Hiatus OR The First Cut Won't Hurt At All

Three things are happening in the next week that are cause for hiatus.

All three are painful and involve knives.

1) I'm having surgery
2) Thanksgiving
3) I'm (still) revising like crazy. (What, you don't use a cleaver to revise? Hmm, Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.)

Guess which one is going to hurt the most?

Yes, Thanksgiving.
For some families, turkey day is a huge orgy of football, eating and running around in the leaves. I know this because I've seen many Hallmark commercials and Lifetime movies. For me, Thanksgiving is just the first salvo in the family vs. family war that gets staged every year. It's not pretty and no one really wins, we just survive.

Makes the minor surgery I have to have a cake walk in comparison.

The revisions however, will likely be a close second to Thanksgiving in the painful-olympics. I'm still struggling, struggling. I haven't given up, which is the only positive thing I can say about it.

So what I want to know, as I take some time off to play with knives, is what do the holidays do for your writing? Inspire it? Derail it? Slow it down, speed it up?

See you in December and Happy Thanksgiving.

A Lovely Award and a Shed Load of Revisions

I know I said I was doing NaNo but somehow it hasn't really happened. Two things have waylaid me.
Most important is my revision schedule. I've said before that I am killing myself to complete these revisions. These will be the LAST revisions I make on this ms until (if) someone with a shiny agent badge asks me for more. It's root canal with a cup of tea for anesthetic, but I'm muddling through. I'm a third of a way through guts and garters revisions and my self-imposed deadline is November 18th.

The second thing that's put me off NaNo is this post from Maggie Stiefvater. At first, I discounted it. I've heard criticism against NaNo before (like this from Salon's Laura Miller last year) and it never rang true to me. But Maggie's 'dear john' letter to NaNo did. BookEnd is a NaNo baby, and though it would most likely not exist if not for NaNo, it would also probably not need such extensive revisions if I'd taken more time with the writing of it.

So, while I'm happy with the new story I've started this year in NaNo, I'm not going to worry about word count (like, not at all.) In fact, I'm using November as a springboard not to write a new book, but just to think about one.

What about you? Are you a NaNo fan forever, or do you have your doubts?

On another note, thanks to Jenna at Finding the Write Way for the "One Lovely Blog" award.

I hereby bestow the "One Lovely Blog" award on the following three blogs which are both lovely and smart:

Yvie Gonya at Wandering on the Edge of Paradise
Sharon Bayliss at The Blue Word
Jennifer Burke at Jen's Bookshelf

Bad Days - Insecure Writer's Support Group

I'm pretty sure I'm doing Alex Cavanaugh's blogfest, Insecure Writer's Support Group all wrong. Instead of writing inspirational stories of how I overcame some issue, I spend my post time moaning and whining and generally being miserable.

If you were hoping I'd say 'But not this time!' then you are going to be disappointed. Because I got no sleep last night and sleep makes me seriously half-empty.

My three year old came in to sleep with us, probably due to some post-halloween sugary imbalance. For about an hour I withstood her elbows and sticky hands on my face. Then I carried her to her bed and tucked her in. She was dead asleep. Then I tossed and turned for three hours, unable to get up, unable to play bookworm and unable to go back to sleep because I was busy worrying. I worried about finishing my revisions. I worried about how long it's been since I got a full request from my agent girl-crush that I still haven't sent because I'm not done revising (it's been six months. I suck). I mentally composed the email I'm going to eventually send to said agent when I'm ready, then discarded it as seriously stupid. I also managed to squeeze in some worry about the new wip I started for NaNo. It just goes to show how effective I can be as a multi-tasker when the task is worrying myself into an early grave.

Due to this lack of sleep, I'm completely useless today. I can barely keep my kids from playing in traffic. And my NaNo word count is hovering under 300. Today is a wash.

I know it will be better tomorrow after Tylenol PM has sorted out my insomnia, but I hate days like today. They seem like such an unnecessary waste. Do I need to have this total breakdown to get to some other 'better' place? Or, as aforementioned, do I just suck?

What about you insecure lot? What are your bad days like?