The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

So in this bit of Oz there's less than two hours left of November. Could be spending some of that time tossing some extra words on the Nano novel pile but decided to just slink about in Cyberia instead

The theory was that doing some proper plotting, planning and outlining during July would pay off in November but not so much that there would be no story left to tell

November would be about joining all the dots and making sense out of all the little bits of the big jigsaw puzzle. Weaving a seamless story from the stash of existing snippets, filling in the plot holes and tidying up the knots and other loose ends

That was the map but the territory turned out to be totally different

( The Missing Muse )

Izzie must be completely bonkers and totally bananas.

Just managed to scrape the daily quota over at Camp Nanoland. So much for the grand plans of writing 2,000 words a day. Looks like this experiment in just winging it - pantsing is what they call it over in Nanoland is just not a good idea at all. It's just so against the grain and out of the serpent comfort zone. So here is hoping that necessity will be the mother of invention

After a very unproductive Monday had to resort to dragging out the nearest Devil's deck to banish a bad case of writer's block. That turned out to be the Steampunk deck and it's worth two thirds of the five thousand words written so far. But less than a couple of hundred of those words have come from the magical zone. It's just plain old fashioned plodding.

Gotten so used to the little card critters that it is almost impossible to manage without them.

Still not in the zone. It is not helped by assorted distractions which meant that the goblin taxation homework usually completed by lunch time on Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest ended up getting done at almost the last minute which was this evening at 9pm after returning from a sort of greenie meeting.

Silly serpent spent last night downloading video lectures from two online courses. Will need to find time to watch them some time before Monday which is the deadline for the various problem sets

While it is a bit silly to be doing so many courses got to thinking that there's no excuse for not managing since other folks are doing just as much if not more as well as working at a full time job and having family responsibilities on top of that

Hard to believe that it is exactly six months since the serpent's last day at a paid job. Time flies so quickly. Heard through the grape vine that the old toad is departing for greener pastures. She is not actually getting promoted to CEO which she should be since she is the absolute incarnation of that company's values but she is moving to a similar boss job in some other suburb. Seems that she is more a sea gull than a toad after all. It took her less than two years to trash the place getting rid of most of the old timers, bringing in her grovelling corporate zombies to create a culture of arse covering, box ticking and cost cutting and now she is going off to do it all over again somewhere else. God help the poor buggers

So here's hoping that the Izzie will soon get around to catching up on all those posts and comments that have been neglected of late. A whole bunch of people are owed very belated Easter greetings too. There's no excuse for the Izzie laziness.

Must slink off to the serpent sack for a snooze. Got to be up bright and early for Goblin class. Here's hoping Julia and Wayne have not been watching the whole Cyprus goblin drama. It might just give them ideas.
Borrowers get brownie points and savers get screwed once again. No wonder the financial world is completely off the rails. And once again the goblin mantra is 'Privatize the profits, socialize the losses"

That reminds me - in the A to Z of the Undead there's got to be at least one Zombie Bank.

The clock is tick tocking. Only five days now to get to the summit of Mount Nano situated some 50,000 words above the white blank pages at the base camp. If things had been normal, if the Izzie had a half decent map, by now would already be staking the emerald and silver serpent flag at the summit. Would not only have that big fat stash of words but also at least twenty stories with beginnings, middles and most importantly ends. Yesss. The Izzie is not good at endings. Lack of practice mainly.

It all seemed so promising at the start. Already by Friday 13th July had a little brown A-Z index book with at least 400 possible story titles and reasonable outlines and ideas for at least forty stories. But only 26 would be needed. One completed story each day and by the end of the alphabet the word count would be well in the bag along with room for another ten thousand words as extras with little effort at all. Such a nice little map that was. There was only one minor problem. What could best be described as a major earthquake took place on the last day of July. It took a good five days to assess the damage and become rather suspicious about the usefulness of that very precious map. It took until the second Saturday to realize that progress would be impossible unless we tossed the infernal thing on the campfire or at least locked it away for another time and place when it might regain its usefulness

Procrastinating on telling toadish tales until the daily word quota of proper story words was reached simply resulted in the story muses stalling and sulking and refusing to return until the toxic toad had been let loose and out and about. Those words were very easy to write. They were like genies screaming to be let out of their bottle lest it explode with the pressure. Since the whole purpose of camp squiggling is to provide a source of ideas for the main event in November, it was obvious that we would have to let the toad have her wicked way rampaging all over the page. She could run riot and then the other critters would feel free to come out of the woodwork. Such a pity that hardly any of them came from the original maps.

The psycho toad from hell had set her horrid Dementors on them and sent them all scurrying off into the recesses of the serpent’s green cells. Maybe they will return some time when it is finally safe to do so.

She is probably plotting and planning another howler if she has not popped it in the post box already. Did not see her toadish face today at the mad house and her Hummer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was off invading Poland or something.

In the meantime, Izzie has found new distractions from the day job with the start of an online course in Cryptography. Lucky we got three weeks to get the homework in because the rest of this week will be devoted to the last 4,000 words and hopefully a few last minute sprints of inspiration.

It’s exactly eleven years ago since last having anything to do with discrete probability and statistics so got some serious catching up to do. It will be good to get the old green cells occupied on something totally untoadish

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First item on the menu is sandwiches
Not your average white bread with plastic cheese and greasy margarine muck.
No. This fussy serpent likes sourdough, multigrain or crusty white Italian bread with Appenzeller, Gruyere or any other tasty aged cheese with tomatoes and peppery lettuce as a minimum. Optional extras include basil, onion, avocado, pesto, pickles, peanut butter, tahini or hummus.

Next serpent snack is potatoes in their jackets - boiled or baked. Fluffy and floury with spring onions, freshly ground pepper, butter or sour cream. Oh and more dollops of evil green pesto

Last but not least - rice and dahl. Basmati it must be - brown or white (with saffron, spinach and pine nuts as optional extras)

Felafel, pasta and pakoras did not make it on the list. While being totally delicious - not the sort of thing you could eat in large amounts. Too stodgy or too spicy