Don't whine. Drink wine.
I am not the first to observe that much of how the day goes is in how you THINK it's going. I am choosing to think about the many lovely pieces of today.
No rain.
An early birthday present from a good friend.
No pee on the carpet.
Coffee.
Brie on pumpkin seed bread.
Managed to get everywhere I needed to be on time.
Did not run out of gas.
Wore the cardigan I just finished knitting, even though I have not had time to buy buttons.
Daniel yelling at Helena "Just think to yourself - I THINK I can I THINK I can" outside to encourage her to ride her bike.
I am very firmly not thinking about:
The catastrophic mess that is the house.
The husky sized dust bunnies that have escaped from under the stairs.
That I have not yet been paid and the bank balance is starting to whimper.
The bills I have not yet paid because of the above.
My inability to make play dates for children.
That I am now late getting the children upstairs for bed.
That I swerved to a stop at the side of the road in a royal mother snit and took out my knitting on the way home from school because the sound track from the back seat had reached such epic proportions that my brain was leaking out my nose.
That I yelled at Helena at the top of my lungs because she was STILL kicking her brother after I asked her to stop.
That I have not written one NaNoWriMo word today and it is now clear that I will not make it to 50000 which makes me cry.
Actually, written out like this, things feel better. Wow. It's working.
You know what else works? Mulled wine.
If you are from the US, you might not have had the chance to try this. You must. Really.
Take a bottle of wine. Nothing too nice. Something on the robust end. A cheap double bottle of Italian something is ideal.
Empty it into a saucepan.
For each litre of wine add the following:
about 2 tbs of brown sugar
some cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger. Ideally, you have a piece of cheesecloth and you can tie up the spices into it, but I have just thrown them in, too and it's just as good, even if you have to fish cloves out of your mouth once in a while.
Apparently (says Delia Smith and I think Nigella might too) you can toss some brandy into this. I never have. It's not so much the alcohol content that matters as the lovely warm spicy smell of hot wine that makes you feel warm, warmed and like there's a fire in the fireplace, even if you have no fireplace. Which we don't.
Heat the wine for about 20 minutes over a low flame, without letting it boil.
Ikea has something called Glogg except with an umlaut that you can toss into a bottle of wine too. It's pretty good. I once had a Norwegian friend cook up her version of glogg and it's nothing like tossing a bottle of Ikea mixture into wine. It was like a winter feast of wine with nuts and raisins and vodka all lurking in the bottom. Yum yum.
Anyway, I can smell the wine now. I'm going to go drink some.
NaNoWriMo thought for the day: Perhaps finishing (sob) is not the point. Perhaps (sob sob) it's the doing of it.
No rain.
An early birthday present from a good friend.
No pee on the carpet.
Coffee.
Brie on pumpkin seed bread.
Managed to get everywhere I needed to be on time.
Did not run out of gas.
Wore the cardigan I just finished knitting, even though I have not had time to buy buttons.
Daniel yelling at Helena "Just think to yourself - I THINK I can I THINK I can" outside to encourage her to ride her bike.
I am very firmly not thinking about:
The catastrophic mess that is the house.
The husky sized dust bunnies that have escaped from under the stairs.
That I have not yet been paid and the bank balance is starting to whimper.
The bills I have not yet paid because of the above.
My inability to make play dates for children.
That I am now late getting the children upstairs for bed.
That I swerved to a stop at the side of the road in a royal mother snit and took out my knitting on the way home from school because the sound track from the back seat had reached such epic proportions that my brain was leaking out my nose.
That I yelled at Helena at the top of my lungs because she was STILL kicking her brother after I asked her to stop.
That I have not written one NaNoWriMo word today and it is now clear that I will not make it to 50000 which makes me cry.
Actually, written out like this, things feel better. Wow. It's working.
You know what else works? Mulled wine.
If you are from the US, you might not have had the chance to try this. You must. Really.
Take a bottle of wine. Nothing too nice. Something on the robust end. A cheap double bottle of Italian something is ideal.
Empty it into a saucepan.
For each litre of wine add the following:
about 2 tbs of brown sugar
some cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger. Ideally, you have a piece of cheesecloth and you can tie up the spices into it, but I have just thrown them in, too and it's just as good, even if you have to fish cloves out of your mouth once in a while.
Apparently (says Delia Smith and I think Nigella might too) you can toss some brandy into this. I never have. It's not so much the alcohol content that matters as the lovely warm spicy smell of hot wine that makes you feel warm, warmed and like there's a fire in the fireplace, even if you have no fireplace. Which we don't.
Heat the wine for about 20 minutes over a low flame, without letting it boil.
Ikea has something called Glogg except with an umlaut that you can toss into a bottle of wine too. It's pretty good. I once had a Norwegian friend cook up her version of glogg and it's nothing like tossing a bottle of Ikea mixture into wine. It was like a winter feast of wine with nuts and raisins and vodka all lurking in the bottom. Yum yum.
Anyway, I can smell the wine now. I'm going to go drink some.
NaNoWriMo thought for the day: Perhaps finishing (sob) is not the point. Perhaps (sob sob) it's the doing of it.
posted by Francesca Amendolia at 18:14
14 Comments:
It's okay that you won't hit 50000. You probably have a great start on something and you will be close. Close will be good enough, and then you can develop it into something more after that. Remember, the fullness of time stretches before you.
Mulled wine = yum.
Me, I'm going to go pour a bit of bourbon, because I don't have any appropriate plonk in the house ready to turn into mulled wine.
Cheers!
My uncle turned me on to mulled wine at his annual legendary Wassail Party. The legend of the wassail was that if you warmed a poker in the fire that warmed the wassail, a virgin could hold the hot poker and not get burned.
In fact, I hooked up for the first time with the man who is now my husband after serving Wassail at a party almost 11 years ago.
Good times!
Fellow NaNoWriMo-er (?) de-lurking to say, "Yes, it's the journey - even if the journey may lead us into the darkest pits of - " Wait, that's NOT what I meant to de-lurk and say...
Oh, yes, I remember now. Thank you for reminding me about mulled wine. Perhaps it will revive me.
Stay strong. There are still fifteen days ahead of us; and all the time we may need after the 30th, to revise and edit.
Well that was interesting Anonymous. Thank you.
On this NaNoWritMo stuff, I refer the Honourable Stuntmother to the comments I made earlier. The word target can't be an end in itself. What you've written is more important than how much you've written. I don't think Jane Austin would have been bovvered if she'd missed the word count. Be nice to yourself.
And on the family stuff, in the last 24 hours I've been coated in projectile vomit by my one year old baby (shirt, arms, hands) and one of the 5 year old boys (head, hair, face, neck, arms, walls, floor, lavatory, sink and -- the peach -- in my mouth).
Just think of it as material for your writing.
Pip pip
R
I am telling myself the same thing for Art Everyday Month- of which I did not produce yesterday.
It's not the ACTUALLY doing the art everyday that counts, it's the mindfulness around it that does?
Me and you can sob and console together.
We do what we can.
I think the word count is arbitrary, right? And can therefore be tweaked a little if necessary. The main point is to make NaNoWriMo work for you--whether as a tool to remind you how important your writing really is to you or as a torture device to make you feel bad for not making your quota every day, it's kind of up to you.
Wow.
I hear you guys (especially Masked Mom, who is one fierce woman -- and that's a compliment) and fine. I agree. If I use this to torture myself, that misses the point.
I was pretty wiped out when I wrote this yesterday, but even so. I was the one going on about having the right attitude.
Yes. You are right -- I have almost 20000 words which I would not have written had I not been trying to live the writing life. And that is great. Bugger the word count. And now, back to work.
Thanks.
I have never had mulled wine! Now I must try it.
I often make lists of good things I have done during a day, it's so reassuring. It's too easy to get bogged down by the negatives.
Thanks so much for the mulled wine recipe. I've been dying to try it.
I've also decided to keep slowly plodding along at my book so that the joy is not sucked out of my writing or life.
Yeah, this NaNoWriMo thing sounds interesting, but also a little sadistic to me. What if all over the nation people finish their novels this month and there is an ugly rush to the literary agent lists? A bit of literary bottleneck ahead! I am happy to be participating in my own project: NoNaNoWriMo!
Mulled wine sounds delicious and maybe I'll heat some up tonight. Thanks for the recipe!
oooh, thanks for the prompt for my next blog post! Grampa's Glogg...Swedish drunk family fest.
I like how you think, sis!
Sometimes, I have to admit, I enjoy both whining and wining.
Oh, I loved coming across this blog today. Years ago, my ex-husband and I were visiting his best friend in Belgium during the coldest winter there in recorded history. During the day of antiquing, we would take breaks for hot, mulled wine. It made the shopping all that more interesting. Thanks for the recipe.
I was introduced to mulled wine as a teenager back in the days when I thought red wine was A.W.F.U.L. (that's a while ago now) It's delicious.
I loved your leaking nose, knitting mother-snit. Been there. Oh except without the handy knitting, what a great touch.
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