Nano Winner

Yesterday evening I reached the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000. That’s 50,000 words in 25 days. And I did it without neglecting my children or missing too much sleep. The general level of tidiness around here has not declined significantly.

I *have* neglected my knitting, which means that knitted Christmas gifts are unlikely.

But the knitting will have to wait!!

Though I’ve reached the 50k goal, my story isn’t finished yet, and I made a deal with Someone that I would try to do Double NaNo. Yeah, I think I’m crazy too. :)

Onward!

Random things

Not a deep blog. Too busy nanoing. Day 5 total: 18046.

Things that have been on my mind (in no particular order):

o Birthday gifts for seven year old girls
o “hip” (gag) mamaness and post-child sexual expression
o “human capital” —related to recent references on NPR in China, and in Mothering Magazine about human care
o Marathon training for the sedentary hausfrau
o Grace and Jeremy. Heartbreaking. The latter is too close in oh so many ways.

Radar rainbow circus mist fungus desk

I avoid reading my spam as much as possible. Don’t we all? Gmail very conveniently dumps suspicious mail in the spam folder before I ever lay eyes on it, and mostly I ignore it. But, you know, every once in a while a non-spammy message ends up in there, so I skim the messages every few days to catch wayward messages.

I zip down the list of names and subjects. Most of them are unintelligible, garblings of drug and sex enhancement products, but every once in a while a creative spammer will have a catchy subject line. I don’t mean catchy as in commercial-jingle catchy or gross catchy. I mean that they do something a little different.

One style of message pastes in a bit of a news article or headline into the subject line. I guess they’re trying to fool us into thinking that someone has sent us a news article to read. These aren’t particularly interesting to me, but they do tend to stand out.

The style that I really like is the random list of words subject line. These are often like monkey-poetry. A random list of words that somehow come together in a lovely juxtaposition. More than once, one of these listy little gems has inspired a character or scene in my writing.

So, if you’re lost and looking for a smidge of inspiration, take a skim at your spam subjects. You never know what you might find.

Oh yeah, NaNo Day 1: 3500 words.