NaNoWriMo’s reward is supposed to be self-satisfaction, a printable certificate of completion, and a free proof copy of your book if you send it to CreateSpace in December.

But I’m a material girl. And I do not want a proof copy of something that is going to pretty much suck. I’ll mark it up in red pen in about 2 days.

So this year, when I hit 50,000 words, I am buying this poster to have matted and framed for my study:

And this shirt because it is awesome and true:

We all make ourselves do some crazy shit once in awhile. I know a few NaNo-ers who are promising themselves tattoos (not book-related, necessarily) or little vacations or other fun things if they finish this year. 

What do you do to motivate yourself to do something as nuts as 50,000 words in 30 days?

(P.S. Thanks to Ashley for the Starbucks contest! I won Starbucks drinks, and just in time for noveling!)

Last weekend, Jenny The Reckless Chef came over to bring me squash soup and gingerbread to comfort my poor sick self, and on a whim she grabbed a frozen cobbler at the store. We don’t usually bake from a box, but it seemed like a nice, quick treat.

Disclaimer: I’d never used the oven in my new apartment.

I turned the knob to set the temperature to 400 degrees, then went to turn the knob to set the oven to “bake.”

The knob was blank. BLANK. All of the words on it had worn off.

Jenny and I pondered for a bit what order the settings might be in – off, bake, broil, clean? I turned it to the first setting and in a few minutes, the oven was nice and hot. Figuring that I’d gotten it right, I put the thawed cobbler in and set the timer for 40 minutes. We went into the living room to enjoy squash soup and watch crappy reality TV.

About 15 minutes later:

“Is that SMOKE in my kitchen?”

We rushed in there and the kitchen was in fact full of smoke* billowing from the oven. I opened the oven door.

The top of the cobbler was ON FIRE.

“Grab a camera!” Jenny screeched.**

Yeah, never mind that there was an open flame in my gas oven. This was for posterity.

It. Smelled. DISGUSTING. Even after we opened windows and fanned the smoke outside,*** the whole house was reeking of burnt pastry. We decided that we must have set the oven to “broil” instead of “bake,” so the top heating element at 400 degrees on a piece of pastry was to blame. I’d always had an oven where the broiler was a separate drawer on the bottom, so the idea of broiling something inside the oven did not even occur to me.

The charred top of the cobbler was pretty much solid, but Jenny stuck a fork down into the bottom of the pan to see if any of the berries could be salvaged.

“These are awful,” she said, wrinkling her nose but not missing a beat. “OMG, we have to Twitter this right now!”

Fail can be funny.

_____________________

* And NEITHER of my smoke alarms went off, which you can imagine made me oh-so-happy and safe-feeling, right?

** She’s not called the Reckless Chef for nothing. Her blog is full of pictures of things she’s burned, melted, and broken.

*** The smoke alarms never did go off. I will be speaking to my landlord. For that – and a new oven knob.

Oh gaaaawd, am I going to finish my October things before NaNoWriMo starts? This freaking sinus infection has had me down and out for a week and a half now, completely throwing off my plans to paint and have lunch with my grandparents, and the resulting drowsiness (both medication-induced and just plain LAZY) has really slowed my progress on outlining my manuscript and even just posting on here.

Well, I take that last one back, kind of. Here’s the issue I’m having with posting, and it’s not entirely because I’m lazy:

My inspiration for the format of the manuscript is in  the lost art of the epistolary novel, like Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangeruses, which is comprised almost entirely of letters among several parties. I’m going to try and translate that into a manuscript where the exposition comes  in the form of my main characters’ public blog posts and personal emails among themselves, and the action really going down in a traditional narrative format.

Hey, it MIGHT work.

My proposed format means that I will have to write blog posts, but not for my blog. So anytime I get an idea or a theme for a post in my head lately, it seems to shuffle its way from MY point of view to one of the characters I’m outlining. Then I don’t want to write it on here because:

a) that’s kind of cheating, to have any narrative done beforehand, and

b) my personal voice is being hijacked.

So for November, please don’t expect any sort of insightful, brilliant posts on here. I don’t think I’ll have them for my own blog while I’m basically creating three others from scratch. You’ll have to settle for a series of “this-is-what-I-did-today” blurbs, I’m afraid.

Just to catch up on a few things…

Since July I’ve been in the application process for a new job here at The Hospital. A friend of mine in the marketing department clued me in to the fact that they were thinking of creating a position to coordinate The Hospital’s growing social media outreach projects, so I fired off an email to the director of the department before the job was even posted. I interviewed a few months ago and was asked back for a second interview, which finally took place in September because the creation of a new job role got tangled up in HR for weeks on end.

My first interview was with a panel of four people, and they really liked me. They liked my resume, liked my writing samples, liked my personality, and la la la. Of course I was really excited about the opportunity to get a foot in the door in the marketing department – without a degree in the field, that’s a tricky thing to do, but my experience in internal and external communications within my current department has helped me build a portfolio of sorts that’s at least halfway impressive to anyone within this organization. To an outside group, who knows – which is why finding this type of job at The Hospital was a plum chance for me.

But, after much hard work (and even a homework assignment!) preparing for the second interview, I found out (on moving day, natch) that despite nailing the second interview, I came in second place to someone from an outside agency who had more experience in the industry. The manager who called me was very apologetic and reiterated all the things about how they thought I was great and would be an asset to their department and if anything ever came open they would absolutely call me because they were all so impressed, just not the right fit for this job because of lack of experience, and so on and so forth.

But you know how it is. Hear that after a rejection and no matter how sincere the bearer of the bad news is, everything feels like lip service. And I was in the Hardee’s drive-thru line when I got the call, which didn’t help.

And of course this all took place on moving day, which you all know was SUCH a wonderful day to deal with – well, anything.

I drove to E’s house.

“I didn’t get it, baby.” He opened his arms and I snuggled into his chest and got all teary. “I’m giving myself ten minutes to mope,” I sniffed. “Then I have to deal with the rest of this crap and I can’t cry any more.” He said many comforting things and rubbed my shoulders and kissed my hair like the wonderful boyfriend he is. When my ten minutes were up, I forced myself to get back to the business of moving.

Maybe it was for the best that I got the news on a day that was already crappy. I had to suck it up and move on. Literally.

I understand their reasons, of course. I wouldn’t have wanted to go into a job for which I was ill-prepared and lacked the experience necessary to totally kick ass. I can’t ride on personality alone, and if I’m not qualified, then I’m not qualified. I can deal with that.

It’s a field I really want to be in. My boss knows that, and after I told her why I didn’t get the job, she said she was going to make an effort to help me get more experience within our department so I could build up my resume a bit more. She also offered to sign off on tuition reimbursement if I’d like to take a class or three in order to boost my academic credentials.

(Boss, I LOVE YOU. The only reason I want to go work for anyone else is because I know that if you won the lottery tomorrow, you would probably not take me to Bermuda with you and I’d be stuck here working for people not half as awesome as you are.)

That brings me to grad school.

I tried it once before and my first class in the Master’s in Project Management really made it quite clear that I did NOT want to work in Project Management after all. I do okay at it right now, but this is not where I want to be. This is not the kind of work that inspires me or even makes me a tiny bit happy. So I’ve been digging into info on graduate programs in the St. Louis area (online learning, not my thing) and found one school that has several Master’s programs in communications that all have the same core courses. So I could take one or two classes and then head into a program in Media Communications, Media Literacy, or Communications Management.

I was rolling this over in my brain when I got a call from the director of the Marketing Department last week. She called to apologize for not having been in touch since the interview (she was not the one who made that first call to me) and to reiterate how impressed she was with me and really wanted to have me in their department when something suitable became available.

I was truly touched. After a few weeks of mellowing out post-rejection, the same words didn’t feel like lip service anymore. They sounded more honest, more true – true enough to make me feel like even little inexperienced me could have a shot at moving into the field I really want to be in.

I seized the moment and asked her about the graduate programs I was considering. Would one of these be worthwhile, what do you think of the school, what do you think of a possible emphasis in this or that? She was so encouraging and seemed pretty pumped that I was seeking this out on my own.

Little Miss Initiative, that’s me. But seriously, who wants to get thisclose and get shot down again? The resume isn’t going to improve itself, you know.

“And I hope you don’t mind,” she continued, “but I took the liberty of sending your resume and application information over to the VP of [department]. I was speaking to her the other day and they’re thinking about creating a similar position to support their new [redacted] campaign, so I told her about you.”

YOU. HOPE. I. DON’T. MIND?!

Guuuuhhh.

It may become something, it may not. At the moment, the job in the other department doesn’t really exist yet, it’s just an idea they’re tossing around. But my name is in there. Yowza.

And graduate school starts in January.

Only 15 days until November!

That means I only have 15 days to get stuff done before National Novel Writing Month begins again, and I fling myself back into the race for 50,000 words in 30 days. I will be putting my word count tracker widget up again this year, so you can cheer me on!

I have got to clear my plate before it begins, or else I will have way too many excuses to procrastinate.  Last year I had to leave the house to write most nights because there were so many projects there that caught my attention and distracted me. I spent way too much money stuffing my face as I wrote night after night at the Gelateria that month.

So, in the interests of a healthy bank account, in the next 15 days, I will:

• Finish painting. I have the living room and bedroom left to do.
• Outline my NaNoWriMo story. I have given myself permission to use Post-Its.
• Write at least 4 more blog posts. I’ve been slacking.
• Finish my grad school application and send it in. (Did I forget to mention that? Grad school? More on that in the next post, I think.)
• Visit my grandparents.
• Weatherproof my windows.

And in the next 12 hours, YOU should enter my bath product giveaway at Like. Love. Want. before time is up at midnight tonight!