Welcome to calderapen's LJ!

My friends-locked personal/family/fannish journal is over at cariadusclan, but this one is my writing/art/ritual-focused LJ.

I won't be sharing a lot of personal information here, so, for now, this journal is public.

Though this post is dated 2010, i'm writing it in mid 2009.

I've been a writer and artist ever since I could hold a crayon, but I recently started the adventure of writing my first novel. I wrote my first 50,000+ words in 2008's National Novel Writing Month, but I have done very little with it since. It's my goal to finish Pomegranate Ink before 2009's NaNoWriMo, when i plan on starting Pomegranate Ink's successor.

Now a message from July 2010: Pomegranate Ink is finished, polished, and is in the process of being published! I'm finishing Book 2 in the series, and Book 3 will be started in NaNoWriMo 2010!

So mote it be!

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Pretty productive weekend, considering the wife was at a conference and i had the twinkies to myself. They were relatively well-behaved, though, and we had a pleasant time together.

Friday we celebrated Aunt Laura's b-day over at teambeam's with Grandma Irma-style Franco-American, Peach Cobbler, and the "Glee" Soundtrack. A & M had a lovely time playin' with Cousin J.

Saturday was Willy Wonka rehearsal and then wyguy came over to NaNo. Was lovely to hang with him. We managed to get caught up word-wise, and friendship-wise, which is a difficult balance, when your writing buddy is also your RL buddy.

Sunday, we ran some errands, but mostly we hung out at the house; the kids entertained themselves fairly well, while i wrote. Somehow Virginia Woolf is finding her way into "Pomegranate Ink". Not sure why or how that is happening, but i'm going with it for now.


I'll have a few pix up of recent events @ cariadusclan, eventually. But there's work and writing and twin-rearing that's taking priority over blogging these days... More later, lovelies...

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and this, by Inky Girl, aka Debbie Ridpath Ohi, brought to my attention by svbodhicitta and teambeam:

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Still a little behind the curve. Gotta step it up.

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Feel good about what I'm writing. I'm finally going foward with the "meat" of the story in acts 2 and 3. And I'm basically going in order now and not doing all the jumping around. So it should be easier from here on out!

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I was stuck last night. Trying to write the first scene, where i introduce all the characters. I avoided this one last time, which is why i still have to do it. Ugh. Finaly eked some words onto the page. Not enough, tho.


So my official word count is 820, way below the 1300ish i need to average.

Been working on Pom Ink in recent weeks. Glad to be working on it but haven't made a huge amount of headway--mostly been editing what i have so far rather than working on the wholly unwritten part of the story. In fact, I'm discoving that even tho the piece is well over 50,000 words, i've got at least another 50,000 words to write to finish the story. And some of the original plot that was in my head is morphing into something....else. So i decided to do NaNo again, just to get me writing the new stuff. Gotta get this story out there. I'm running out of time! My deadline is fast approaching!

My NaNoWriMo Page


I've also managed to convince a number of my students to take on the Young Writers NaNo this year. Fun.

This is the art I made for our family's New Moon Ritual on Aug 20th. We are combining Feng Shui and Astrology for this 12-month cycle, working on a Gua of our house every New Moon, corresponding to the Houses in our natal charts. (Conveniently, all for of us have Leo Ascendants, so we can all work on the same Gua every month). Since Aug 20 was a Leo New Moon, and we all have Leo on the 1st house cusp, we asperged, enhanced, and blessed the Gua that corresponds with the 1st house, the Career Gua. Since my wife has been looking for a new job, i asked her what image she'd like to see here. She requested an image of our family on "the land" (a vision we've talked about for years), with livestock and crops and places for events, retreats and ritual. This is my interpretation in acrylics on canvas (my first time w/o watercolors on watercolor paper!!!) of "the land." It's kind of 10 of Cups-ish, i think.

I actually wrote a little on Sunday night! And started organizing the disparate chapters into some semblance of order. Finally.

And, I've arranged to meet my novel-writing pal auntbeedle on Friday evenings (Amo willing; she'll have to kid-sit) so i have a real person to "answer to" on this.

Moving forward again! Gonna have this thing fully written and mostly revised my the end of the year!!!!