Tag-Archive for ◊ NaNoWriMo ◊
• Thursday, November 01st, 2007
Category: Fanfic, Misc. Musings, Writing
| Enter your password to view comments.
• Monday, October 01st, 2007
Category: Fanfic, Misc. Musings, Tau Beta Sigma, Writing
| Enter your password to view comments.
• Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
I have to be amused at the irony regarding my holiday card exchanges– I get involved with organized holiday card exchanges and am psyched to use up the cards that have been stored since last year. But somehow, I’m always short cards and wind up having to buy more… and have the same amount that end up sitting and being stored until the next year. And the cycle continues…
NaNoWriMo has crashed and burned for the year. I just got to 30,000 last Saturday. I simply don’t want to write any more. I’m done. *sigh* Too busy, too tired, too much stuff that I either want or need to get done, and I can’t justify sitting and slaving at the computer every night.
My undergrad sorority chapter put on a kickass informational tea on Sunday. Complete with a turkey dinner– made in an on-campus apartment. For over 20 people. They absolutely rock.
I colored my hair Sunday morning, using a new brand of haircolor, and I really like it. It came out in what I can only describe as a cinnamon-tinged blonde. A little darker than I normally do, but it’s really, REALLY shiny.
We’ll probably have snow for Thanksgiving. Whee…
Of all the nights to be waiting outside, the X-Box 360 buyers were complete geeks last night– it was raining. It was cold. It was miserable. But there were people camped outside the CompUSA in Warwick at 8 p.m. last night so they could be the first ones in the door at 9-something this morning. Erich, thankfully, is waiting until Halo 3 comes out to buy one.
I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner in my own house for the first time on Thursday. That’s just such a weird thing to type, or to read.
Oh, I’m officially an owner of my house, as of last Wednesday. Erich went to the lawyer and signed the papers to add me to the deed.
I need to find an appropriate vessel to brine my turkey tomorrow night. The only thing I have that’s large enough is a keg tub. But that can’t fit into the fridge. Erich has suggested putting it out on the mudporch (which isn’t heated). But for some reason, that’s not sitting right with me.
As of Saturday, Noby weighs 4 pounds, 7 oz. Elly weighs 3 pounds, 15 oz. They’re getting big. 
Out of sheer boredom last week, I put the cats up on Catster last week- Colley, Fizzy, Gus, Noby, Elly.
I totally need this weekend’s LAN party. Blowing up the world goodness. Or at least, I’ll do a lot of damage to myself and others with a rocket launcher.
Need. Coffee.
• Thursday, November 17th, 2005
I didn’t write anything for NaNo yesterday due to our World’s Largest Dungeon game (that lasted until nearly 1 a.m.– eep!) Tonight, I’m not finding much inspiration, either. It’s a bit frustrating, but I’d rather not force myself to try to come up with something and constantly stare at my wordcount.
I’m currently at 25,000 words. So I’m about a day off pace now– for the first time in a month. Given that Erich is having a D&D game with a couple of the guys on Saturday — one that I’m not involved in — I’ll have the entire afternoon to putter around up here in my office.
And we don’t have tickets for Harry Potter tomorrow night, which means we’ll probably be unable to see it until sometime next week due to the opening weekend insanity. So I have tomorrow night, too.
Part of the problem is that I have all of these little checklists of shit to get done. Not all of it is big stuff, but there are so many little things that I can’t justify sitting down and writing. My brain won’t shut up. Now that Thanksgiving and the LAN party is coming up, I’m prioritizing. Then Mom’s up on the 30th for a long weekend.
So I need to work the “need to do” vs. the “want to do” stuff carefully.
Holiday madness– gotta love it.
Category: NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
• Friday, November 04th, 2005
|
|
|
8,215 / 50,000
(16.4%) |
*stunned*
I’m getting there! So far, I’ve had two really, really good writing nights and one that kept on pace with the minimum words per day. According to my handy Excel spreadsheet, at this pace I’ll be done on the 19th.
By the way, if you have never seen said Excel spreadsheet, or just need a new copy, leave a message with your email address and I’ll send you it over the weekend. It’s a FANTASTIC NaNoWriMo tool. I’ve used it religiously for four years now. It really helps with getting my mind into the “okay, I need to push myself to this much today…” and then know where I can chill out and just write for the hell of writing.
I’m hoping to have two very, very good writing days this weekend so I can pad that wordcount even more. Ideally, I’d like to rack up around 7,000 more at least over the weekend so I don’t worry about days like the 16th when I know I won’t be writing due to our World’s Largest Dungeon game, or days like the LAN party on the Cape, where I’ll get some writing done, but can’t guarantee I’ll get a full day’s worth due to all of the fun distractions… like Ghost Recon and Unreal Tournament 2K4.
———-
We’re supposed to have a beautiful weekend weather-wise. It might reach 70 degrees tomorrow. The odd thing is that the leaves in lower Mass. and Rhode Island still haven’t really fallen from the trees. In fact, our trees are just now starting to get significant color. Mostly yellows right now, but we have one bush that’s a brilliant orange so far. Every morning I’m peeking out at our maple trees to see if they’re going to turn red.
Since it will be so nice, we’ll be getting a good deal of yardwork done this weekend. The grass needs a final mowing for the season to cut down the weeds, and we have a bunch of broken branches that we need to break up and bundle for trash pickup. We’ll probably get a couple bags of leaves raked up, too– but raking will most likely be a Thanksgiving week activity, judging by the progress of the leaves.
If my mom would bother sending home my camera, I might actually be able to take and post some pictures!
Category: NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
• Tuesday, November 01st, 2005
I can write about absolute crap with no end in sight! It’s November 1st. Looky here:
|
|
|
3,604 / 50,000
(7.2%) |
*bounces*
Holy shit, how did this happen?
(and I have tomorrow OFF to stay home for our yearly furnace appointment!)
Category: NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
• Tuesday, November 01st, 2005
Apparently I live in THE neighborhood. You know– that cool neighborhood that all the kids hit for candy on Halloween? Not sure what’s up, but the kids were out in force last night. We went through about 7-8 pounds of candy between 6 p.m. and 8:30. I’d say we had somewhere between 120 and 150 kids.
Hot damn.
Around 6:45, the kittens were getting extremely rowdy and gave me a “shit, I don’t need to be herding cats while trying to give out candy” thought, so I decided to move myself outside. Our front door is kinda shitty for trick-or-treating anyway. We don’t really have a landing, so whenever kids came up, I’d have to ask them to step back down the stairs so I could swing the door open. Not good. It was an absolutely beautiful evening for trick-or-treating. Mid-50′s, no wind. Coats not required. I plunked my bruised witchy ass on the steps with my fake air-powered burning cauldron, the huge bowl of candy, a Biggie Diet from Wendy’s, and an old Time Life “Mysterious Places” hardback (hey… it was an appropriate theme), and just waited for the kids.
Adorable costume award goes to two sets of kids– one, a pair of twins dressed up in complimenting ladybug and bumble-bee costumes, complete with felt and fuzzy ball antennae. They couldn’t have been more than three. The other was a brother and sister pair in dinosaur costumes. But not any dinosaur costumes– these were bright, bright colored and poofy and made them look like living Puffalumps (remember those?). I almost melted. Sooo… cute.
I met our state senator last night, who was out – in costume – with his kids. While the kids did the few houses right around me, we chatted briefly. He seems like a very nice guy, and not overtly politician-ey at all. Lots of other parents welcomed me to the neighborhood last night, too. I don’t remember names, but I was amazed at how friendly everyone was. It really is one of those close-knit neighborhoods where people at least recognize one another and say hi. All ethnicities and religions blended together. Lots of adults waved to one another as they walked their kids around.
It was awesome.
By 8:30, it was all over. I took a bit of time to relax and stretch out before going to work on my computer for NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program. There is a backlog of students who need to get their accounts verified and activated, and despite the servers being obnoxiously slow with the NaNo kickoff, I did get some work done.
At midnight, I opened up a Word document and scribbled about 850 words in a half-hour. I’m playing with my co-worker’s idea to write about myself. I’m setting it up in a daily diary format, and will talk about different aspects of my pagan geek life. Doing it this way means that basically all of my entries that have any length to them (read: non-meme) can also be incorporated if I choose.
Like this one, for example.
So yes… I’m playing with an idea now. It definitely fits under the “No Plot, No Problem!” monkier, since I have no clue what kind of a plot I can pull out of this. But it’s writing, and it’s working for now. I’ll see where it leads.
Busty lesbian pirate ninjas may make an appearance by day 15 out of writing desperation.
If used, does anyone want to have one named in his/her honor?
Category: Celebrations & Holidays, NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
• Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
It’s now less than a week to NaNoWriMo, and I’m still not quite sure that I have a solid place to start writing. I fully expect to be staring at the blinking cursor line for a while before anything gets on the page screen.
Monday morning’s timesheet entering doldrums sparked one idea that I’ve played with a bit in my mind– a woman is brought into a psych hospital (for an unknown reason, to be developed over the course of the book), and the story goes through the layers of self-discovery to figure out why she’s there, and how she needs to change.
It works– but can I get 50K out of it? Eh, not sure.
Then Miss Marya (of two other NaNo years) came knocking on my brain, asking if maybe I was up to explore her character a bit more. I told her yes, but not for NaNo. I want to work on developing her stories on a long-term basis and possibly develop them into something publishable. Her stories are moving into a someday, I’m going to publish this… realm, and I don’t want to screw around with it for NaNo.
Yesterday afternoon, one of my coworkers and I were talking about NaNo. I mentioned how I just needed to flesh out a couple characters to get myself going. If I put a somewhat fleshed out character in a room (or a park, or whatever) and just write about how they interact with the environment, it will get me started. I’m an environmental writer– I want to connect to how a character interacts. I’m fascinated by textures and shadows and being so pissed off that a person’s vision is blurry. So give me a good character, and I’ll make up a story about them…
Anyway, my coworker just stares at me and says (along these lines- not verbatim), “Mel… you really need to write yourself. Do you realize how different your life is compared to most of the stuff that’s out there on the market? Everything is about mothers and daughters and someone having some freaky incest trauma in their background. You’re a member of a subsect of a subculture that few people know much about (referring to being a female gamer geek, I suppose) and are involved in so many things that most people wouldn’t think twice about considering for themselves, but would find just fascinating. It’s so different than anything else out there right now. I give you two models for your characters– yourself and Erich. Discuss.”
And I blink.
And then I retort, “but I’m weird and abnormal.” (and thinking and boring)
“Exactly! Well, not really abnormal… different,” she says.
I ponder.
And ponder some more.
And have a small discussion about this weekend’s Forgotten Realms game with Erich.
And forget all about it until tonight.
Would I really want to write about myself? And honestly, would it really be that interesting? (or would it come out like entries in my blog usually do… boring as shit?)
*sigh*
There has to be ONE topic I can write about come next Tuesday…
Divine Intervention, please?
Category: Geeky Stuff, NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
• Wednesday, September 28th, 2005
NaNoWriMo signups open this Saturday. Are you ready?
And no, I have no idea yet what I’m writing about. What else is new? Why on earth would I actually want to prepare for NaNo beforehand? I want to live every moment in sheer agony as the words simply refuse to flow through my fingers. Aaaarrrrgggg! In a sick way, I sort of enjoy the pain, honestly. I do my better writing under pressure when I know that a deadline is looming. Perhaps it’s the journalism major in me.
But honestly it won’t be that bad. I do have a few very small ideas floating around. Come Oct. 1st, I’ll start elaborating on them. But I do try to stick to the concept of NaNo– all of it in the month of November.
There’s a few changes in my participation role, too. Since I’ve moved out of Massachusetts, I can’t really be the Municipal Liason for Massachusetts: Elsewhere anymore. With the craziness so far this year, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to jump into ML’ing in Rhode Island quite yet, either. By the end of November, I expect to be well on the marriage planning route. I’m so sick of being asked when the date is. So it really wouldn’t be a good idea to be trying to juggle all of that, PLUS work, plus the commute, and (now) plus two feisty kittens.
I still wanted to participate on a larger scale, though, so I contacted Erin to see if there would be another area that I could help out with. Erin has the incredibly insane job that I have termed “Municipal Liason Cat Herder.” I specifically mentioned possibly stepping in as a full-time forum moderator, since there was a mid-month plea last year for people who could help moderate forums. She really liked the idea.
Then on Monday, she contacted me again and mentioned she’d passed my name onto the leader of a new subsection of NaNoWriMo called the Young Authors Program for kids aged 12 and under, in case they possibly needed help. The project leader contacted me today to ask for help with the kid forums, which I excitedly accepted.
I’m looking forward to this year’s NaNoWriMo. A lot. I’ll write. I’ll be able to volunteer in a way that helps them out, but also is practical for me. All will be good.
So who’s joining me in the insanity?
Category: NaNoWriMo, Writing
| Leave a Comment
