’m feeling the deadline this morning and can only hope that baby decides to stay in til she’s due so that I can get this novel done.

I haven’t stopped to think about the math of it, but I’d like to be at 80K by Sunday night, and now doing the math thats 1.5k a day… so maybe I should raise the bar a little because I think my count is going to be higher than 95K at this point in time. Something to consider later on when I sit back down to do some work.

Anyways, better go get organized… busy day ahead!

It’s good to be home

Ah, home… so nice to see you, to sit on your couches and relax.

The trip away was good, but tiring, my body isn’t really thanking me for it so I am going to have to take it really easy over the next few days. Lots of time spent with my feet up to try and make them shrink in size a little.

My pirate nappies arrived while we were away, I’ll have to post a pic later, lol way too cute. Little Miss watched Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend so she’s ALL about the pirates at the moment and has decided we’re now a pirate family. I get to be called Pirate Mummy, and I must call her Pirate Miss and we are saying yar a lot. It’s all fun.

I really need to go lie down now though. I just wanted to check in, see how everyone was doing, and leave a note to say that I’m back wooo!

OH, and I managed to get some writing done over the weekend! Not a whole lot, but I figure anything is better than nothing. I’ll be back into my regular writing later on tonight after things have been put away and everything has been restored to normal.

70K - woo!

I made it, and in pretty good time as well It’s still early and I really feel like I could write more but I don’t want to burn myself out today. We’re leaving in like…. a little over 3 hours and I need to finish packing the car and lie around on the couch for awhile. lol yes I NEED to do that, all the driving is going to wear me out later so the more ‘rest’ I get right now the better.

The story is still flowing pretty well, I have a character from the first book coming back into the mix shortly and that will be really interesting for my MC. She’s kind of avoided thinking about the past situations until now, but seeing him is going to make it all come back and she might finally have to deal with it. I really like the old character. I started out not liking him but there was heaps more to him at the end of the first book that I had no idea about before then. It’ll be fun to see what happens next!

And weird to think that I won’t be writing tonight… I am sure I’ll be exhausted and won’t want to, but I’ve definitely gotten back into the habit of doing my writing at night, so even though I won’t want to, the fact that I’m not will feel strange. I write even when I don’t want to, lol I’ll just have to remind myself that I have already done my work for the day.

Anyways… better go and get onto the other things. It’s been nice having the house to myself for the day, I am sure Little Miss is having a ball at preschool and hopefully she’ll be tired enough to sleep for at least a portion of the drive. I’m really looking forward to being away.

I am taking the laptop though, and I think I’ll want to do a little bit of writing here and there, even if it’s not 1.5K a day.

Hooray!

Well, I finally got into my planning this evening, much later than I had hoped to, and one of those lovely little epiphanies hit me on the head. Ah, I love it when that happens! I was sitting here thinking to myself - I need to tie up some of these loose ends in this book, before moving onto the third. I need a solid ending, where SOMETHING is resolved, but how the hell am I going to do that?

And then ’smack’. Oh yeah… right, it’s obvious now isn’t it? Of course it’s obvious, how could I have not seen that before?

And things began to fall into place. Oh bless you muse (nameless, faceless muse, but muse nonetheless I am sure).

Which meant that I could get on with my writing tonight as well, and I managed to add another 2.5K to the novel. I’m now sitting pretty at 68.5K meaning I should easily slide into 70K zone tomorrow before we head off for the weekend.

So yes, feeling pretty good about all of that really

And now, off to attempt sleep, and hopefully not snore too much. Apparently I snore now… apparently this could be what is waking Ivy in the night and scaring her. Lol, that makes me giggle, but it’s terrible really. Apparently, also… this is fairly common in pregnancy and I can expect to go back to only snoring when I’ve had too much to drink lol, though it’ll be awhile before I’m overindulging in alcohol again. More and more reasons why it’ll be great to give birth! lol I am looking forward to being a non-snorer again.

35 weeks

Time for the weekly baby update…. mostly because of this beautiful little sentence included in my baby email.

If your baby is born now there is a 99% chance that she will survive, so if you have had anxiety related to premature delivery you can now relax.

Isn’t that so nice to know? 99% is a pretty darn good chance, and while I suspect she’ll go over her due date, it’s nice to know that whatever happens from here on out, we should be fine. Not that I have been having anxiety, but hey, any reassurances you can get are nice! lol

So strange to think that anywhere in the next 3-7 weeks this little girl is going to arrive. I was chatting with Little Miss during our morning cuddles and we did our weekly finger countdown on roughly how long until she gets here. She seems more excited than anxious now and that makes me so glad. We talk about things in a nice silly way that she seems to get.

Like, you know, when baby is here we’ll have to make sure we do our puzzles and put the pieces away because she might goober all over them! Little Miss cracks up at that kind of thing - so yeah, I’m kind of using baby as a reason why Little Miss needs to start taking better care of her stuff, but she’ll thank me for it if it means this little girl never manages to eat or crunch something important to her.

She’s actually finishing putting her puzzle together now… it’s been out for 2 days lol.

Part of me thinks that shes more excited about baby coming because it means she gets to move rooms in the near future and we’ve told her that we’ll buy her a bunk set when baby moves into the room with her… not sure she realizes that it’s not happening for a few months yet though…

I didn’t do any planning last night. Tama threatened me with Counterzeny, and we can’t have me losing points! No, it’s not going to happen. I work hard for my zeny. Damn writing games. Not that I’m writing just to get points, but knowing I am racking them up at a reasonable pace gives me some strange sense of satisfaction. I can only conclude that both Tama and I are weird, though, we’re writers, it goes with the terriroty right?

Ok, time for the dishes, washing and then bath time for Little Miss. The house still needs some serious work done to it this morning to get it up to scratch for visitors (seeing as my brother is my landlord and all lol). I’m hoping to fit some planning in there as well though so that the writing will flow easier tonight. I don’t want any road blocks cropping up on me now, there are only a few weeks left to go.

A successful day

So now I’ve managed not only to finish the basic edit, but I also managed to write 2.5K words on Ayden. I got to almost 2k and thought ‘woo, I’ve caught up!’ and then did a quick calculation and realized that I needed another 500 words to go. It wasn’t hard though.

It worked out so nicely and meant that I finished up the section I was working on! I’m a little floored about that actually… it took a lot fewer words than I thought it would. Admittedly there is a lot less ‘fat’ in the writing than I think there was in the last section, and only one POV to work from meaning which automatically cuts down on the words needed to get through a chunk of the story. Still, I thought it would take a lot longer. On revision it might well turn out that this section needs some work, but I am happy with it for now.

I haven’t done the planning yet - I just wanted to get my writing done so that I could pass out when the need to took me. So I guess that means I’ll hit the shower in a few minutes and take the planning to bed and see if I can pin things down.

I now need 2k a day to hit 70K on Friday, and providing I can get this planning done, I am pretty sure that I can pull that off. The planning is going to be vital though, because we’re approaching the bit of the story where there are more ?’s than before. I have a couple of ideas that I want to work into the next few scenes though, I just have to make some decisions. Fun times ahead!

Anyway, that’s it from me. It’s so weird to think about ending this book. There is a lot left before the story itself is tied up, but that needs a whole other book after this one to do. I’m trying to figure out how I can resolve some of the issues by the end of Ayden though, all things that need working on. And I’ll get there, I have every confidence.

Also, just now, it struck me that these prolific busy writer days are coming closer to being over. Soon it’ll be all about the baby and when I do get back into writing I’ll have to find a new rythym, a new daily word goal that works for me. I think it’s going to take some time, it’ll be a ‘work in progress’ of its own.

Exciting times ahead.

For now I’ll just enjoy being free to work as hard as I want on the writing stuff, and for later, I’ll enjoy being completely taken over by baby madness

Basic edit, complete.

And it didn’t even take me til Friday!

I was feeling hugely unmotivated today, very fragile emotionally, and just all over the place (hormones, damnable hormones). But regardless, I decided to plunge on with the editing. I’m amazed that I managed to get through the rest of it this afternoon, and while the changes are very minor at this point and it’s been mostly fixing up of grammer and inconsistencies I’m atleast feeling like it’s good enough now to hand over to Dad and Sharon.

Now I just have to get to work on hitting 70K by the time we leave on Friday… it’s manageable, but it’ll take some work and I’m still feeling a little bit iffy about whether I’ll make it.

I’m starting to consider taking the entire weekend off writing, but I figure I’ll take the laptop with me anyways and if I can pump out a few hundred words here and there it’s all better than nothing - either that or maybe I’ll work on fleshing out the plan for the rest of the novel. I can feel the ending drawing nearer, and I’d really like to pinpoint a little more clearly what exactly will be in this novel and what will be in the next.

I still haven’t done the planning I need to do today, though I could do one more nights writing without it, I’ll have to try and fit it in there at some point. Hubby will be playing Mass Effect again tonight so I’ll have plenty more hours to work during, though with my editing marathon this afternoon I don’t want to make it a late one.

Anyways, better feed the animals and start getting dinner organized! No rest for the wicked.

Yesterday was rough

In a few ways. I am going to pin it on the hormones though, the lack of sleep, the aches, and the fact that all the animals in my house are hungering for my attention as well as my child and there never seems to be a moments peace.

Anyway! Enough of the whining.

I didn’t get my writing done early, at all. Instead hubby told me to stay on the couch and we watched TV for most of the night. Mostly mindless TV, but Mythbusters was in there too! Oh I love Mythbusters (for the record, a ducks quack DOES echo) lol. It was probably exactly what I needed - to just sit on the couch with him for a couple of hours and think of nothing, not having to do a thing.

At 1020pm when Hell’s Kitchen finished I sat down and began to write - with the soul intention of getting my 1.5K out for the day and then crashing to bed. I did, no more, no less. As much as I wanted to be hitting 2k a day this week, as much as I could easily have stayed up for another 10 minutes and hit that goal, I just needed to go to bed. I can catch up today, or tomorrow, or Friday lol.

So, it’s three days until we leave (though we leave on the afternoon of the third day), and I haven’t moved forward on the editing. I’ll be pushing myself onwards in that area today with the hope of finishing it all off on Friday morning before heading out.

As fragile as I’m feeling today, who knows whether it will actually happen - the bright side is that if I DO get through it all in time, I’ll feel really great, so that alone is reason enough to push on.

The novel is coming along really well, the pace has picked up a lot and I am enjoying that. I wrote ‘less’ than for the last section and they’ll need balancing out in revision, for now I’m just enjoying moving forward and just sticking to the one POV instead of bouncing around so much. I really need to do some planning today as what I did the other night has already been used up, in fact everything that I wrote last night was ‘unplanned’ even though it’s still on track with the bigger rough outline I did right back at the start. I am so glad I made that bigger outline! lol

I’ve really come to appreciate the planning aspect of writing. It certainly makes it easier to keep writing at a really steady pace when you know what’s going to happen yet, and the fact that there is still flexibility in there, room for the occasional surprise makes it all. It’ll be interesting to see how the next few scenes pans out, even more reason to keep writing.

Anyways… better get on with the housework for the morning. I want to leave my afternoon free for work when Little Miss is in preschool and we have my mother, brother, sister in law and nephew invading us for lunch tomorrow so the place has got to be spotless!