This is such an annoying blog to write that I've been putting it off for ages. I really hate to 'fail' at things. I hate it. So much.

So yeah, I didn't manage my goal for NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org) and that kind of sucks. In the end, I wrote 9000 words towards a novel but that fell far short of my personal goal of 25k words. I hate making excuses about as much as I hate to fail but here they are anyways...

1) I was a lot busier with work in November than I anticipated. Once I finished with the WSOP Final Table broadcast, I was planning to write while in London working on the Party Poker Premier League Mixed Game show but the schedule was far heavier than I thought it would be. The first day of filming, we finished at 3am and then I had to be back on set at 9.30am for another 14-hour day, followed by 3 more long days. With the jetlag, I only managed 2 hours of sleep between the first two days of work and it really knocked me on my ass for the rest of the week.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm not entirely happy with my own performance on that show. I definitely felt like I was struggling for words and on a number of occasions I had to restart interviews because I either lost the thread of the conversation, asked an entirely stupid question (you just busted out, how do you feel?.... oh, yeah. Pretty shitty. Right) or I made sounds that just simply didn't add up into actual words and sentences. Not my finest hour, although I think I caught up on sleep by the end of it and so finished better than I started.

2) Moving house is stressful. After 5 months of living on the road out of suitcases, I finally moved into my new place in Santa Barbara, the day after I returned from London. I'm incredibly happy to be settled again and I love (love love love) my new place which is an old renovated Barn. The moving process (coupled with jetlag) was more tiring than I expected and writing again took a back seat.

3) This one is probably the ACTUAL reason that I didn't make my NaNoWriMo word limit. I bored myself. I started writing and kept trying to push through tiredness or lack of creativity or 'writers block' but found myself confronted again and again by the reality that I was just. so. boring.

If I'm bored by my own stories, I'm certainly not interested in inflicting them on others. I'm not sure why I couldn't tell stories that were funny, interesting, compelling but one possible truth is that I'm just not as interesting as I thought I was! Or maybe I'm just not ready to write about shit yet. That could be it as well.

I've spent the past month settling into my life (and my barn) and feel far more grounded than I have in a long time. Being on the road and having my life thrown into some kind of 2011 randomness generator was a very cool experience. I've learned a lot about myself, about my friends (mostly how fucking incredible they are) and about what I love about my life.

I'm happy to have a nest to call my own even if it's only for a short period of time. I leave for Canada in less than a week to spend Christmas with my family. After that, I go straight to Europe until Mid February. Two more months of suitcase living but with a bit of stability back under my feet, I think I'm better equipped to enjoy and revel in the experience. I adore living on my own but I'm also a very social chaffinch so getting the chance to visit my family, my friends in the UK and spend time with my Party Poker family as I travel to play some WPTS.... well, life is good. That's all I can say about that.

I do wish I'd done a better job on NaNoWriMo but I think I need a bit more time to find my place before I can write with enough honesty to make it worth people's time to read it. Thanks for reading this blog though and I hope wherever you all are, you're cozy and warm and as content as I am!

I have been in a food coma since American Thanksgiving last week.

Being a non-US transplant in California has certainly been an interesting experience over the past couple of years. Although Canada and the USA are geographically close (note: but not ACTUALLY the same country, thank you very much) there are just enough cultural differences to constantly remind me that I am indeed in a foreign nation.

Over the past couple of weeks, the only topics of conversation seemed to be Thanksgiving and Black Friday. No, not the poker version of Black Friday but this strange day which sounds ridiculously ominous but is actually just an extreme and slightly frightening version of the Boxing Day sales you non-Americans might be more familiar with. People camp out with real tents and everything and line up in front of stores like Walmart ALL NIGHT in order to be allowed in early to pick up deals on merchandise. People get really wound up about Black Friday and the news has been full of stories of people going a little bit too far in their shopping zeal. One lady even used pepper spray to fend off purchasing rivals who were approaching things she wanted to buy. I really don't understand the whole thing and I'm sure there must be more to it that I'm missing, because it all sounds utterly bonkers to me.

Thanksgiving though, now THAT I can get behind! This is a holiday created for nothing short of gluttony - something that I'm quite fond of as a pastime. Some friends of mine invited me over to share their dinner, along with about 15 family members and other friends. It was, in a word, awesome. The taste and variety of foods was staggering although of course Turkey was the centrepiece. And the amounts, dear god, the sheer volume of food that we ate. It was really lovely to be able to watch her family dynamic as everyone teased and told jokes and caught up on each other's lives and they welcomed me in like a long lost Canadian cousin. I endured a lot of 'eh' jokes but we bonded over the humour from the classic Canadian movie Strange Brew.

They are a great group of people and if they don't invite me back next year for some reason, I might just camp outside their house pre-Thanksgiving in my own version of crazy Black Friday consumption madness.

I hope you all enjoyed your November, whether Turkey was involved or not!

So I'm supposed to be doing NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.com) this month along with a lot of poker/journalist friends.

Let me be frank. It's going very, very badly. Seven days into November and I've written a grand total of 344 cliches words.

In my defence, I wasn't planning to actually start writing until after the WSOP coverage was finished on the 8th, so I'm not technically 'behind' yet. Working on the near-Live ESPN coverage is a pretty big deal for me and I didn't want to split my focus by writing at the same time. It turns out that today (the day off between the two sections of the Final Table) I actually have a bit of free time so I tried to make a start on my writing. I don't know if it's just tiredness or preoccupation or what, but I'm pretty sure that everything I wrote was shit. Like, really shit.

I know this is the point where you're supposed to just push through and keep writing but I'm actually boring myself so much that I'm finding that kind of impossible.

I'm going back to my original plan of waiting til the 9th to start writing. I'll deal then with the disturbing thought that I'm actually a lot less interesting than I thought I was.

For now, my head is pretty full of November Nine stuff. It's great to be back on set with my colleagues and having a post-work drink at the Hooker Bar with my friends in the media. Tomorrow we play the final 3 players down to a Champion and it's going basically live (15 minute delay) on ESPN during prime time. Yowzer! It's a pretty incredible atmosphere in the Penn & Teller Theatre and I love getting to be part of this spectacle. It's one hell of an experience and such a fairy-tale story that one person is going to win nearly $9 million tomorrow.

Now if only I could figure out how to use my words to throw some of that excitement onto paper.

French Press' is the name of my favourite coffee shop in the world (tied with Red Roaster in Brighton). I also thought it was a clever play on words to wear my favourite 'French Press' t-shirt during a photoshoot for WPT Magazine in Paris last month (geddit, I'm a member of the press and we were in France). I'm also sitting in said coffee shop this very minute and someone just delivered my copy of WPT Magazine, hot off the presses. Synchronicity.

All that to say, I'm in a magazine and I'm stoked!! I'd like to be all cool about it in a 'yeah, whatever man, no big deal' type of way, but I can't help myself. These things are exciting. I am air high-fiving ALL of y'all right now!

The magazine has just come out but the cover photo was released a little while ago and I thought it was interesting how many people commented on the 'Party Girl' headline. Quite a few people got in touch with me through social media to say that they didn't think it was a good representation of me. The truth is though, I work for Party Poker, so 'Party Girl' is kind of given in terms of nicknames. My friends pretty much all laughed when they saw the title after I posted the cover on twitter last week. Too put it simply, I'm not exactly known for partying. I'm the one who is always saying 'nope, I can't go out' and extolling the virtues of fluffy slippers and early nights. I think Oskar Garcia, an AP Reporter said it in my favourite way on twitter:

oskargarcia Oskar Garcia "@karaotr Maybe their definition of partying is getting to sleep at a reasonable hour after a day of working on various projects. :)"

Not that there's anything wrong with partying. Some of my best friends are partiers.

Jon Young, the editor of WPT Magazine wrote a really cool feature article to go along with the cover and I need to say a big thank you to him because it was totally flattering and just so gratifying to read. Tell me that you think I'm 'likeable and professional' and I will purr like a cat - best compliments ever, imo.

It's interesting to see how different media outlets spin things in different ways. I was in Ireland last month doing some interviews and press work and I ended up in Ireland's Sunday World newspaper. Reading that article was strange because even when they were quoting me, I just couldn't imagine myself saying the words as they were written. I think it's difficult for non-poker media to write accurately about poker (that seems like an obvious thing to say but it bears saying) so this may have been a big part of our communication disconnect.

They quoted me remarking,

"There are lots of us girls now kickin' ass in poker. I will admit that we are not on a par with the boys but we are getting there."

For a lot of the people reading this quote, they won't realise that we actually had an extensive, analytical discussion on why the number of women in live poker is so much smaller than the number of men. People reading this might think I'm saying that women don't PLAY as well as men. Let me be clear; there is NO way that I would suggest that. In fact, when I initially read the Sunday World article I was convinced that the next knock on my door would be someone coming to revoke my 'feminist card.'

And on a similar note, Congratulations to Linda Johnson on her induction into the Poker Hall of Fame. It is well-deserved recognition for decades of work promoting the game we all love. I certainly won't be telling her (or Vanessa Selbst or Jennifer Harman or DMoonGirl etc) that they're not 'on par' with men!

I'm back in California and the jet lag is finally starting to fade. I swear that it's much more difficult coming west than going east! It's nice, albeit a bit strange, to be back here and I'm glad that I'm getting a chance to catch up with my friends. I'm pretty lucky that people let me dance in and out of their lives this way. I'm rarely around for long periods of time anymore and I imagine that must be frustrating for people. It's certainly a bit frustrating for me!

Speaking of being busy, I'm still planning to attempt the www.nanowrimo.com challenge. I'll be attempting to write 50k words of a novel in November but considering that I'll be in Las Vegas working on the WSOP Final Table for nearly a week, then travelling to England to work on a TV show there for Party Poker for over a week and then possibly moving into my new place at the end of the month.... well, I'm setting myself a lower bar. If I can crack 25k words in November, I'm going to be really happy with that. I'm still shooting for 50k but I'll just be happy with a lower number. I guess the whole point was to get myself writing again and if I let myself feel that anything less than 50k words is a failure, I might just not do it at all. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out and I hope that next year I have a clear November so I can really focus on trying to do it properly.

After a crazy November with only 10 days in Santa Barbara, it looks like I'll have zero days back here in December. Party is sending me to Europe to do some work there and then I'll be off to Canada for Christmas before returning to Ireland for New Year and to play the WPT. Phew. Crazy schedule. I need to figure out a better way to make sure that I'm eating well and staying healthy while I'm on the road because I've definitely noticed myself getting a bit tired and lethargic from not eating regularly enough. Any good tips from you all would be gratefully received in the comments box!

And now I'm off to look at one more apartment in Santa Barbara before I make my final decision on where to live. I've seen some great (and awful!) places here and I'm totally ready to just get my stuff unpacked in one of them so that I can feel like I actually 'live' somewhere before I take off in November. This is a really great time of year to be in Santa Barbara as the weather is amazing and there are all kinds of food festivals going on. Time to go out and enjoy it!


Here's a photo from one of SB's great festivals. This was Fiesta a year or two ago!

I've had such a great time being back in Europe that going away is kind of breaking my heart a little bit. Tomorrow afternoon I'll be leaving on a jet plane with lots of lovely memories and a real sense of homesickness.

I managed to extend my trip here by a few days so that I could be around for a friend's birthday. It was a big one for her and I didn't want to miss it. She and I were roommates as two single girls here in Brighton in another life. Her boyfriend threw her an amazing party and surprised her with her 'real' present which is a sailing holiday around Greece that he's been organising for months. Thankfully we don't set sail until next spring so there's a bit of time to plan it all!

Around 25 of us went down to the beach after sunset and had a great big bonfire tonight. The weather has been incredibly warm for Autumn so it was so lovely and mild, even after dark. There were groups of people scattered around the beach as far as you could see in either direction and every once in a while a bunch of paper lanterns would float up into the night sky as people celebrated whatever they were there to celebrate.

We had a couple of tables full of food, cakes and of course, lots of booze. I've never really understood why it's against the law to drink outdoors in most places in the USA. It's just so damned civilized to mix your own cocktails by a fire on the beach! It was a great way to spend my last evening in Brighton but it's also made it that much harder to face leaving in the morning.

It is going to be fantastic to settle down in one place for a few weeks though. I can't wait to catch up with my friends in Santa Barbara and spend some time re-connecting with them while I do some apartment hunting. I've decided to spend another 6 months or so in California so October will be focussed on finding a good place to use as a home-base for all the travelling I'll be doing. Wish me luck as I think I may need it!

England is a seductive little minx! As much as I've enjoyed the obvious benefits of living in California (hello, actual sunshine), whenever I come back to the UK for a visit I find it incredibly hard to leave. I lived here for over a decade before relocating to the USA and it does still feel like 'home'. I had a nice time in Paris at the WPT event earlier this month but it was a bit of a relief to finally arrive down in Brighton. Travelling, new experiences and sightseeing are great fun but sometimes you just really want to sit down on a familiar sofa, put your feet up and feel like you're at home. Pulling into Brighton Train Station always feels just like that for me.

I'm staying with a very dear old friend of mine while I'm here. He's an incredible musician/composer and waking up to the sound of him playing something gorgeous on the piano, I'm not going to lie; it's pretty awesome. He has this low, rumbling, gravelly voice and is a a great big tough Northern bloke with a massive heart. He's pretty much the perfect person for me to spend some time with right now and we've been mates for years. As soon as I pulled into the train station, I jumped into a taxi and was straight down to the centre of town to surprise a friend at her birthday drinks. She's like a little sister to me and the look on her face when she saw me walk through the door just absolutely made my year. Every hug and kiss and hello from each of my friends here just made me feel like I'd walked right back into a space that they'd left open just for me. As 'welcome home's go, you can't get better than that.

They've all been trying to convince me to move back to Brighton. It's damned tempting. I like the value system here. Nobody ever asks you what you do for a living, what kind of car you drive or tries to measure you by how much money you've got in your pocket. As long as you have enough to get your round of drinks in at the pub, you could be a rich man or a poor man and nobody really cares. Good stories are a much more valuable currency. I find it a great counterbalance to the sometimes fabulous excesses of the world of poker.

I don't think I'm ready to move back here just yet as I'm not quite finished with my work in the USA and also, my family in Canada would like me to at least stay on the same continent as them! I absolutely adore my friends in California and I'm looking forward to catching up with them when I go back there in a couple of weeks but for the meantime, it's been a real relief to settle back into life in Brighton; to clear the fog from my head following a pretty tumultuous summer and to refocus on the things that are actually important to me.

To say that I had an 'unconventional' childhood would be an understatement. I've already spent some time on this blog detailing my experiences growing up in the painful cold of Northern Canada without indoor plumbing or many of the other amenities that people take for granted as being 'normal'. While I was describing the challenge of hauling buckets of cold water from outside to fill an old tub for baths, or having to brave -50C temperatures to visit our unheated 'outhouse' for a middle of the night loo break, I'm not sure if I made clear just how AWESOME my childhood was too.

Being so far from the equator, summer days back home seemed to last forever. When I tired of tromping around the miles of woodland that were our backyard, I would go and spend hours in the carpentry workshop that my Dad built, creating all kinds of bizarre art projects with an endless supply of tools and materials. Nobody told me that it was impossible for a 10 year old to build her own robot so by god, one summer I spent hours tinkering, trying to come up with a good prototype. It mostly consisted of painted blocks of wood nailed together for a body with an old bucket for a head but in my imagination, it was always just a few days away from Frankenstein-like animation.

Of course the trade off for our long, hot summer days were the cripplingly cold and dark winters. With temperatures so low that any exposed skin would freeze in under a minute and days spent trapped in our house because the local backhoe hadn't dug us out yet from the latest dump of snow, we had a LOT of free time to fill. We didn't have all of the electronic distractions of today. Now, I panic if I forget my iphone at home when I make a quick run to the shops. Back then, I kept my mind busy with books. All books, any books, lots of books. If it had words in it, I would read it. We even had multiple sets of encyclopaedias. I think that's when my curious nature was nurtured.

For variety, my Dad would set me writing 'assignments'. He's an incredibly creative man. Not only did he build nearly every one of our houses - everything from the foundation all the way to the roof - he is also a very talented professional artist, a fantastic photographer and a published author. He would write a list of topics and then it was up to me to write either a short story or a poem for each of them, one for every day of the week. My Mom's talents are also varied, creative and completely impressive. She organised all kinds of crafts to keep us busy. I think I was the only kid in our area who grew up knowing how to both milk a cow AND use acid to etch pictures into metal plates.

When I visited my parents last week, I made a very cool discovery. Their office is a jumble of books and pieces of art from all kinds of places - mostly their own of course. On one wall, were three watercolour paintings of the same scene.

They were one of my mother's old projects with us. We each had to copy a scene out of one of her art books. My sister was 10, my brother 9 and I was 5 at the time. We didn't do so badly! That's mine over on the right hand side. Yes, it's a bit wonky but hey - I was FIVE.






So lets bring it up to the present day. I've fallen out of the habit of keeping my creative muscles exercised and I've really felt the lack of it lately. I loved making things - ANY things. I used to write all of the time but the past 5 years, I've been rather lazy. And so when some friends of mine in the poker media mentioned that they were going to take the NaNoWriMo challenge, I was incredibly jealous! Finally, after some prodding and cajoling (it didn't actually take that much) I agreed to do the challenge alongside them.

For those of you that don't know, www.nanowrimo.org is a challenge where people attempt to write an entire 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I'll be working on the WSOP Main Event final table for the first week of that so really, I'm looking at 50k words in 3 weeks. Yikes! I'm not sure if I can actually do this. Like I said, my writing muscles are pretty weak nowadays. But hey, if rambling posts like this are anything to go by then writing around 2500 words a day should be a breeze!

I'm pretty nervous that I won't finish the challenge. 200,000 people attempted it last November but only 30k actually completed it, so there are no guarantees that I'll make it through. I'm certainly going to try though.

My life is very unstructured right now. I have no real home-base and all of my things are in storage so I'm living out of suitcase for a few months. My life is in a state of flux and while I'm used to that (my family spent at least a year travelling in a camper on the back of an old pick up when I was a kid. Like I said, unconventional) I think some discipline and structure would be good for me.

So.... writing. It's a pretty cool challenge and I'm hoping that by telling people that I'm attempting this, it will give me even more incentive to push through and try to get it done. I doubt that anyone will ever be allowed to read what I write, but who knows. Maybe the seed of a good novel will be in my ramblings somewhere.

If you want to join me and try to write your own novel, look for me and 'buddy' me on the website. My user name is Kara_Scott. Here's hoping that my novel shows a bit more creativity than my user name!

Happy August everyone!

Not going to lie to you, so far this month has been a bit crap. I had dental surgery last week to fix an abscess in a tooth that I'd had a root canal in years ago. The problem had spread to my jaw and it was ridiculously painful. Also, it was pretty much as nasty as it sounds. The swelling is mostly gone now but ugh, it still hurts like crazy. I decided to inflict my misery on my friend Maria and so did a road trip out here to Vegas to visit her. We're sitting on the sofa watching as many episodes of trash TV as humanly possible for the next week. It's a pretty good plan, as plans go.

Next week is my birthday and I'm hoping to be well enough to head out and have a drink with my friends who all seem to be in Vegas covering the poker tournament happening at the Palms right now. All in all it's going to be a fairly low key month and once I'm done vegetating here I'm headed to Canada to visit with my family for a couple of weeks. Maximum relaxation.

I will try to DO something before my next blog to make this more interesting for anyone still reading but I'm not promising anything. This 'doing nothing' schtick is pretty habit forming.

Filming the World Series Main Event for ESPN was incredible. We spent 10+ hours a day broadcasting live on a mixture of ESPN3, ESPN2 and the flagship ESPN. It was intense, it was a huge amount of work and it was unbelievably fun to be a part of. It was a bit surreal to be working on poker biggest stage and I was really grateful to be able to do so. The support that I received from the poker world and my colleagues in the poker media really blew me away and I'm also grateful for every single message - so thank you!

One of the things I hear a lot of from the players is how difficult is for them to sleep after a full day of poker. I have always found this to be true too and the deeper into a tournament, the more exciting the day of poker, the harder it was to get rid of all of that adrenaline and just go to sleep! It's exactly the same when I'm working. Live TV requires a near constant level of adrenaline. I spoke to my doctor about it before heading to Vegas and he suggested I take Ambien. *Cue dramatic music*

The first night I was determined to try to just sleep normally but after a couple of hours of tossing and turning, I caved in and took a pill. I woke up pretty early feeling really refreshed and was amazed by how well it had worked. It was nearly lunch time by the time I received my first worried text from a friend. Scrolling back through my text history, it appeared that I hadn't actually dropped off to sleep immediately as I'd assumed. I'd been up for a solid hour sending off random messages to people on my contact list.

But, it worked so well putting me to sleep and more than ever before, I needed to be well rested and alert so I kept taking it for the next 4 nights. I started locking my phone in the safe in my room to prevent myself from sending 'Ambien texts' to people. My drug-addled brain got around this by grabbing my laptop and sending out emails instead.

As far as I can tell, I only emailed my friend Nick Wealthall but wow, did he ever get some doozies. I wrote him a loooooong email one night telling him off for sending me an message that was CC'ed to a few other people. Apparently I was seriously offended by the lack of personal greeting and told him this over the course of 10 paragraphs. I say 'paragraphs' but I really mean 'vitriolic stream of consciousness'. I guess I felt bad by the end of the email because I ended it with this little gem:

"I feel like I should clos this off with a joke.......

bogg off, I spent 10 min trying o find one. Meh

AMBIeN wins, winner, winning"

Yeah, me and Charlie Sheen. Sheesh.

Sorry about that Nick. The real kicker was that I didn't even remember writing it to him and had no idea until he emailed me back with a pretty understandable "WTF?!?"

So, I started logging myself out of my email accounts before bed, knowing that I would never be able to log back in - I am clearly a poor speller when on ambien - But ha ha! My brain on drugs would NOT be outsmarted by my sober self! I certainly showed me. I started posting crap on my own Facebook wall.

Again, I would have had no recollection of doing this if my mother (yes, my MOTHER) hadn't 'liked' my post the next day. Sigh. So here it is.

"the dangers of ambein

After all of this rush rush rush work, Moving to Thailand or Costa Rica is starting to look likr s solidly good plan to me now too, I like because that are warm and drinks with wieird fruits in in and sand beneath my toes and I can sit around and do bugger all I want to do I could take up meditation again or some other shiht. Meditation sounds dull though, I'd rather take up reprobating instead. Just laying around nt doing shit.

O believe my ambien kicked in.

night night nugget"

Not a bad plan actually. I'm going to give the 'reprobating in Costa Rica while imbibing fruity drinks' plan some consideration.

So yeah. Ambien; not such a good thing. Don't do drugs kids.

Night night nugget.