Megan, the Noveliste

I am now a novelist! I have spent the month of November typing furiously - I typed 50,795 words, to be exact. I did this to participate in National Novel Writing Month - fondly known as NaNoWriMo. 10 years ago Chris Baty, the founder, got together with 20-something friends of his and they all decided to write a novel in a month. If I recall correctly, six of them made it to the end. :-) As this year's NaNoWriMo ends, 119269 people have signed up, and 18,229 of them have written novels of 50,000 words or more, in the month of November 2008. Collectively, all the writers have written almost 1.5 billion words.

I did this mostly for fun, partly for school, and partly to see if it actually could be done - it can! It was so cool. I would write mostly at night, and I managed to stay fairly on target the whole month, even finishing a little bit early. I typed 'The End' at 1:15 this morning, and then was so excited I didn't go to bed until three.

Now the questions that everyone wants to know: Can I read it? No. Not for a while, anyway. What is it about? Top secret, but it's not historical fiction. How many people died? Ugh . . . nobody died! (I can't tell you how many times my family has asked me that.)

It is a fun and trying experience to be a novelist. Anything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on writers block, and at certain times housework may be neglected - pressing deadlines, you know.

So now I get to return to a more normal mode of living - one where you don't use the word count function every fifteen minutes. Next year, I'm looking for more people to join me and we can have word wars. :-)

Tonight I went back to my previous hobby/addiction - LibriVox. It's so nice to read someone else's words for a change!

In upcoming life, I get to participate in a performance of Handel's Messiah next week, which will hopefully help me to recover from post-noveling blues. :-) I can't wait!

Megan

Another Trophy!

Friday night, Dad and Daniel went hunting in Indiana. They had decided to hunt Friday night, instead of Saturday morning. 10 min. before dark, they saw a nice buck walking about 150 yards away. After they waited another minute, they saw it come out again 80 yards away, and walking towards them. After unsuccessfully trying to stop it, it finally stopped after the 3rd try. Daniel laid a perfect shot on him, and the deer only ran 80 yards. It was an 11 point with a drop tine, and the first buck that Daniel had ever killed with a gun.

Congratulations, Daniel!

A Trophy!

It was an exciting day of deer hunting. Robbie started out early with a nice 8 point, he dropped it and as they waited a few minutes along came another 8 point, only considerably larger than the first. He couldn't resist, and we are so thankful for such provision! So by 8am he had two 8 points! Something like that will probably never happen again. Thanks for putting meat on the table Robbie!

Pursuit of Animals and Purple Toes

Emily and I ganged up and painted Lydia's toes purple. They're so cute and she'll touch them and then looks at us and giggle. Mom loved it and Emily and I painted ours to match. Benjamin had a hard time understanding why he couldn't paint his too.


Tomorrow, of course, is the opening day of gun season. Daniel gets to go on his first gun hunt in Michigan, which has him quite excited. I'm even going up in the afternoon - I get to go milk goats in the morning (doing a friend's chores - Dad calls me the goat whisperer), then I'll join the rest of the crew for an evening hunt. I'm not the one with the gun though - just along for the ride.


And so, the Kunkel's wind down for the evening. Mom is reading to Ben and Lydia, Joey and Matthew are chasing each other around the coffee table, Emily is reading over my shoulder, Robbie is 'quietly' playing a Mozart piece, and Dad and Daniel are making last-minute preparations for tomorrow's hunt. In a few minutes we will pray and half of us, at least will be in bed. Good night all.

~Megan