I am embarking on a new adventure…the NaNoWriMo July Camp.  I have committed to writing 25,000 words by the time July ends.  A little scary!  I am hoping that this will help me with my severe case of procrastination that seems to jump in my way every single time I start a new project.  Tomorrow is the 1st day of Camp and I still haven’t decided whether I am going to work on Rapture or start something completely new.  I’d really love to write some pure horror but I’m not sure that I’m completely comfortable doing so.  I am such a fan of the genre, which is my go-to when it comes to books and movies, and the thought of doing it poorly gives me pause.  Am I capable of instilling fear and dread in my readers?  Will my ghosts and spirits haunt their dreams as well as their waking hours?  Will they be afraid to turn off the lights at night after reading the final chapter?  If I write horror, I want to be able to scare Stephen King!  I want to build the dread to an unimaginable peak and when it’s time, I want the reader to fall to equally unimaginable depths of shock and horror.  I am a huge fan of Noel Hynd’s writing.  He is a true master of horror and he is relatively unknown to the average reader.  He has written spy and conspiracy novels as well as books of sheer, slow-building supernatural horror.  If I do choose to write a book of horror, I aspire to write like him.  I don’t want to copy him…I want to be as original as he is but in my own way.  I have decided that I will be watching all of the Marvel Studios movies while doing this.  Unlike a lot of writers, I have to have a distraction.  I don’t call it that though.  I have severe ADHD and in order to work using my left brain, my right brain has to be kept occupied otherwise it just runs wild and I cannot concentrate on the job at hand.  And I love the Avengers!  I figure that since I will also be using my right brain to come up with my story, I need to have something in the background that I’ve already seen so that it doesn’t require too much of my right brain attention.  So, tomorrow I will embark on my NaNoWriMo Camp writing adventure and I am excited as well as a bit trepidatious.  I’m determined to succeed.  25,000 is only 806 words per day.  I have 4 weekends to play catch-up if I fall short plus, 1 of those weekends will be 5 days long thanks to the 4th, a couple of vacation days, and the weekend itself.  I also have my lunches that I can use to work on my daily word count.  I’ll be using my Office 365 account so I can write anywhere and save it all to the cloud so it’s always accessible…even on my phone.  I have a 12.9″ iPad Pro with a keyboard so, except for not having a mouse, it’s like using a laptop.  And, if all else fails, I have my trusty writer’s notebook and some awesome new pens.  Before I get started, I have to finish the postcards for 15 NaNoWriMo Camp attendees.  I received my 1st 1 yesterday.  I have them all addressed and now I have to come up with words of encouragement to write on them.  I plan on internalizing those words as I write them to use to encourage myself.  I will need them.  So, wish me well!                  

Like the saying goes, sometimes life gets in the way of what you really want to do.  Most of the time, we let it get in the way but other times it forcibly pulls you out of your routine and makes you focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.  It seems like my life has been taken over in the past 2 months.  Rick almost bled out and it took a lot out of him literally and figuratively but has improved after 7 iron infusions, I had an acutely infected tooth and had it extracted which set off a seriously major RA flare like I’ve never had before that lasted a couple of weeks, I’ve been caring for my feral colonies as well as a semi-feral mama cat and her kittens and 1 of them had to be rescued and trapped after taking a ride under my husband’s van which took 10 hours to do and then 2 of the kittens died (including the 1 that was rescued) and that sent me down into a spiral of depression for a week, Rick had a cardiac ablation procedure to get his heart out of AFib so he’s feeling much better as long as he doesn’t push himself too hard, then I fell out in our driveway while dealing with the cats after stepping on a big rock that somehow ended up there and my bad knee, elbow and, shoulder took the brunt of the fall so I’ve been a bit crippled by that. and now 1 of my feral rescues from 9 years ago is sick and I’m hand-feeding him baby food every hour now that he’s on an appetite stimulant.  (His rescue was an awesome story.  My husband had told me that I’d reached my limit of cats that I could bring home and that the only way I could bring another home was if it fell from the sky.  I’d fallen completely in love with this feral kitten at work and wanted him but I had that falling from the sky restriction stopping me.  1 day, I was out in the main office fixing something on someone’s computer and I heard a commotion coming from the ladies’ restroom.  I open the door, turn on the light and there was my kitten in the toilet.  Mama cat had moved her kittens into the ceiling and the tile shifted and down fell Zippy from the sky!   I dried him off and immediately called Rick and told him that we had a new family member.  After that, I couldn’t have 1 unless it was green.  We’ve adopted 5 since then…Rick is a big softy.)  And, of course, there’s work and everyday life.  Each day, I plan to get back to this blog but it always seems like something else pops up to stop me.  Right now, it might be this storm that has rushed in.  It’s extremely dark, the wind is blowing scary hard (up to 70mph gusts). and we’re under a severe thunderstorm warning until 2:00 and a watch until 7:00.  The lights have flickered a few times so I’m saving this every few seconds…just in case.  Well, I’m back.  The storm has passed through and it looks like we lost another tree, some tree limbs, and a few of our tomato plants have some broken vines but, all in all, after 70+mph wind gusts over a period of 30 minutes, we came out pretty well.  Plus, we won’t have to water the garden tonight.  The storm was beautiful to watch from my front row seat here in my Magical Writing Haven but it did get pretty intense.  On the plus side, the temperature dropped from 91° with a heat index of 100° to a mild 70°.  I’ll take that.  They had predicted 98° for a high today but I guess that the cold front moved through a bit earlier than they had thought it would.  It’s not even officially summer and I am done with the heat and humidity.  That’s 1 of the downsides of living in Texas.  I can deal with the heat but when humidity is thrown into the mix, which it usually is here, I’m done.  I’m just too fluffy for that!  Well, after all that, I’m back to blogging and hopefully, life will cooperate so that I can keep on doing it daily.  I really love doing it so I have to make it more of a priority.  I’m also still plodding along working on my personal writing workshop as well as getting back to being more active in my creativity group.  I’ve missed it all.  We have a video POP-Up Dessert Group Zoom call at 5:00 this evening.  I’m looking forward to that.  It’s an hour of connecting in smart groups.  We talk about everything and bond over all of the similarities that we discover during the call.  It’s pretty amazing.  So I have some things to do before that time so I’m going to go now.  I’m hoping that between this post and the Dessert Group I’ll start the week with a more positive attitude and not with my current “what’s going to happen/go wrong next” outlook.  Fingers crossed!