I'm shuffling my blogs around, moving them onto my web sites in WordPress, and splitting my business blog into several.

Of likely interest to my livejournal readers (all six of you!), I've moved my "writing about writing" blog to:
http://www.dhemery.com/dalewriting

The feed is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/dhemery/dalewriting

I've already copied all of the non-Jeremy stuff from here to there, including comments.  Sorry about the similarity of names, but I like the name  dalewriting and want to use it for my new writing blog.  I would rename my livejournal blog, but that costs money (I think).

For now I'll keep this livejournal blog so I can post my NaNoWriMo stuff semi-privately.  But if I can find an easy way to do private posts (or private blogs) with WordPress, I'll probably abandon livejournal altogether.  If I do that, I'll let you know how you can follow my NaNo 2007 novel.

Click for a larger image. Click again for a full-sized image.

Just for fun I ordered a few printed and bound copies of Jeremy Comes Home.  I used a self-publishing company called Lulu.com.  You send Lulu a PDF or other file of your book, and they'll print and bind as many copies as you want. If you want, they'll even make it available for sale. This year Lulu made an offer to NaNoWriMo winners: Send us your book by January 16 and we'll print one copy for you for free. I missed the deadline, but ordered two paperback copies anyway, one for me and one for my sweetie.  The price was just over $8 per copy, plus shipping. You can either design your own cover art or choose from Lulu's gallery of about 150 stock backgrounds.  I found a stock cover I liked well enough.  It's hard to gauge the age and gender of the person in the picture, so let's say it's a 12-year-old boy. The books arrived on Thursday.  They're nicely bound, and the cover looks great.  I hadn't read any of Jeremy since I finished it on November 30.  Thumbing through the book has been a nice surprise.  There's a lot in it that I like, and reading it makes me want to start the rewrite. I'm not making Jeremy available for sale on Lulu.  I'm hoping to find a publisher for it, and publishers tend not to like previously published material.

A year after running away from home, twelve-year-old Jeremy Crowther returns to resume the life he left behind. But when nobody recognizes him—not his mother, not his brother and sister, not his best friend—when even the physical evidence denies that he ever existed, what life is left for Jeremy to return to?

That's the premise behind Jeremy Comes Home, my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in November.
I start writing tonight at midnight, along with a mixed metaphor of other enthusiastic NaNoers at a cafe in Dixon, CA.

I got the germ for this novel while sitting in a theater in Berkeley on October 2. Some writer friends and I were listening to Neil Gaiman read some of his short stories from Fragile Things. One of the stories, "October in the Chair," was partly about a boy who had run away from home. As I listened, I had the thought, what if he went home and his mother didn't know who he was? And a plot was born.

[Update November 1] You can track my progress on the NaNoWriMo progress sheet. Yes, my user ID on the NaNoWriMo web site is Bleen Booley.