'Twas the Day Before Advent, and...

... my list looked like this:

1. Put Autumn Away.

2. Get Advent Out. (No panic necessary.)

3. Remind Self: Self, you're preparing for the birth of the King, not for a Pinterest page.

4. Relax and enjoy the season, for all the right reasons.

And...Boom! Done.

The NaNoWriMo Update:

50,000 words in 25 days = Betsy.

50,000 words in 27 days = Me.

Story almost done = Ramona.

Sick of our characters = All of us.

~~~~~

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

And if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stop thinking about counting my words
and have one of these:

Bits and Pieces of our Nanoing Days

• Yup, still doing NaNoWriMo around here. Betsy and I each have about 35,000 words. Ramona set herself a goal of a 3,000 word story, and she's on track. Her characters were recently spotted in the Swiss Alps. 

• Ramona and I just read The Cricket in Times Square together, and it's the kind of charming and utterly delightful book that permanently endears itself to the unschooler in me. It's a sweet and simple story, but one that's full of such great stuff: rich vocabulary and fodder for discussion, talk of musical genres, and mentions of all sorts of great pieces. When I played the Blue Danube waltz and Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik for Ramona, she said, "Oh! I know these!" Now she knows exactly what they are called, too. And things for her to Google: Johann Strauss, Orpheus ... such good stuff. 

• Advent. It's coming. It will be here in nine days. Did I just say that? Nine days?! Don't panic. It's meant to be full of preparation, people. We're not meant to go into it Advent in full-fledged Christmas mode. It's okay to meander through Advent with deliberate preparation. 

• Ramona is in full-fledged creative mode, and not just with her NaNo story. She's been watching all kinds of YouTube tutorials about making doll furniture and accessories. Tonight she made a lamp and rock candy for her American Girl dolls. I love the internet. 

And This Is Why I Can't Have Nice Things

This is my dog: 

This is my dog, hoping I will be home soon: 

This is the rug by the front door -- that is, this is the rug by the front door if I've been gone for more than five minutes and the dog has had to wrestle the rug into a nest in order to sit 

and wait for me. 

And, of course, she has had to do that: 

Shall we take a closer look? Here it is: 

And thus ends the sad tale of Why Karen Can't Have Nice Things. 

But that's okay.  I don't like to spend too much time worrying about inanimate objects.On the other hand, it would be nice, now and then, to have an accent rug that isn't shredded.

"Being not unlovable but strange and light..."

To celebrate the release of Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line, I'm sharing a poem I included in the book.

As an adult convert, there are so many lines here that I love:

the whole world turned over and came upright 
...
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
...
Old riddles and new creeds 
...
And all these things are less than dust to me/Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

The Convert
by G.K. Chesterton

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

(from The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton)

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is being hosted today by the inimitable Jama Rattigan, at Jama's Alphabet Soup. 

Deathbed Conversions: My New Book Is Finally Here!

Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line 

is finally at the finish line and ready to ship! 

Huzzah!

I'm so excited about this book. It was fascinating to research, fun to write (when I wasn't fretting over how I could possibly do justice to all of these people and their spiritual lives), and -- I hope -- will be fun and fascinating for you to read.

You can find it at:

• the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor
• Amazon, in paperback 
• Amazon, for your Kindle
• Barnes and Noble, in paperback or for the Nook
• from Indie booksellers
• Catholic booksellers such as Catholic Answers' shop, Leaflet Missal, The Catholic Company,  or your local store. 

~~~~~

Another fun note -- I've been experimenting with Authorgraph.

It's a cool way to get an electronically signed note from a writer. You can go to my Authorgraph page, and request a personalized inscription and/or a signature for any of my books, even the ones in paperback. (Currently, only Deathbed Conversions and Through the Year With Mary are available on Kindle/Nook.)

The request is forwarded to me, and once it's fulfilled, you'll get an email with a link that will take you a page that looks like this:

(If you have a Kindle, and have enabled direct delivery, it will also be delivered as a document to your Kindle.) 

So, if you've purchased one of my books in the past and didn't get a signed copy, this is the next best thing. That's my real signature, too -- it was a little tricky to use a mouse to create it, but after some practice, I was able to say, hey, yeah, that actually looks like me!

Poetry Friday

Ellen Bass writes so deftly of human fragility.

We are neither on the eve nor the other side of a daughter's a wedding here, but still ... I can feel the stuff of this poem down to my bones.


After Our Daughter's Wedding
by Ellen Bass

While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli's pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
"Do you feel like you've given her away?" you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn't...

...And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing...

(Read the whole poem here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~

The round up is here, at Random Noodling.

If Thanksgiving Is In Three Weeks, That Means...

...Advent is in three-and-a-half.

Here's the monstrously long "No-Panic Advent" post.



Don't let the length of it scare you off. It's really just a compilation, in one ginormous post, of a series I did in 2008.

Use it to prepare, use it to think, use it to pray, use it to take the pressure off.

Because the point is not pressure and perfection ... the point is to think about and prepare for Perfection Himself.

Top Five Ways You Can Tell That Betsy, Ramona, and I Are Doing NaNoWriMo*

*NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Yes, it's crazy to think that a novel can be completed in 30 days, but I do believe that a lot of great ideas can make it onto paper (or onto the screen) in 30 days. (It was fun to read Rainbow Rowell's pep talk, which affirms exactly that perspective on the process.) Then the real writing starts. Deadlines are my friend. So is revision. 

So, for the month of November, I'm exercising some writing/fiction muscles that I haven't used for a long time. Betsy has completed NaNoWriMo twice before, in 2011 and 2012, but Ramona and I are novices. So, Betsy can often be found these days nodding sagely at us and saying things like, "Yeah, I felt that way my first year, too." 

~~~~~

And now, the Top Five Ways You Can Tell We're NaNoing: 

#5 
I (apologetically and sheepishly) use "NaNo" as a verb: "Dinner's in the oven, guys. I'll be NaNoing and then we'll eat in about an hour."

#4 
I tell the kids that it would be obviously, patently, ridiculous and unacceptable to pad one's word count with sentences such as, "She was very, very, very, very, very, very tired." Then I create a character who says things such as, "I really, really needed to be here."

(Do as I say kids, not as I do.)

#3
I am sometimes caught with a dreamy look on my face, my lips moving as I play around with dialogue.

#2
I am counting the words in this blog post. I'm thinking it's a shame there isn't someplace to log the number of words in a blog post so that I can feel a purely mathematical sense of accomplishment.

#1 way you can tell we're doing NaNoWriMo:
We are focused on sharing an adventure and a goal. We have shared synopses ("Oooh! That sounds compelling, Betsy!" and, "Ramona, that is an amazing idea! And it's so you!" and, "Mom, this sounds cool! And I love your names!") We have guarded works-in-progress. We have emailed each other pep talks. We've checked in on one another's word counts ("Mom! I wrote 4,000 words today!")

We remind each other that although writing is a huge amount of work, creativity is an enormous amount of fun.

We are having a lot of fun.