Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com has some incredible comics -- themed on Nanowrimo as well as another year-round series "Will Write For Chocolate." They rock. She's hilarious. Here's one of them, I'll just post the embed link -- she posts them with a creative commons attribution license, as long as they're not for profit and you link to her site you can repost them. Or retweet them, she's got twitter set up too.

Okay, now let's see if this works...

I got Chapter 11 done at 11:30, though I added a fem more words of more dialogue at the end once I'd posted on NaNoWriMo in the "Shoutout" forum on the 50k thread. It was 51,693 when I thought I'd finished, just expanded by a few more words as I did the synopsis.

The cats have learned lore from the African lion, who has adopted them as brothers. He turned out to be rather deep and clever, aware of a lot of things including the presence of the Blight and the human it possesses. He chose not to accept its temptation to break him out of the zoo because he knew he'd die if he went around killing humans. He had already avenged his brother's killer, a poacher, by leading him into the camp of some game wardens -- which was how he got captured and wound up sold to a zoo anyway, he got a leg wound and they fixed him up. I think he's a little more than an ordinary lion. I think he's a rather large magecat of another species and has some of the same type of supernatural connection the small ones do -- and they will realize that as they think about it. Or if they run into other, dumber lions.

Onward.

They have been warned -- don't kill the prey-enemy with your mouth, then it gets inside you. Kill with your claws as if it was a cobra. Magic isn't tainted because Magic did it right and it didn't try to invade him -- he startled it when he attacked it and did cleanse himself of the monster's blood in his pool-swim. It's not a virus or bacterium, it's an evil spirit -- not the same thing at all.

Dinosaur Coloring Page
6" x 9"
Black ballpoint pen on paper

Sascha came in after I wrote my chapter and wanted to watch dinosaurs. We watched "Alpha's Egg" together and she asked me to draw Alpha and her little baby. Then Dragonfly the aucasaur, a baby theropod, and his mommy, so I put the mother theropod's foot in the picture and threw in a land crocodile headed for the nest. It's a coloring page, feel free to copy it off and color it or email or message me asking for a full size one so you can print it out and color it. If you color it, I want to see how it looks though, and if you post the colored version you must credit me for the drawing, preferably with a link to this blog or my oil pastels page.

Now I want to get another chapter done tonight. I've napped and I'm awake again.

• 17:49 Stop by my art booth at the Moss Rock Festival this weekend! Weather's going to be awesome and so is this show! is.gd/4PcEr #

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The lovers finally make love for the first time. No wonder I procrastinated 24 hours before writing this chapter. Magic and ritual are potent against psychological barriers. They decided to do it mid chapter before I had any idea what they were leading up to. It worked. Oh wow did it work. I may have to work on the description in the edits, but now I know what happens.

I also think this book has to be in third person omniscient in order to comprehend all of the dialogue -- the cat to cat dialogue, the cat to human dialogue, the telepathy and the characters' thoughts are all important. If it's close third then I'll have to break scenes often to change point of view. That's for the editing process though. For now it's enough that the lovers finally got together.

Read this thread on the NaNoWriMo forums: What's Happening In Your Novel?

It's elegant.

If you post to the thread, you know what happens next. So you can keep writing. Broke my scene-block about starting chapter 10 in Audubon Park. I know the thing that has to happen before the lion scene. Several things that have to happen before the lion scene.

My count at the start of the day:



Hopefully I will post again with much more words!

Pill Bottles and Toothpick Holder
8 1/2" x 11"
Color Conte sticks (hard pastels)
White ProArt wirebound sketchbook paper
From life, three objects on my drafting table -- right next to my netbook. A little break from writing, the first drawing I've done since I started NaNoWriMo.

I finished Chapter 9 last night and left the scene with Grandfather Tree to be written today, which might solve how they get to meet the African lion anyway since Grandfather Tree is in Audubon Park right next to Audubon Zoo -- right next to some chain link fences dividing big cat exercise areas. The kittens could walk right up to the fences to talk to the lion or to the cheetahs that exercise in those long runs, without the distraction of a lot of human crowds.

Unfortunately that's less dramatic than what I had planned, but the cats are practical and I'm sure drama will result anyway. I can't ignore it when the cats see an opportunity better than the outline, that just never works in this book. But nothing guarantees that lion's going to cooperate. He's got every reason NOT to.

I think that's what was bugging me last night though when I was thinking about the lion scene -- if they go to Grandfather Tree they would notice the exercise area, smell that lion in it and know they don't need to actually go into the zoo. I don't like forcing characters to be stupid if there's a better path for them to take, so the previous idea of the scene wouldn't be plausible without forced stupidity. Besides, I don't know if a zookeeper would go to all the trouble of getting into a lion enclosure to fish a wet kitten out of the moat before it drowned. Or if they did, if they'd give it back to the people dumb enough to let it fall in when they don't have papers or vet records or even a collar on the kitten.

The kittens are going to Audubon Zoo in a picnic basket. The humans have acquired "B" licenses to sell art in the French Quarter (but not on Jackson Square).

There is no WAY those kittens can defeat the Blight in only another 10,000 words or so. This is a bigger book. I'm around the middle of a bigger book. We haven't even cut back to see what the Three Sisters are up to with their mama and whether Missy Tar Baby can get out of her new house whenever she wants or is going to have to be clever about it but risk all her new prosperity in order to stay connected with her family.

Oh wow, the hard candy with the red cellophane on it is cinnamon flavor! Delicious. Ari will probably want the cellophane.

I'm currently working toward a major life transition from Disabled Underpublished SFF Writer to Disabled Self-Supporting Pro-Published SFF Writer. So I'd say that's pretty major. Everything listed in the question is changeable, not things like my disabilities or my past.

• 08:47 heading out for my run...gorgeous day today, loving the fall weather!! #
• 12:39 Lost a dog on Sunday, my sweet little ShihTzu MaiTai. Gentle journey little girl, miss you... #

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In which two young cats watch television with their humans, pounce on each other, wrestle and also learn a spell for making prey stumble from a lioness in a documentary. They start figuring out what they need to do next.

They're kittens. My protagonists are eight week old kittens.

All of the cat fantasy novels I've ever read involved clans of feral cats way out in the countryside somewhere who either never saw humans in their lives or avoid the few that are nearby. This book is for all the cats who adopt humans, live in houses, watch television, eat food that comes from cans and bags and plates while hunting more for sport and learn how to open window latches and doors for themselves, along with all the honorary cats who share their clans.

So when your cat is pawing at the floor with intense concentration and you don't see why, or walking in careful circles, making strange sounds or doing other mysterious cat things, now you know. They're doing magic, possibly to help you prosper at your job or remember to bring home the salmon flavor gooshy food.

I would've written more yesterday but all the pain caught up with me. I laid down to shut my eyes and try for a nap at about seven, but didn't sleep. Eventually I figured out that I might need to rest my eyes, so a couple hours later I got up and read a bit of Tad Williams The War of the Flowers, an excellent fantasy novel by an author who's on my "learn to write that well" list. He's also the author of one of my favorite cat novels ever, Tailchaser's Song, which he never followed with another cat novel.

But that's up to him. If this book comes out in its final draft as good as it feels to me right now, I could easily see doing a Magecat Series.

I just woke up and it's noonish. I took my meds. Now I need to wait for them to work, poke around a little online, read back the latest scenes I wrote and go back to New Orleans to find out what kind of trouble those kittens get into. They almost decided to seek out a poisonous cottonmouth snake.

They're still kittens. They don't get it that some of the trouble in the outline was just trouble that happened to be in their way rather than something they needed to do or gain in order to defeat the Blight.

Leonora faces her fears and has artistic breakthroughs, first on line and then on tone. Jerry observes that maybe it's not a matter of whether to believe in magic so much as to disbelieve the people who say there isn't any magic.

I also did a little line editing as I warmed up reading through some of the last things I wrote yesterday, just fixing the prose without changing what happened.

My halo doesn't show yet on NaNoWriMo site but I have one, I donated. I looked at my savings and realized I wasn't broke. They did a black t-shirt this year! At last! They also have a cranberry one and I like that color too, so if I do two novels I'll get a second t-shirt. My 2005 one is looking ratty and faded but I'm wearing it today anyway.

I think that's the end of Chapter Five, for plot it was a good stopping point. Dramatic things happened. Two chapters fused together as Lenore aka Leonora discovers Night Hunter of Monsters is her mage cat. Lenore had been a whisker away from some sort of suicide, just drifting from tragedy to abuse to more abuse till something broke her too much to live. Night saw past that to the huntress and her edgy strength. So the human characters are a bit more than comic relief this time. Interesting. The cats engage more with them.

Outlines don't last beyond encountering live characters any more than battle plans survive battles. Instead of starting in horror, I'm staging up to it from pretty kittens and happy sunshine plans to darker and rougher and darker and rougher troubles. It'll get worse before the end.

New themes are emerging and different symbols. Inner conflicts are richer and deeper. Somehow it's all coming together and I can't put it down. I need to sleep though, and that does mean that I need to stop posting here there and everywhere, to let it flow and sleep on it. Then find out what happens next tomorrow.

I'm doing great. Still got about four hours till midnight. Having FUN with it too! This chapter we find out what all the other magecats did while Magic did his thing in chapter one.

A fun, fun way to word war to the Extreme! Write Or Die! also has a very cool progress widget preset to 50,000 for Nanowrimo.



The slightly higher word count is from some edits caused by letting a fellow Wrimo read parts of the first chapter and adding necessary clarification at the points she got confused. Like whether it was day or night since the evil spirit had a "nocturnal" ambience but it was bright noon -- a bright noon that FELT like a dank midnight while its influence was sweeping through.

12,634 words. We find out what the other kittens do on coming of age. All five now present and accounted for. This won't be one lone mage-cat saving the city. Magic saving the rest has consequences.

9,784 words in two chapters. Yankee Boy meets Goth N'yawlins Girl, some spookiness around the cat, feline perspective on it all. He yawned and went to sleep when they got down to starting to mate. Soul Mates. Uh-huh. Yeah. We'll have to see if this actually lasts or if it's easy come, easy go. But they believe in soul mates so it'll be a hard fall if it doesn't.

I should probably actually email this to myself considering that I didn't do that at the end of chapter 1. Got to get in good habits on this one!

Edit:

Backups sent to three email addresses and stuffed into my 1 gig key drive so that's covered. I found out I had tons of music on it already, that was very cool.

Today there is a NanoWrimo Kick Off Party at 3:00pm and I am going. I might even have chapter 3 done before I leave if I write very fast.