I was on a roll, churning out chapters right up until chapter 10 and then the wheels started to get wobbly. Missed several days and tried to push the wheels back on. For those of you who ended up not knowing what all those chapters were about I had started on the epic journey called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It happens every November and you have to write 50,000 words in that month.

THEN I started to drive from Toronto to Victoria BC with my daughter who has just been posted there from Halifax. She picked me up in Toronto and we drove to Ann Arbor to visit my niece and then on to spend the day in Chicago, 3 hours in Minneapolis, a night in Winnipeg, sleep in Regina (where she was sick),  sleep in Medicine Hat, wander around Calgary, two nights (poor child was sick again) in Banff where I got to do the hike and she stayed in bed, on to Kamloops where the morning presented us with a magnificent vista of hills, on to Vancouver and the ferry and dinner in Victoria with my nephew and his wife.  I rested on Friday and flew  home on Saturday. Whooo, it was great and amazing with little gems of adventures and meeting people.

And the 50,000 words? Well I thought I would be clever and just bring my tablet and keyboard. I was using scrivener so I copied all the chapters to dropbox as RTF files and checked to make sure they were available on the tablet. Everything good to go. I would write while she drove, wrong. The first thing is that dropbox on the tablet wouldn’t let me access the files without an internet connection. Ok, first stop I copy all the files onto the tablet. Good to go again, not.

The word processor on the tablet wouldn’t open RTF files. Now that is stupid. So again wait until we stop, find a word processor that will open RTF files. Now we’re good to go, sort of.

Since I’m writing on the fly, I sometimes have to go back and add something to an earlier chapter so that it makes sense. Except that this word processor only allows one file open at a time, grrr. Then I have files with character descriptions and to look at them means that I have to save and close the file I’m working on, grrr. So I copy all the chapters into one big file. Good to go again, not.

There was a certain amount of angst as I lost lots of words before I realized I had to save the stupid thing even to go to the home page of the tablet.  Ok, so now I think I’ve got it wired, nope. Just opening the program takes multiple attempts so finally in disgust I look for another word processor (again after we stop so I have an internet connection). I finally locate one that will not only open RTF but says it will open and save files as DOC files. Get it, open my story and I’m good to go, YES.

The story was done on the 28th and I wrote 50,360 words. Even gave it an ending!.

So you’ll get chapter 7 + in my next blog post.