Deborah Woehr

I’ve gotten a bit behind this week, averaging about 300 words per day. Next week, I’ll have to make up the time somehow (despite a family birthday and Thanksgiving). I’ll be stoked once I get past that 50% mark.

Last night, I spent working on the scene where they have to “put down” the Marshal. Kate has her own selfish reasons why she wants him dead while the others wrestle over what to do. Sawyer tries and botches the job by aiming for the heart instead of the brain.

Right now, I’m at the spot where Jack is sitting on the beach the next morning, trying to deal with what he was forced to do.

23,643 / 50,000 (47.3%)

I received this in an email from my husband, who lost his father a year and a half ago. At first, we didn’t know what was happening because he didn’t have the “classic” symptoms (severe headache, blurred vision, falling to one side). He was vomiting profusely and complaining of dizziness.

We thought he might have been suffering from a heart attack. As it turned out, he had suffered a massive stroke and had to undergo five hours of surgery to remove a clot the size of a golf ball from his brainstem. He never fully recovered, but he was able to come home after ten months.

We’re not asking for sympathy, but we would like you to pass this along to educate your friends and families about strokes. Just knowing what to look for when something like this happens can make all the difference.

During a BBQ a friend stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) and just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food - while she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening. Ingrid’s husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00pm, Ingrid passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ - had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke perhaps Ingrid would be with us today.

It only takes a minute to read this-

—–A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke…totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed an getting to the patient within 3 hours which is tough.

Recognizing a Stroke in 3 Steps

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

1. *Ask the individual to SMILE.

2. *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

3. *Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e. . . It is sunny out today) If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 9-1-1 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three questions. They presented their conclusions at the American Stroke Association’s annual meeting last February. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.

This episode was much more action-packed and than the previous episodes. I found myself feeling more compassion towards Ana-Lucia, whom I thought was nothing more than a “tough girl” stereotype in the last two episodes. They’ve had more contact with “the Others” than the first group of survivors, and managed to kill three of them.

The best scene was where Ana sits with Goodman in the countryside, passing the military knife back and forth. I watched the looks on their faces as Goodman paused with the knife in his hand. Right then, there was no doubt in my mind that she had holed up the wrong guy (who had the misfortune of getting killed by the right one). The dialogue between them was good, but left me with more questions.

Who the hell are these people, and where did they come from? There are so many storylines that were introduced, and then dropped. Will those ever get reintroduced and resolved?

My husband and I watched the previews for next week’s episode. It seems that Ana-Lucia and Sayid are going to go to war over Shannon’s death. I hope that gets resolved quickly so the two groups can combine their knowledge and work together. That would make sense. But then again, nothing about this show makes sense.

Chapter 6 is almost finished. Once the deadline comes up, I’m going to set this thing down for at least a month so I can finish my other projects and deal with Christmas. Then I’m going to take a look at it and see if it’s worth continuing. What are you going to do with your NaNo project? Do any of you have goals of publishing your work?

You Should Get a MBA (Masters of Business Administration)

You’re a self starter with a drive for success. You’d make a great entrepreneur.

I laughed when I got the results because I couldn’t get through Economics class without falling asleep! However, I did enjoy Marketing and Advertising. Now, all I have to do is come up with something worth selling, lol.

The first day of Julie Hutchinson’s nightmare starts out perfectly normal, despite her stepson’s need to cut himself. She goes to bed that night, worrying about him and whether or not her husband, Hut, is cheating on her. The next day, she learns that Hut was murdered by an unknown serial killer, who has drawn strange symbols on the body.

The body “disappears” while en route to an NYC morgue, which doesn’t surprise the police since all of the bodies in these killings have disappeared. As the story unfolds, Julie learns about her husband’s involvement in a military paranormal experiment called Project Daylight, which was closed down after a brutal murder occurred.

The clues keep coming, throwing her into a world of paranoia and outright creepiness. Someone is coming to her and her young daughter at night, but she isn’t able to get much proof to convince her family. When her mother takes her to see psychic Michael Diamond (John Edward’s militant brother), the terror escalates.

Michael not only shatters her beliefs about the afterlife, but shows her a side of her husband that she never wanted to see. By the last quarter of the book, I wanted to see if/how she and her kids would escape. Instead, I was left hanging and wondering if there is going to be a sequel.

The only thing I didn’t like were all the sex scenes. I’m still not sure exactly what their purpose was, except to perhaps illustrate Julie’s grief and make her doubt her own sanity. Despite this qualm, I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys horror and suspense.

I’m looking at my calendar this morning and seeing that we have 2.5 weeks left until November 30th. Here is my wordcount up to this date. I’ll be starting on Chapter 6 sometime today.

The real challenge isn’t adding more to my wordcount, but trying to figure out which POV would fit a scene best. For instance, there was the scene where Jack yanks the shrapnel out of the Marshal’s chest. It could have been told in his point of view or Hurley’s. I wound up choosing Jack because it was the easy way out (I felt), but I may switch it to Hurley because he faints at the sight of blood.

16,935 / 50,000 (33.9%)

My husband is a gear-head. When I first met him, he owned a 1971 Corvette and a 1937 Willys, both of which are parked in our garage. Over the past four or five months, he’s been talking about buying a 2005 GTO to replace the black ‘69 he’d bought and refurbished two years ago.

All this week, he’s been agonizing over the sale of ‘69 because he wanted to use the money for the downpayment on the above. Well, today, he sold the it for $12k. No sooner did he return home from the bank, did he want to go out to the dealership. We talked about what would be an acceptable monthly payment (since I’m not working) before we packed the kids up and went.

On the way, he was telling me that he was going to have to quit smoking because he wasn’t going to be able to smoke and make the car payments. He looks over at me and tells me that I will have to do the same.

I’ve been obsessing quietly over getting a Siamese cat for the past couple of months, but have hesitated because how he felt about having pets in our newly renovated house. When he mentioned my quitting (haven’t gotten to that place yet), I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to cajole him into letting me have a pet. He accepted.

We pulled into the dealership. He went straight for the gray model. To his disappointment, it was a demo model with 5,000 miles on it. He was concerned about the type of miles (whether it had been simply driven or thrashed). Meanwhile, I saw a deep blue and a red one that I thought were much prettier.

Gray is such a bland color, and I didn’t like the tinted windows. He wanted a brand new 6-speed with close to zero miles. The blue car was an automatic, so that was out. He didn’t want to get the red, but I kept oohing and aahing over it until the boys started chiming in about how they liked it better than the other one.

After a few minutes, he caved, reminiscing about the day we bought my car. Originally, we were going to get silver or gray, but came home with the red one. So, now we have two red cars sitting in our driveway. Mine (13 years old now) looks decidedly like a piece of crap, but that’s okay because I still enjoy it.

We didn’t get out of that dealership before he just had to call one of his buddies. They’re out right now (my oldest in tow), picking up my brother-in-law to take a spin in the new toy.

Between yesterday and today, I typed almost 2,000 words. I also passed last year’s wordcount, and a lot sooner than I’d anticipated! That’s all I have to report today. I hope you all are enjoying your holiday.

I managed to get a mere 300 words written today before my hands started killing me. Whoop-dee-dee. That’s what I get for overdoing it on Tuesday. If I can get my act together by Sunday, I hope to crank out another thousand so I can surpass last year’s mark.