How to win NaNoWriMo

 I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, and aren't you jealous?

No, it's not a yodeling contest in Wisconsin. Sheesh. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, the month being November, and the challenge being to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That figures out to ... let's see ... carry the--ah. 1,667 words per day, on the average.

Doesn't sound like much ... until you try it.

Personally, I would have chosen NaNoWriMo to be in January, which has an extra day, no holidays, and absolutely no reason to go outside. (What, New Year's? Let's face it: That holiday is actually on December 31st. After that a ball drops, you kiss someone through a mask, go home, and sleep late. Start writing at noon, and you're good.)

But the advantage of November is that you can use the excuse to leap up as soon as the turkey is eaten on Thanksgiving. "Sorry, love catching up with the family but Uncle Bert has already started with the political insults and the football game will be boring gotta go!" And you're outta there.

 

 

If you're a writer, you have the advantage of being too poor to go do anything else anyway, so why not give it a try? I won NaNoWriMo twice, with my manuscripts for Summer Jobs Are Murder and Fire On Mist Creek, both now quietly accumulating rejection slips in the corner. So I can give you a few tips on how to make it through the month, which is intended to give wannabe writers a kick in the proverbial pants:

Have your story ready to go. Characters created, outlines done (if you’re an outliner), research … um, researched. You should be prepared to type the first line of the actual story at 12:01 a.m. November 1st. (Or 10 a.m., or whenever you start.)

Second, take care of personal matters. Have a talk with friends and family. Tell them why it’s important to you. Make sure they either support you, or your locks are changed. If there’s some TV show you can’t stand to miss, DVR it. Take care to stay hydrated and eat proper meals, and every once in awhile get up and make sure your legs still work. Hire someone to make the meals and do the dishes.

Oh, wait, you're a writer--you can't afford to hire anyone.

Third, clear your schedule. As much as possible, anything you need to do, have done in October. Doctor appointments, for instance. Or, delay it until December. Laundry, for instance.

In other words, free up as much time as possible, and use that time for writing—writing first. Sure, if you cut a finger off you have to go to the hospital, but couldn’t you just bandage up an amputated toe for a few weeks? You don’t type with your toes.

Do you?

Once you get started writing, keep at it--don't worry about typos or other problems, you can fix those in edits. Get your story down.

I'm doing what I've been calling my Untitled Oz Project, which has no title.  (My original titles always suck, anyway.) Tell me yours! You've got nothing to lose but 30 days ... and maybe a toe.

If anyone wants to tag along on my trip, or maybe try a trip of your own, my NaNoWriMo account is here:

https://nanowrimo.org/participants/mark-r-hunter

 

 

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

 

Tahoe Spooner Summit Flag replacement 2020 Hwy 50 Carson City, NV

Tennessee and Rhode Island on 50 Authors From 50 States

 It's a sad, sick day in Tennessee, and something's fishy in Rhode Island, on 50 Authors From 50 States:

 

https://annettesnyder.blogspot.com/2020/10/tennessee-nashville-at-night-with.html

https://annettesnyder.blogspot.com/2020/10/greetings-from-rhode-island-home-of.html

 

 

Book Review: The City of Mirrors, by Justin Cronin

 I was going to make this short: I can't say much about the plot or characters, because that would spoil the first two books of this trilogy. But there's so much going on, and so much to talk about, and so many, many pages, that I'm not sure "short" counts for anything here.

 The City of Mirrors is the finish of a thousand year story begun in The Passage. As we open enough time has passed since the second book, The Twelve, that younger members of an apocalypse-surviving human community have come to think the deadly "virals" they've heard of are just scary stories. The last outpost of humanity, Kerrville, Texas, is bursting at the seems in a spreading civilization that harkens back to the Old West.

Both the rest of humanity and the virals seem to be extict, although one small group of survivors have been trying to repair a ship that might take them exploring, and a few others are scattered here and there.

 But all is, naturally, not what it seems. At about the same time the survivors learn they may, indeed, be the last humans on Earth, the final Big Bad makes his appearance: Zero, the one who came before The Twelve. And he's got surprises waiting.

There's enough backstory here that you could read The City of Mirrors as a standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it. Justin Cronin brings all the strings together, including the ones you didn't even know were there, and his final act is immensely satisfying to those who've seen the story all the way through. Spreadsheets? Markable walls all over his house, covered with family trees and notes? I don't know how he does it. But I submit that he's actually better at these sprawling sagas than George R.R. Martin, who sometimes seems to enjoy mystifying his readers about who the heck these people are, and where they heck they've been.

My only issue is that there's one huge--and I mean HUGE--flashback involving Zero, the sort-of-villain who's been ahead of everyone else from the beginning. We find out in detail exactly why he ends up where he is, and what drives him. It's not that it's not interesting. The story of Zero's life, and how he ends up at the epicenter of a civilization-ending epidemic, is fascinating. It's just that it goes into an amazing amount of detail that the reader doesn't really need to know, in a book that's already so long that Chuck Norris could stand on it to punch out Godzilla. You could skip a lot of it ... but you won't know which parts, until you reach the end of the story.

Oh, and what is The City of Mirrors? Well, that's revealed, but to give it away would be ... giving it away.

And then, to satisfy the "thousand year" thing I mentioned earlier, we go far, far into the future, to find out the results of our heroes' actions. It's the ultimate epilogue--and it works.

 I highly recommend the whole trilogy, and I'm impressed that Cronin clearly wasn't winging it--he knew where all the characters, and his vast story, were going all along.

 https://www.amazon.com/City-Mirrors-Novel-Passage-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B015BCWZWW

 

 

The Devil's Soup Bowl

A trip to the Devil's Soup Bowl in Michigan ... assuming you can see this video from my seldom used YouTube channel. What do I know? But if this does work, I'll be trying to post to YouTube more often in the future. Because I don't juggle enough social media sites.

The Avengers Of Oz [DeepFake]

I was deeply distrubed, until I got to the end--then I wanted to see the whole thing.

Your Standard National Park Trail

I wrote this a few weeks ago, and held onto it to cheer me up on those first cold, windy days of autumn. Oh, there they are. If you walk this trail now, I'd imagine you'll be treated to some amazing fall colors.

 

 I joke with the title, because there's no such thing as a "standard" national park. Still, the first trail we hit on our first visit to Indiana Dunes National Park struck me as being a more or less normal Indiana trail. Woods, gullies, a little river, boardwalk over the swamp--that's Indiana, all over. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

 

We were only a short distance from the dunes, and from Lake Michigan, where no doubt more spectacular views could be found. Certainly this trail wasn't as up and down as Turkey Run State Park, or Brown County, or Clifty Falls State Park way down south. But there's something to be said for just a normal, quiet walk in the woods.

This is assuming you don't find some creepy half-completed Blair Witch Project-like structure in the middle of nowhere. Luckily I'd already done my research: This was someone teaching how the local Native Americans used to make their domiciles. So we continued on our very short hike.

Except, of course, that we took a wrong turn. Instead of hiking the mile and a half we intended, we went for three and a half miles. Believe me when I say that by the time we got to the end, we were very happy that there weren't too many ups and downs this time around.

Many places in Indiana that are now parks and nature preserves were once settlements or farms, so it's not unusual to see a few big, old trees surrounded by a bunch of younger trees that just started growing within the last few decades. In my novel Storm Chaser I described a meadow at Chain O' Lakes State Park that doesn't exist anymore--it's a woods. So it was here, but we saw some trees like this one that were gnarly and huge and crazy old.

It was an overcast day, so the pictures didn't pop as well as I'd hoped they would, but they still give a sense of the place, I think. The funny thing is that we were just a short drive from the sprawling Chicago metropolitan area, and from the edge of Lake Michigan you can see the city's high-rises across the water.

We crossed the Little Calumet River twice. I'd hate to have been canoeing here--there were lots of dead trees fallen into the water, and it would mean a lot of portaging around them. Apparently such blockages are called strainers, which I didn't know, and can be very dangerous, which I did.

Ah, but we walked, Three and a half miles we walked, around gullies and over the river and through the woods and--wasn't that a song? We also hit a boardwalk across an area that would ordinarily be swampy, but in our drier weather was just mushy. I love boardwalks, and we've followed them through many Indiana parks and preserves. Why do I like them? No idea.

We're hoping to get back to the National Park when the leaves are turning, and maybe get you some dune and lake pictures. Stay tuned.

 Here's a link to the Dunes website:

https://www.nps.gov/indu/index.htm

http://www.markrhunter.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R. Hunter"

I Missed Fire Prevention, but Fires Go On

 I've barely had a moment free the last several days, and completely forgot that last week was Fire Prevention Week. (A lot of its normal activities, naturally, were curtailed by COVID. Little meanie virus.) So I'm late, and the upcoming week doesn't look all that much better, so I'm partaking in that time honored tradition of reposting a previous blog, or as we called it at the time, newspaper column.

The actual theme of this year's fire prevention week was "Serve Up Fire Safety in the Kitchen!" Heaven knows the kitchen can be a pretty dangerous place, especially when I'm using it. Why, just last ... never mind. So be careful in the kitchen, have a fire extinguisher and an escape plan, and when Daylight Savings Time ends in two weeks don't forget to change the batteries on your smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In my three (or so) decades in the emergency services, (Forty now. I don't want to talk about it.) I never heard anyone complain their smoke detectors worked properly. Well, okay, once—but that guy was an arsonist.

Fire Prevention Week this year is October 9-15, mostly because nothing else goes on in mid-October. No, actually it was because the Great Chicago Fire happened on October 9, 1871. That fire destroyed more than 17,400 structures and killed at least 250 people, and might have been prevented if Mrs. O’Leary had installed a smoke detector in her barn. Have you ever seen a cow remove a smoke detector battery? Me neither.

Nobody really knows what started the Great Chicago Fire, so the dairy industry has a real beef with blaming the cow, which legend says knocked over a lamp. Does the lamp industry ever get the blame? Noooo....

We do know that at about the same time the Peshtigo Fire roared across Wisconsin, killing 1,152 people and burning 16 entire towns. In fact, several fires burned across Michigan and Wisconsin at the time, causing some to speculate a meteor shower may have caused the conflagration. There might have been shooting stars elsewhere, but Chicago got all the press.

This year’s Fire Prevention Week theme is “Don’t wait, check the date!” So ask your date: Does she have a working smoke detector? If not, maybe you should go back to your place.

Just as you should change your smoke detector batteries every fall and spring, you should replace your smoke alarm every ten years. Doing the same to your carbon monoxide detector is a great idea, so it can make a sound to warn about the gas that never makes a sound.

As I hadn’t given much thought to the age of my own smoke detectors, I took that advice. The one in the basement stairway said: “Manufactured 1888 by the Tesla Fire Alarm Co.”

Not a good sign.

The one in the kitchen hallway said simply: “Smoke alarm. Patent pending.”

Oh boy.

So don’t wait—check the date. Do it right now, because otherwise you’d be waiting. I know it doesn’t have quite the pizzazz of the 1942 Fire Prevention Week theme: “Today Every Fire Helps Hitler”.

But hey … you can’t blame the Nazis for everything.

 

Ahem. This would be a good time to remind you that proceeds from our book Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department go to support, naturally, the Albion Fire Department. You can grab a copy of that or any of our books at the website, http://www.markrhunter.com/books.html, or from the other usual suspects.

 https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter" 

A hardcover book for just ten dollars ... for awhile

Well, shoot ... disregard. The price shot back up to normal while I was in the middle of spreading the word all over the internet, so I just look like an idiot. I suspected it was a mistake, but I'd hoped some readers would be able to take advantage of it. Instead I have egg on my face.

 

Amazon has the hardcover edition of Images of America: Albion and Noble County set at only $10, which is a heck of a bargain. I don't know why it's six bucks less than the paperback version--in fact, it's so low for a hardcover that I honestly wonder if they made a mistake.

But it would be a great Christmas present, and rumor has it we're going to take a shot at doing the holidays this year. If you do give it as a present, you can say you got it at full price--we won't tell.

Of course, the publisher never told me there was a hardcover version to begin with--I found out by accident.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Albion-Noble-County.../dp/1531671551

 

(And of course our other books also remain available. Gotta ramp up for the holidays!)

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

 

Poking Through Another Medical Week

 I started out last week in something of a good mood, because I finished the third draft of Smoke Showing and then took the preliminary steps toward writing a novel involving the Land of Oz--a project close to my heart that I've been planning in my head for years.

Then the week turned into one of those Medical Weeks. You know the ones I mean: When for a certain period of time everything that happens seems to be health related, usually in a bad way.

Starting from worst, my uncle and my grandmother both fell and broke their hips, and as I write this both are scheduled for surgery today. For my grandmother it was supposed to be yesterday, but they couldn't transfer her to the hospital where the operation will be done because all their beds were full.

You knew the coronavirus was going to pop up here, somewhere.

So everything after that is pretty minor. In fact, very minor, and begging to be made fun of, although sometimes even I'm not in a fun-making mood. It's just that it all happened at the same time.

I got poked by needles four times, for instance, but that doesn't really count because I get two regular allergy shots, anyway. The third was a routine flu shot, so only the fourth--my annual blood draw--led to anything worse than a little soreness.

Besides, one needle was a withdrawal and three were deposits, so doesn't that count as a net gain?

The first day saw the two allergy shots and the blood draw, which my employer has done so they can shake judgemental fingers at me. I had a feeling about the results, so I downed a half gallon of ice cream between then and the follow up ... I figured it was likely to be my last guilt-free food treat ever.

Two days later, we took our dog Beowulf to the vet to get his ear infection looked at, so that counts as one. He's been walking sideways with one ear drooped over, and no, I don't share booze with him. Last time I walked that way was after two strawberry daquiris. (I'm a lightweight. Well, in that way, I am.)

Left ear, the one under the dump trunk.

He's doing a lot better.  Yesterday he had enough energy to dig his nails into my left big toe, so for awhile I was walking just like him.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the chiropractor. As usual, my vertebrae were trying to pass each other on a curve, but she pounded them back into submission.

Then came the flu shot, which was entirely uneventful as shots go. My wife and I were together for those last two, because it's important to experience pain as a family.

We closed out the week with a follow up at the doctor's office, where I mentioned two strange little bumps on my left hand that didn't really seem worth mentioning. Turns out they might be the beginning of a condition that can lead to the inability to use that hand without surgical intervention and GAH! I've always had a fear of not being able to type. Talk to text just isn't the same, because the whole reason I started typing to begin with is because I can't speak.

 Oh, and also I'm fat.

But you already knew that, and thanks for being polite. The doc didn't actually say so, in so many words. She said my cholesterol was going through the roof, I had a fatty liver, and my PSA levels took a huge jump. Since two out of three of those things mean I'm fat, I took it that way. The third had to do with my prostate, so I guess another visit to Doctor Finger is in my future.

Prostate cancer is one of the cancers that's more common in firefighters, so of course I'm going to have it checked, but I'm not too worried ... and there's nothing I can do about it, anyway. Doctor finger will poke around until he digs out the problem.

Weighing 233 pounds is whatI can do something about.

First I took all the stuff out of my pants pockets, then I cut my hair, and finally I bought a cheaper pair of shoes, so I'm already down to 232.

No. Just--NO.

 

Other than that, it's the same old story: Eat less, exercise more, make better food choices. My goal is to lose around five pounds a month, then maintain it somewhere below 200. The timing couldn't be worse, as I've gained weight during winter all my life, and the holidays don't exactly help. But losing weight might also help my back problems, and I'm starting to think my chiropractor enjoys causing me pain.

Anyway, that was my medical week. If I read back through this I'd probably feel ashamed of myself for whining, and delete most of it. Then I'd have to find something else to blog about, so hang the edits! I'm going back to my story outlining.

Maybe a trip down the Yellow Brick Road will shave off some pounds.

Oh, you'll heard more about my new project later.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"