Nanowrimo Spotlight: Nasim Mansuri

Good morning friends and followers! I hope you’re enjoying the spotlight interviews, because I’ve got a new one. Nasim can be found as valeh on nanowrimo.org, blogs at http://nasimmansuri.wordpress.com/, and tweets @nasimwrites.

What’s your background with Nanowrimo like?
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo since 2008, which means that I completed my first-ever novel on the night before my thirteenth birthday. I think it was one of the best birthdays of my life.

I had heard of NaNoWriMo from some family friends earlier that year, but hadn’t really paid much attention. Sometime in October, though, someone posted a link to the site on a Lord of the Rings fanatics forum, which I practically lived in at the time, and I was instantly in love with the idea. I’ve done NaNo five times since then and won four of those times, completing three novels (yes, I cheated on the last one… I just added 50,000 more words to my novel from the year before), and I intend to win for a fifth time this year!

I’m not sure what initially prompted me to do this crazy 30-day typing marathon (I say typing, because sometimes it doesn’t really feel like writing with all the half-asleep gibberish that comes from sitting on the computer until 4 a.m. just trying to get your day’s count to 1,665 words), but I’m very sure of why I continued to do it. Every year is a new adventure, both for me and for the characters that are born with each novel. I’ve learned that there’s a certain pattern to successful writing in my case, and I’ve continued to expand my knowledge about myself and the world around me with each new story. I love the Viking hats (I used to have one), the plot bunnies (I actually sew plot bunnies for each plot), and the desperate #NaNoWriMo hashtags on twitter that get more incoherent as everyone’s time zone gets nearer to dawn wherever they live.

I’ve had all sorts of weird experiences: one year, I woke up with my laptop still on my stomach and found a creepy smiley face centered at the bottom of my NaNo document… I’m not entirely sure how it got there, and the memory still creeps me out if I think about it too much. I’ve had to juggle finals and novel writing at the same time every single year so far, and somehow managed to survive the stress of it. I’ve written ‘really’ and ‘seemed’ more than twenty times each in the same page and forced myself to just ignore such an abomination. And most of all, I’ve enjoyed the amazing support of my friends and family, as well as my fellow insane writers online, who have never failed to give me advice and support when I’ve asked for it –and sometimes, I don’t even have to ask.

What are you writing about this year?

It’s Thankful Thursday!

I came across this little weekly blogfest recently, run by Just the Stuff Ya Know, and felt I had to join in. So, what am I thankful for this week?

I’m thankful for the great opportunities I have in my life and my writing, like going away to Odyssey in… 3 days, actually more like 2 and a half now.

I’m thankful for a job where I’m treated well and get paid doing things that I enjoy.

I’m thankful for the rain, even though I’m not a big fan of singing in it, and for the sunny days when they come back again.

I’m thankful for air conditioning when it gets too hot, not that I’ve needed them this week.

I’m thankful for my family, and I know that I’ll miss them this summer.

I’m thankful for all the amazing books available on audible.com; I spent a little while this evening trying to pick some new ones for the trip, and ended up with eight novels in my shopping cart checkout! 😉

I’m thankful for bacon! I haven’t been having much bacon lately with my diet, but I did pick up a pack a while back and froze most of it, and then realized that I needed to use it up before I left town. So I made a bacon tomato sauce last weekend, and I’ve been enjoying that with my pasta. It’s almost done, though there’s one helping that I can take into the office for lunch.

Let’s see… I’m grateful for smartphone GPS apps even when they don’t quite work perfectly, and for old-fashioned print maps that come free from the nice people at CAA.

I’m thankful for all the music that I love, and for tools that let me write my own ways to organize it all.

What are you thankful for today?

I did it!

This morning, with the help of a word sprint, I got up to 50,006 words on my August Camp spreadsheet. Opened up all 5 chapter files, copied and pasted into the validator… and found out that Camp had given me an extra 362 words!

 

Not going to say much, because the Dragon*Con panels are going to start in a few minutes. Oh, one other thing. I went off to find breakfast this morning, and found out some interesting things:

• Dairy Queen makes surprisingly good pancakes and bacon
• For some reason they put a few bits of fried onion in the hash browns.
• Apparently in Atlanta, all breakfast combos come with eggs.

 

Pizza

P is for…

I’m a big fan of pizza – with meat on it, thanks, and tomato sauce of course, and a nice helping of cheese.

Stuart McLean wrote that the secret to feeling rich beyond your wildest dreams is finding the feeling that you’re getting a deal on something, and slipping into excess with it. For him, it’s picking up 30 pairs of socks at a discount, for some reason. Apparently a freezer stuffed full of pizza does the trick for me.

The Little Caesar’s across the street from my apartment had Customer Appreciation days yesterday and today, so I appreciated five medium pepperoni pies for twenty bucks plus sales tax. One pizza got split into half for yesterday’s dinner and half for this morning’s breakfast, and the others got split up into little plastic bags, three or four slices at a time, and into the freezer. The only thing missing is Canadian bacon.

So, dare I ask it… what do you like to put on a pizza? And what makes you feel rich if you buy enough of it?