If you’re wondering why this blog has arrived a few hours past its due date, I blame me. If I were you, I would, too. Yes, it's been bitterly cold. Yes, I've been shoveling snow. Neither of which is an excuse. Yesterday, when I could have been blogging merrily away, I spent the time on finishing another chapter for my new story, instead.
 
I was pushing to complete the chapter because I knew I was going to check in with you today to tell you about my progress on the 30-Day NaNoWriMo outline-y thing. As you know -- and if you don’t know because you’ve never visited here before, this is your best and last opportunity to run off to a happier website – the deal is this: Christine Frazier studied three huge best-sellers, boiled their storylines down to 30 different plot points, and then provided an outline for anyone who wanted to try to complete a novel in a month.
 
She believes, if a writer followed her outline by doing one step at a time, like this –
 
STEP ONE: OPEN THE STORY ON A “BITTERSWEET CELEBRATION”
 
– and made each step a completed chapter in their work-in-progress, the scribe would see her or his 30 steps become a 30 chapter novel in exactly 30 days. This made a lot of sense to me. I wanted to try it. However….
 
I’ve never worked with anyone else’s outline before. Christine’s challenge was particularly trying to me because (a) I usually work with a partner, and I’m spinning solo this time; and (b) even with a partner’s help, we rarely complete a chapter in a single day; and (c) I don’t write the kinds of books Christine studied. Who knew if a mail order bride story could somehow fit within the framework of something like the first Harry Potter novel?
 
But I didn’t let any of that deter me. I had an ace in the hole. Unlike most of Christine’s followers, I wasn’t concerned about writing an entire novel. I only wanted to produce a novella. 30,000 words tops. As Glynn has often said, only to be proven wrong, “Piece of cake.” Plus, the concept sounded like fun and, with my honey hard at work for a month and a half, I was ready for  some fun. I decided to find out if I could make it work.
 
After all, there’s no such thing as failure, as some guy (whose name I forget) once wrote. There’s only doing something, learning from it, and moving on.
 
What I’ve found out so far? My 30-day novella is going to take so much longer than 30 days to complete. Today I should be completing Chapter 14. Yesterday, I had my nose to the grindstone, desperate to complete Chapter 8. Yep, instead of clocking in with seven chapters a week, I’ve been producing four. I’m letting Christine down.
 
It didn’t start that way. The first day, I rolled up my sleeves and pounded out my chapter quite easily. It was a little under 1,000 words, I knew I’d make up the difference with some future chapter, and I was on my way to a 30,000 novella. Then, day two, I rolled up my sleeves, pounded out another chapter – but this one took an extra couple of hours, and popped up at 1,500 words, but that was okay, I’d do a shorter one the next day. Except the next chapter wasn’t shorter, it was longer, and I had to research department stores in 1876, revolving doors (turns out, they hadn’t been invented yet), women’s fashions in the Victorian era, men’s hats, popular foods of the time and – sweet Heaven above, I wasn’t close to done by the end of the day. Or the day after. The next chapter was longer still, with more research.
 
Yesterday, Chapter 8 wrapped at three times the length of Chapter 1. It took three times as long to complete it, too, and I began to worry I’d never get it done. It just went on and on.
 
Most of the NaNoWriMo pros suggest getting up early or staying up late to finish your daily chapter. This is a wonderful idea for people who aren’t me. I have a sweet spot when I feel creative and inventive and that’s always during daylight hours. I’ve discovered this sweet spot is not at 4:15 AM because, when I got up at 4:15 AM to write Chapter 4, I stared groggily at the computer before writing foggy-headed nonsense that I had to rewrite later in the day. If you believe I’ll get better with practice, you’re incorrect in this assumption.
 
Another time that’s not the sweet spot for writing is 8:30 PM. Tackling Chapter 6, I learned that, at 8:30 PM, I stare sleepily at the computer before falling asleep in my chair. When I woke up with a stiff neck, I wrote wooden, terrible dialogue that I can’t begin to rewrite the next day because it’s so terrible. So the early and late thing just don’t work for me.
 
What did work for me is the silly randomness of the outline. The story has jumped into directions that Glynn and I would never have considered, and it’s been great fun. I don’t know that the tale I’m writing will ever be great literature but, I tell you now, it’s a very different kind of  mail order story. There’s lots of action, lots of cooking, a villain, a herald, romance, and a cat. A very-important-to-the-story cat that makes me miss the ones I’ve loved.
 
Less than a third of the way along, I no longer think I’m writing a novella. In an effort to move this book along, I won’t be blogging next week. Probably. After all, I said that a couple of weeks ago and showed up, anyway. But I’ll report back in around mid-February and share how I’m doing.
 
Please let me be doing better!

Yes, I said I’d see you in two weeks, but here I am, anyway. You can always come back in seven days and pretend you didn’t see this blog.
 
Yesterday morning, a day off, Glynn asks if I’d like to go out for breakfast. I wonder if this is a trick question – I do most of the cooking here and I’ve never, ever said I don’t want to go out – but he seems to be sincere, so I go with it. When he suggests The Breakfast Place, our old standard, I remind him we’ve eaten there a hundred times. And, sure, the food is always good, but never great. The prices are always low, even if they’ve recently inched up a bit. The service is spectacular, but we’ve eaten there frequently enough that the waitresses know our order when we step in the door.
 
(The best breakfast I've EVER eaten was made by the woman in the picture, Rachel Ruiz. And, yes, she's family and, absolutely, I adore her, but true is true. Wonderful food. On YouTube, she goes as the Gas Station Gourmet: here.) 
 
I wanted to try The New Place, a restaurant that opened a couple of months ago. Reluctantly, he agrees (the boy finds something he likes, he does NOT like to change – which works with relationships, isn’t as exciting when it comes to eateries) and off we go. When we arrive at the New Place, the lights are on, the OPEN sign is flashing, and the parking lot is empty.
 
As in, there are no other cars in the front. Through the window, it appears there are no other customers, either. I look at Glynn. Glynn looks at me. “At least we’ll get good service,” I tell him.
 
I was wrong.
 
Inside, the hostess tells us to pick a spot, since all of the spots are available, so we do. The waitress appears, pours our coffees, takes our orders, and vanishes. As if she never existed at all.
 
We open the newspapers, one digital/one paper, we sip our coffees, we discuss life its ownself, and we wait. We finish our coffees, I fold up the Life section, Glynn turns the last page of Sports, and I discover that the hostess has disappeared, too. Thirsty and tired of waiting, I stand up in search of other life. The hostess has retreated to the other end of the building, in the off-chance that her next customer might be sneaking through the emergency exit, and I shout a request for more coffee.
 
I don’t normally shout in restaurants, no. But she was far away, and most restaurants I visit aren’t quite so empty.
 
Coffee arrives at the same time as the food, so all is better. My two chocolate chip pancakes (don’t judge) are enormous. Glynn’s platter of biscuits and gravy isn’t quite as big, which disappoints him, as he believes there is no such thing as too much biscuits and gravy. He tries a corner of biscuit, heavily doused in gravy, and says nothing. This is not a good sign.
 
If you want to know what Glynn is like when he gets good biscuits and gravy, go here. He acts exactly like Snuffles the dog, getting a treat from Quick Draw McDraw. Watch his face, and you can tell Glynn is (figuratively) floating in the air from joy. Not this morning. Not with this breakfast.
 
​But he didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I took my knife to cut a wedge of pancakes. I had to use my knife, because the pancakes refused to tear under the force of my fork. Then I put them in my mouth, chewed and chewed, managed to swallow the mouthful down, and told my sweetie, “These are the worst pancakes I’ve ever eaten in my life.”
 
Long story shortened, we left the rest of the food, paid the bill, and went to The Breakfast Place. I’ve never done that before, paying and abandoning one breakfast before paying and enjoying a second, but it happened yesterday. As Glynn said, life’s too short to spend it eating bad pancakes.
 
All of which was supposed to lead in to today’s post about my other, fairly recent, bad idea, but I’ve spent too much time grumping about breakfast foods. The bottom line is, I’m doing an awful, terrible, no good job of keeping on track with the NaNoWriMo outline thingie.
 
More about that next week. Before I embarrass myself completely, I have a chapter to finish. Maybe.

As it turns out – and don’t pretend you didn’t know this, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing you’d know – toy strap-ons have an audience. According to Glynn, our web traffic jumped over 20% with last week’s post. Imagine how numbers would spike if there was a vibrating Rosemary Roadster.
 
In other, less toy-related, news, I’ve finally rebounded from the respiratory yucks. None of this could happen, naturally, until the holidays had evaporated, but isn’t that how life goes? Once I felt up to it, I returned to my task of completing Christine Frazier’s 30-step NaNoWriMo outline, as I’d mentioned earlier. Things hadn’t gone as swimmingly as they might (“achingly slow” is how the Good Witch phrased it), but I’d somehow managed to plug along fairly consistently until the yucks hit me. In front of the computer screen, I tried to ignore each new step until I reached it. Finishing with #27, I saw this:
 
Step 28. A climactic battle with the villain reveals the twist and explanation
 
Which isn't at all what I would have done, if I wasn't letting Christine guide me. I felt lost because, while the story has a villain, my little mail-order bride story was woefully free of late-story surprise twists. While I’d fudged a few points to hit Christine’s various marks along the way, I’d still done it. And, sure, maybe part of Step 1 was in Step 2, and a bit of Step 4 was in Step 3, but the tale had come together pretty solidly. Until Step 28. Oh, bother.
 
I decided I had to cheat to see what Step 29 had in store for me. Maybe if Step 29 made some kind of sense, then Step 28 could be made to work. Sadness, that wasn't what happened.
 
Step 29. The hero is knocked out, wakes up in the hospital, and learns of success  
 
My story was woefully shy of hospitals. Also, I didn't want my hero or heroine to be absent during the finale. They needed to learn of success as they achieved it! Step 29 hadn't helped in even the tiniest amount.
 
If those two steps insisted on being wrongheaded, I saw no reason not to peek at Step 30. The last part of the outline insisted that Faith, my heroine, had to go home, I literally threw up my hands in frustration. This is a mail-order bride story and, in my particular story, anyway, the bride stays in the Dakota Territories. In the middle of nearly-nowhere, I didn't want her to return to New York! After doing so well earlier, I felt helpless, it was hopeless, and I was done.
 
I’d have to abandon the outline. Instead, I'd bring everything to a close before steps 28/29/30 even happen, and count the project as a win. A win with an *asterisk*, sure, but a win.
 
But Glynn was home, happy days, and he witnessed the black cloud circling my head. He wondered what was wrong, and I told him. He asked if he could see the outline, so I gave it to him. Then I went into my doll cave to meditate and feel better.
 
If you don’t think someone can find peace in a doll room, you clearly don’t own a pale blonde Barbie with the Japan flip curl.
 
The good news is, Glynn liked what I’d written. I knew this was true, because he's a lousy liar. He admitted this wasn’t like any of our other stories, he was surprised and amused by what I’d done, and – better news – he had some ideas on how to finish the last three steps. Listening to his suggestions, I wanted to argue against them...but they worked nicely, once I accepted that they could work at all. He even had a twist that I didn't see coming.
 
I sat down to flesh out the ending of the story. It took another day to get there, but get there I did. The outline is complete at almost 10,000 words, which is as complete as any of our outlines tend to be, and I’m eager/scared to get going. Starting tomorrow, I’ll charge ahead and I'll let you know how things go.
 
I'm taking next week off from the blog to tackle this kind of nutty idea. I’ll be knocking out a chapter-a-day, if Christine is right. and should be nearly halfway done with the book the next time we talk.
 
Fingers crossed.

Every year, Glynn and I get each other a stocking for Christmas and, since an empty stocking is hardly any gift at all, we put things in the stocking. When I say "things", I mean good things that we think the other person might like. This year, among his treasures, Glynn received a can of mixed nuts, a Big Cherry candy bar, and a hardcover copy of The Wah-Wah Diaries, a 260-page book about the making of a film he's never seen and doesn't care to see. Yes, you and I might not have wanted such items but he seemed quite happy to have received them. Among my delights was...well, you've seen the picture.
 
Once I stopped laughing, I was quite happy to have received my things, too. I'd asked for a vintage Troll doll or a Liddle Kiddles, and he went to work, finding a LK still in the package. When I read the line directly above the toy -- Ready for Fun Wherever you Go -- I started laughing again. I couldn't wait to tell my mother that Glynn had bought me a "Uneeda Strap-on" for Christmas.
 
Mom didn't laugh very much. The Good Witch did, though.
 
Liddle Kiddles, I know you're wondering, were a Mattel product when they were introduced in the mid-1960's. The packaging in those days offered cute names like Luana Lucky Locket and Kiddles 'n Kars (with Rosemary Roadster). On the off-chance you have an extra Rosemary Roadster, by the by, and want to send her my way, please do. In return, I promise not to cough on you.
 
​According to Vintage Doll Collector, Liddle Kiddles were all the rage in the 60's. But rages die and tastes change, and the LK line came to an end in the 70's. For Mattel, that is. In 1994, Tyco released a new line of the dolls, giving each of the adorable toys their own name, but that didn't last for long. It was the '90's, baby, and "names" were so a thing of the past. The Uneeda Doll Company grabbed the brand in '96, putting Strap-ons, Clip-ons and Lovely Lockets on toy shelves throughout the world. While they later returned to the name game (Betsy Bride was kind of popular and Tracy Tea Party had her fans), the fad had passed. These days, you have to haunt eBay or doll sites if you want a Kiddle in your stocking.
 
Speaking of Tracy Tea Party, I'm reminded to brew some lemon and ginger herbel tea before resting on the sofa. Feeling better, not feeling my best. Next week, I'll tell you what happened with my 30-day novel thingie. 
 
A promise or a threat? You decide.