Some years ago when I was a vendor on the small Renaissance Faire circuit here in our tri-state area of California, Nevada and Arizona, we were doing an event in Corona, California called the Koronenburg Festival, held at the Crossroads Riverview Park. We had been doing events with Crossroads for awhile, but this particular event was only in its second year at the new permanent site in Corona. A couple of good friends of mine, Cyndi and Darren, vendors of wonderful magickal and mystical items as well as some East Indian resale goods, had a booth next to my stained and leaded glass set-up, where I sold and demonstrated the creation of a wide range of stained glass items.
At set-up, the day before the festival opened we were given our vendor packages which included a hand drawn map of the festival grounds. It was a simple, if nicely done black and white drawing and as the promoter handed them to Cyn and I he said sheepishly, “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t remember the name of your shop when I was drawing this up and had to rush it to the printers” as he pointed at a corner of the drawing. I looked and saw “A Hartjoy Design”, the name of my shop, clearly printed in the space that designated my spot, but beyond my place, where Cyn’s should have been, there was only an empty square with the words “more fun” and an arrow pointing in the direction of her booth.
Cyndi, a good natured gal just smiled and told Tom not to worry about it. We laughed a lot about it throughout the event. It was pretty funny, because Cyn actually was more fun. That girl could have fun doing anything and we all had fun with her.
Well, until it came time to pack up and go home for the weekend. I tend to lose some of my good humor after a weekend on my feet, working hard in 90 degree and up heat, without a shower. When the gates closed I was ready to get the hell outta there and home to a nice hot bath and my extra firm king size bed. But before that can happen all of the glass that didn’t sell had to be carefully packed and loaded onto the truck along with the myriad ice chests and dirty clothes and bedding and myriad stuffs that I just couldn’t live without for the weekend.
So come time to pack up, yer Thornie got pretty serious… focused, I like to think.
Cyn, on the other hand, managed to keep being silly and playful and I had to face it, more fun.
I’ve been a bit less than exciting, silly, fun or anything else for some time now. Winter doldrums, life crap, whatever. But I have this neighbor… you have simply got to check out what Shelly has been doing over at This Eclectic Life. Her Bare Nekkid Ladies are definitely “more fun“!

Well, I kinda fell down on the job for NaBloPoMo, but I’m rockin’ n rollin’ with my annual noveling efforts for NaNoWriMo during the month of November.

After an agonizing month of worrying about the fact that I wasn’t excited about it this year, and that despite NaNo founding father’s advice to “not worry if you don’t have an idea; just write”, I was devastated by the wasteland of my personal creative landscape. It appeared barren beyond any desert and as far as the eye could see. The closer November first came, the more worried I got. My thoughts continually returned to last year’s NaNo Novel… 51K words of a projected 150K word novel that I hadn’t touched all year. Every character, scenario, story line or idea I had seemed to circle back and be a part of the unfinished ‘08 Novel.

I came to a decision. Despite the suggestion to start and complete a 50K novel with a complete story arc for NaNoWriMo, this is my time to write! This month and the daily word count goals and the permission I give myself to be self absorbed and totally immersed in writing seem to be the only way for me to maintain the self discipline to actually pound out a story.
Imagine my surprise when I dropped in to the NaNoWriMo site forums to discover that I was in good company with other rule breakers. I am an official Nano Rebel, (as attetested to by the badge). Hee hee!

When I wrote last year I was only about 20k in when I realized that it would be impossible to complete my story arc in 50k words at the rate I was going. My story was going to need a lot more words than that. So I began summarizing the story here and there, and writing scenes as they sort of needed to be written. I’d find myself slipping from summary to dialogue and prose and then back to summary. Writing this way got me to 51K, a NaNoWriMo “winner” by Nov. 31. I had a complete story arc, albeit one with a lot of HUGE holes!
This year it’s all about filling in those holes to the tune of the monthly goal of 50 thousand words, which breaks down to 1667 words per day. I started writing a bit late, between my cleavered typing finger (a story for another day- and no; you don’t want pictures!!) and the necessity of going through the manuscript and identifying the holes. I went to sleep this morning sometime after 3 AM having knocked out 3,048 brand new words, which is about 5k short of being on schedule, but I’m back to it today and tonight, and hoping to catch up in the next couple of days.

If any of you lovely bloggy peeps write novels or screenplays, you absolutely must get Scrivener, by Literature and Latte. It is the most phenominal writing program I have ever used, and it’s making it soooo simple for me to keep a word count of this year’s writing separate from the entire manuscript form last year. It has super cool meta data, you can make notes and links and stick index cards on a corkboard on a spilt screen, color coded labels and, and, and… it just rawks! Check it out!!

Okay. I gotta go. I’ve just spent over 500 words, and I don’t know if there exists a finite amount of them in me each day or not. Lawl! Wooo hooo!

Peace, out!

* Peggy, please email me again. I lost your addy in comp switching and many of my passwords aren’t set yet, either so I can’t comment at Utah Savage

and Technorati dreams.
Well, not so much anymore. I’m back to blogging mostly for fun and for free and have given up worrying about stats and PR. Mostly. Still, I know there are a lot of great bloggers on my ‘roll who are interested in that; who need it to suppliment their income or to make a name for themselves (or keep it) in our bloggy world, so… better late than never here’s my monthly blogroll post (brought to you by Mock, Paper, Scissors). Please let me know about any dead links, or if you need me to update yours. Also, If I don’t have you here and you think I should, leave me your link in comments!
Peace, out!