Well...

In which there is much bashful blushing.

So, as it turns out, I was still more sick than I thought (if you watch the video in the last entry, you can hear the beginnings of the congestion that reared its ugly head again) and so I was laid up yesterday and most of today again. So that "video everyday" thing sort of died before it started.

I'm debating whether or not to take another shot at it next week (sort of starting afresh on Monday), but it might not happen.

There are times when jumping in without any sort of planning can be a good thing (i.e. NaNoWriMo) and times when it is not. As it turns out, videoing actually takes me more concentrated time. I knew that, but I sort of didn't think about it. While writing can be done anywhere and at any time (boring classes and long waiting room stays are ideal), a scripted video can only be made at a particular time in a particular place with particular equipment. I didn't really take this too much into account, simply looking at all the free time I have in a day and not really thinking about what was actually available in that free time (there's a reason I write most of the time).

So, that endeavor has been shelved, thankfully before I got too involved or emotionally invested. I haven't given up on it yet, but I'm content in just writing and blogging for a while (and preparing for Screnzy, which is coming up faster than I realized).

Plus, I'm still sick and all I want to do right now is curl up and watch movies.

We're different, different as can be...

Yay for super-mega-foxy-awesome-hot fan-produced parody musicals and their ability to inspire blog titles.
---

It's funny, how even when you know something, it doesn't really sink in. This past November, I finally sort of got it through my head that my characters don't have to think the same way I do.

It's not that I was opposed to the thought of people having different thoughts than me, I just didn't really write characters that were all that different from my own way of thinking (excepting perhaps the antagonists). However, for NaNoWriMo last year, nearly every single one of my protagonists thought quite differently from me. They approached problems differently than me, they resolved issues differently than I would, and they were just different people.

Not that (I hope) all of my characters have been the same before this, but this was where I noticed a real change from myself. And, just like the narrative style, I'm ripping off what worked from that novel for my hedgehog story. In this case, writing outside my comfort zone.

My narrator isn't much like me at all. In fact, I find myself annoyed by her sometimes. But that's part of her character and she'll grow out of some of the more universally-annoying traits, though I don't think she'll ever come into conformity with how I think. And I don't want her to. It's a new experience for me as a writer. I like it.

In hindsight...

So, I just recently got my Createspace copy of my NaNo novel and flipping through it and thinking back on it, there are many things I both like and dislike about it. (For the interested, Glass and Salt can be found in all its unedited NaNotastic glory here.)

Things I like:

- I like the narrative structure. I have three different kinds of narration: a main 1st person narrator (Chevy), a secondary 3rd person narrator (Ian) and a sort of interlude narration that is fashioned after simplistic fairy-tale type storytelling. I like the way it works. I might be using something similar for my hedgehog project (yay for blatantly stealing from myself!).

- I like Chevy's voice. It's like my homage to Mal from Firefly. I didn't mean it to be, but as I read it, I am reminded of our favorite space western captain.













(Because we all know our favorite pirate captain is Barbossa.)

- I like the ending. It comes out of nowhere, involves the death of innocent zombies and really resolves none of Chevy and Mel's problems I'd been hinting at as if they were important. I have no real basis in my love for it. I love it anyway. 

Things I don't like:

- I don't like how I kept forgetting that Chevy was claustrophobic. I mean, for real, you would think that would come up a few more times. But it doesn't. Because I forgot about it.

- I don't like how angsty it got, with a lot of coming and going without doing anything. It's like I couldn't bring myself to actually make something happen (I think that's why I like the ending, because I finally bit the bullet, stopped trying to make the characters resolve their differences when they clearly weren't interested in doing so and instead just proceeded to eliminate the problems by lopping their heads off - literally in some cases). 

- I don't like that I forgot to align the right edges of the text in my printed copy. Oh well. Each year, the Createspace copy gets a bit better-looking. Next year (if they do it again next year), it will be that much more awesome.

So much to do, so little free time...

December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

Mah NaNo novel: Glass and Salt. Used a G-2 fine point blue ink pen and a Picadilly medium notebook with college-ruled pages for the first half or so, then switched to my trusty Compaq, Write or Die and Word '07 when I realized that there was no way handwriting was going to get me to 50,000 in time.

Omigosh, there is so much I want to create right now. A short list:

- a novel about a hedgehog princess
- a short film about robots in love
- a song about fighting crime
- poetry

There are times I feel like artists and musicians are more artistic than writers. I mean, they get to use materials, to make images and figures and shapes and things you can touch, see, hear and smell. There's such a beautiful tangibility to what they do. Writers can only grasp at it, try to spell out what they want a reader to envision, rather than just making it and letting them see it for themselves.

But then I see a page of handwritten scrawl, and run my fingertip over words that have been pressed deeply into the grain of the paper, and smell the way the oil from my hands rubs off onto the fibers, and listen to the gentle hiss of the pages rustling together and I feel better.

Imagine, if you will...

A writer in the wake of National Novel Writing Month is not a pretty picture. Imagine, if you will, a person with slightly greasy hair, wrapped in blankets that need washing, wearing an unattractive oversized turtleneck, having eaten an ungodly amount of little candy-coated chocolates and typing sporadically while watching silly videos on YouTube. You would have imagined me at this moment.

The good news is that I friggin' won NaNoWriMo. 50,006 words, baby! The cheering of the victory video by the OLL was recorded especially for me! 

However, as noted above, I'm usually a mess in the aftermath of NaNo. What usually happens is my writing drops off for several months. It's a trend that I've noted for both of my previous Novembers and I intend to avoid it this year. Fortunately, I have an idea that I'm excited about (it involves princesses and hedgehogs!). I think that excitement will help my productivity level from diving off a cliff this December. 

Another thing I'm trying out is Reverb10, a blog challenge someone in my NaNo buddies recommended. Yet another thing to keep my muse from hiding under the bed for months. Plus, I have a bunch of scribbled notes and ideas for blog entries if not short stories, so I think that I could actually fend off the dreaded post-NaNo shlump. 

One last meme entry:

Day 30 - Share a link to either your NaNo profile or a location on the internet where your story can be found.  If someone offered to beta read for you, would you be willing to do the same for them during the subsequent editing process?

Actually, here's a place you can read all three of my previous NaNo novels: Scorpion and Sandman ('08) Dirt Queen ('09) and this year's Glass and Salt. 


As of this writing, Dirt Queen and Salt and Glass aren't fully uploaded, but they will be very soon. Right now, I just want to dive into the pile of library books I've been ignoring for weeks and watch some more Tin Man (which I started yesterday and which probably is the reason I was writing all the way up to November 30).

To be truly honest, I don't think I'm going to be editing this sucker any time soon, so a beta reader would not be necessary. I'm perfectly willing to beta for anyone interested though, as long as they're willing to work with a full-time student, part-time kennel worker's schedule.

I are a winner! *whoot*

Something like thirty-six hours left...

Blah... Somebody shoot me, please. My short story for Creative Writing is due in two hours and I'm just now sort of kind of getting to it, moving some previously-written stuff around and trying to frame it with a second narration. And it sucks. It sucks so badly. I wish I could change it, but I've already sort of committed to this story. I can only hope that either a) no one else remembers today is the due date (it would not be a first for this class) and we can postpone turning it in or b) I actually get the thing done in two hours and it isn't as bad as I think. But, for serious, I hate this friggin' story.

The only good news is that I finally got the characters to age up into sixteen year-olds.

My NaNo on the other hand, despite having given me grief the entire month, is back (sort of) on my good side. I sort of kind of have finally gotten around to the character's motivations, discovering meaning behind their actions and whatnot. Sort of. Still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. In mere hours... *hyperventilates*

Just two more meme entries to go!

Day 29 - Name one thing in which you indulged as a treat to keep yourself motivated and writing that you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

You know, I indulged in lot of things this month that I don't normally do, but none of them were really writing-centric. I think the only thing I really did to get myself writing were 1) to promise myself that I would write my hedgehog story if I made my word counts every day (and that didn't really happen) and 2) I climbed a mountain about mid-month to novel at the top. It was more to just say I had done that than to bribe myself into writing.

Less than ten thousand to go...

I'm in the home stretch. I didn't know if I was going to be able to do this. But now I am!

I just had Scrub's own father shoot him. Why would I do that? I'm not even sure if he's going to die yet or not. I mean, he's the doctor, so who's going to fix him? And I already had one character get non-fatally shot. Two might be pushing it. I don't know. I don't really know what made do that, beyond perhaps the arguable temporary insanity brought on by Write or Die sessions.

To paraphrase Mr. Smith:
"Meme, meme, meme..."

Day 27 - What’s your word count now?  Are you satisfied with your progress or panicked that you won’t have enough time to finish by November 30?

As of this writing, I am at 40,315, after making a crazy turn around in the past two days. Not super happy with my progress, but certainly fairly certain that I will finish in time. At least, I'll make it to 50k. Whether or not this story will manage to wrap itself up is an entirely different matter (see the above note about the shooting of Scrubs).

In other news, I saw Disney's Tangled today. I liked it, but the flaws that did exist kinda really bothered me. I just want a good fairy-tale movie, people! How hard is that? Perhaps more details will come later...

When in doubt...

...give your character a mental illness. Which gives us a segue into the catch-up memes:

Day 15 - Do any of your characters have a disability or mental illness?  If so, how does that affect their development throughout your story?

If I had actually done this particular meme entry on the actual day 15 of NaNo, the answer would have been "no" (well, maybe the zombies, but there's a lot wrong with them), but today, that all changed.

I think Virginia is going to turn out to be crazy-nuts, based on her traumatic experiences. Most of her backstory is a hallucination and the resolution of the story is now going to be about trying to save her from herself and Bluejay, rather than trying to heal the zombie-fied children. Because there wasn't a way to save the zombie-fied children.

Day 16 - At around the half-way point, it bears mentioning that most of us wrimos have other obligations beside simply hitting that elusive word count.  What else do you have going on in your life (work, school, children, neurotic pets, etc.), and just how much are you shafting it to win NaNo?

School, work, sleep. Sleep is getting a shorter end of the stick, but mostly it's been NaNo losing out this year.

Day 17 - In what time period is your novel set?  Is it in this world or another?

Eh, I'd say a slightly alternate version of this world (y'know, to accommodate the fairies) somewhere in the future, after some sort of world-wide near-apocalypse.

Still behind, but feeling good now that I have a slightly more definite resolution in mind. Still gotta figure out how Ian's going to play back in, but we'll see if he redeems himself or not.

I'm back...

Fiction is an exploration of non-fiction concepts. Every time I learn something interesting in a class, my first thought is how I can apply it to a story.

At least I'm thinking of something I can apply school to. Sometimes.

Sometimes I wonder what my fiction, or even my non-fiction like my blog posts, is contributing to the world. But at least I always know what the things I learn can be contributed to. (Though if I'm confused about what contribution I am making, then what does contributing to my confused contributions do for anyone?)
---
Thinking too hard about stuff again instead of writing. Had a crazy long work-weekend, so got maybe a total of a thousand or so words in. Currently at 18,042 when I should be at least at 23,338. That's about 5200 words I need to make up. Blah.

Day 12 - Imagine you’re behind in your word count goals (even if you’re not) and are going to pull an all-nighter to catch up.  Screencap a playlist of inspirational music you would use to get you up to speed.

Lulz. I'm actually behind, but the thought of an all-nighter would just about kill me right now, having had maybe a total of twelve hours of sleep in the last four days.  That said, pics!

Day 13 - Name a male character from your novel.  Describe him through the point of view and words of the female character you introduced in question 3 (if they never interact, pick another female character).

"'Scrubs' isn't even a proper name. He doesn't even deserve it anymore anyway. People who loved him gave him that name. But he doesn't deserve it.

He's bigger than Chevy. Thicker, younger. Brasher. Doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. He's going to get himself in trouble."

Day 14 - Is the sexuality of your characters a large part of your novel’s story?  If so, are there characters who deviate from the heterosexual “norm”?  In what way?

Not really, beyond the main couple being married and the secondary couple being attracted to one another. More just "boy loves girl" than any statement on sexuality.

No man is an island; I am no man...

This meme is brought to you by the number eleven and by the letters P-R-O-C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-O-N:

Day 11 - Ever tried collaborative writing (such as play-by-post roleplaying)?  If so, what do you think of it?

Tried it once. We kept it up for several thousand words, but it eventually just sort of flagged, probably due to my inexperience in the whole thing and our lack of communication.

I can't say I'd do it again. As much as my characters tend to run away with the story, their motivations are always in hand, or at least in my head, even if I don't know what they're going to do with them. To let someone else be handling motivations of characters makes it too much like real life, where you don't know what other people are thinking.

And Zoidberg...

Day 10 - How does your love of writing manifest in non-NaNo months?

Lots of writing.  Lots of writing about writing. Lots of thinking about writing. Lots of writing about thinking about writing. 

And whining. 

It's been turning around...

I went from being nearly 5k words behind to being only 1500 words behind, and I'm not done writing for the day. And that's on top of the frame of my bed breaking, necessitating a near-complete rearrangement of my room. And horrible traffic on the way to and from class. Yeah, I'm pretty much awesome.

I meme at you quickly:

Day 9 - Have you told anyone else you’re doing NaNo this year?  Who?  What was their reaction?

Told most of my family, as well as a few friends. I've done NaNo before and told them before, so their reactions were mostly "Oh that thing again". A few friends that had never heard of it before were like "Zomigosh, you're insane" in the most flat monotone possible. General excitement and support. There's a reason I hang out with these people.

Turn around, baby, turn around...

Yes, I intend to turn around my progress for NaNo. Really quickly.

Barely wrote a word over the weekend. I blame work and sleep. Also head colds. Seriously, never feel really happy about how you're the only person in your family who hasn't been sick yet. You will immediately get kicked in the head with congestion. Like, literally, within hours. And you will suffer through your shift at work and then immediately go home and crash.

So yeah.

Currently, I'm not sure what my total word count is. Last official typed up count is 7491, but there's some more to be typed up after that. Needless to say, however, I'm still behind by a bit. But I intend to change that with some hardcore writing today (while dosed up with painkillers and decongestant, so we'll see how that goes) and tomorrow's write-in.

Did take the time to write up about a page of rambling for my princess hedgehog story and it's going to sit on the back burner until December methinks. Or I might use it a bit as rewards for myself after reaching word count goals: "Make it this far and you can dabble in another story for a while." Bribing, even bribing yourself, works wonders.

To continue this brief stint of procrastination, however:

Day 7 - Where’s your favorite place to hunker down and write?

My bed. Seriously, with my notebook, I can be laying on my side and writing comfortably up near my head. It lets me nap - er, I mean write without having to expend much energy. Yay for laziness! Plus there are blankets and since I am in the basement and it is the middle of fall, it's one of the warmest places I could be most of the time.

Day 8 -List your current, most up-to-date word count.  Are you satisfied with your progress thus far?

Listed above: 7491 is my most current offical count. And no. No, I'm not.

It's happening again...

NaNoWriMo does this thing. I get really excited about an idea, anticipate writing it all of October, then November comes and the idea just doesn't seem as awesome as I originally thought. And a few days into that idea, when I've made a respectable amount of progress on it, I suddenly get a new idea, one that I think is a thousand times better than what I am currently writing.

Mainly it seems to be because all of my NaNo novels seem to come out angsty. I don't mean them to, but they do. In contrast, the shiny!new idea this year has a premise of anything but.

"Once upon a time, there was a hedgehog who dreamed of becoming a princess."

Yes, I went there. Basically, running with a long-established want to write a "fairy tale princess" story (seriously, I have notes from months and months back) and my recent binge of Princess Tutu (finished it, loved it, though bittersweet ending to the max), I actually have a decent idea for how this story would go. And I really want to write it.

But I think I'm going to just scribble everything I have in mind about it down now and then get on with my NaNo for this month. Then December will be waiting with a shiny!new idea already in place to distract me from the editing that I so sorely need to do.

Continuing the memetastic(ness)!

Day 6 - What is your one biggest stressor related to forcing yourself to write at least 50,000 words in a span of 30 days?

Turning off my inner editor. After having won NaNo two years in a row, I now know I am capable of doing it. The idea of writing 50,000 words in a month is, while still a challenge, no longer a daunting near-impossibility, so my inner editor pokes its head and demands that I actually put an effort towards story-telling. After all, if I'm not spending my time panicking about whether or not I can make word count, then I should be spending my time panicking about something else.

Chugging on...

Day 5 - Name two songs from your playlist that you feel are connected with your novel in some way, and explain how they are.

This is one of the questions I was both looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward to because I could plug some great pieces of music. Dreading because I rarely have songs that actually relate to my novel in my playlist. They usually just are songs that I like to listen to while I write.

However, this year, there is one song that immediately demanded it be about my novel. Thing is, it isn't actually on my playlist. I just have it in the back of my mind that it describes my novel quite well.

How You Remind Me by Nickelback. I don't listen to a lot of Nickelback, but this song came on the radio one time at work and as I actually listened to the lyrics, it describes the projected relationship between Bluejay and Suli (now possibly named Virginia... I'm not sure yet who Virginia is... ah NaNo) so well.

Zelos ~ serious arrangement ~ from the Tales of Symphonia soundtrack is one of those songs that doesn't actually have much to do with my novel per se, but it captures a particular mood that I really like. Plus I love the game and knowing where this piece of music plays in that game brings up another swell of emotion that is perfect for bits of the story.

My characters got out of that mess they were in, in a fairly believable manner, I think. I mean, it by all rights should have ended in their deaths, but Bluejay's introduction was enough to save the day. It came earlier than I meant it to, but it seems to be working thus far.

Whining is never the answer...

Writing, however, usually is.

Currently, my characters are doing something really stupid. I mean, really stupid. By all rights, they should die right now, that's how stupid what they're doing is. I mean, they're in a situation where the only real outcome should be that they die. I mean, they are professionals. What did they go and do a thing like that for? They knew what they were doing,so why'd they do it?

Yeah, but if they die, I'm not sure how the rest of the characters' situations are going to be resolved. But they really should die. So they might. But they might not.

Anyway, meme time!

Day 2 - What’s the title of your story?  Why did you choose the name you did?

Well, the temp title is City of Glass Eggs, which actually has nothing to do with the projected story at all. I just picked it because my novel has cities in it and glass in it and I like the words "glass" and "eggs". They sound cool. Yeah, other than that, there is no reason and hopefully I'll come up with something better before too long.

Day 3 - Pick one of your female characters.  Introduce your readers to her, from her point of view and her words only.

"I'm Mel."

Day 4 - What genre is your novel?  Why did you pick it?

Erm, the best way I could sum it up would be something like "dystopian fantasy". The premise is "fairies meets zombies" basically, so... yeah. It happened that way because I had an idea once upon a time for a "fae meets girl" story,with a setting possibly in the Seelie Court. Soon afterward, I saw Terminator: Salvation and due to my propensity to emulate other works that I have read, I decided to try to set that story in a post-apocalyptic world. The nuclear fall-out zones would be like the fae's forest and so on and so forth. The zombies came in when I decided that really not-good things happen to the children that the fae kidnap and then forget about.

Anyway, don't have my word count for today yet, but as of yesterday, I was at 5858. On track despite handwriting everything, spending way too much time listening to music for the NaNo CD swap and having had a really bad day yesterday.

No internet access for the win...

Yes, I missed blogging here yesterday. I did, however, actually write a blog entry. It was just for somewhere else. I posted it there and updated my word count. And then my laptop died.

It's what comes of letting your brother use your laptop for over an hour at a write-in with no outlet access and then not being able to charge it until the next day.

Yes, I went to my first write-in last night and it was marvelous. Barring the lack of outlets in our corner of teh bookstore (which didn't really bother me, seeing as how I am trying to entirely handwrite this year's novel... my hand weeps), it was really great. The Christmas music was odd (I mean, just two days after Halloween, and they played two Muppet versions of Christmas carols within an hour of each other), but somehow it really got me in a writing mood. The little spurts of conversation followed by periods of silent writing were something I've never done before. It was nice.

The best moment was right at the beginning when I arrived. I sat down and there was still the awkward atmosphere brought on by a strange newcomer when I accidentally ripped the ribbon bookmark from my notebook. It apparently just hadn't been glued on very well, since it just came out with no damage to the book itself.

The instant outpouring of genuine sympathy was amazing. I had five people, complete strangers all, commiserating and reassuring me that it was okay to feel the loss keenly, since writerly bling is precious.

It was wonderful. And to make up for the loss of my cheap ribbon, I got a priceless NaNoWriMo bookmark provided by the lovely OLL for write-in locations around the world. I luffs it.

Current wordcount (without having written yet today at all): 4247

I'm a terrible NaNoer...

Reasons why:

1) First of all, I call us "NaNoers", whereas the official term by OLL seems to be "Wrimos". Terrible.

2) I didn't stay up until midnight as planned. I got until 10 pm and just crashed. Probably had to do with having woken up at 5 that morning.

3) I should be writing my 1667 words and instead I am blogging the below meme.

4) Meme time! Gotten from here: 

Day 1 - Have you participated in NaNoWriMo before?  If so, which years and what end result?  If not (or even if so, for that matter), what’s your connection to writing?  Why do you want to participate this year?

Yes, I've participated in NaNo before. 2008 was my first year and first win (writing Scorpion and Sandman, still one of my most favorite things I've ever written, even if it is a big steaming pile of unedited fail right now), 2009 was last year and my second win (writing Dirt Queen, which was cool, but not as cool as I would have liked). So now I'm going three-for-three!

Writing just is. I don't know how to describe why I do it.

Participation in NaNo is something I don't even question anymore, even though it's only been two years. It's less "Why would I do NaNo?" and more "Why wouldn't I do NaNo?".

Doing a lot of handwriting right now, so I don't have a legit wordcount yet, but my first four words are "Once upon a time". I'm not expecting any record-breaking wordcounts from myself for the first few days, due to Real Life having quite a few obligations it demands I look into, but as long as I crank out the 1667 words every day for the next few days, I'll be happy.

Commitment...

So I just found this and now plan to do it. Because I've decided to. NaNo makes me make spur of the moment decisions. If nothing else, it will encourage me to actually blog every day of November so I can keep some sort of record for posterity.

Because posterity is going to be real interested in the ramblings of a writer with too little sleep and 1667 words of a horrific novel to write.

Also, I am making a vow right now to vlog some of my NaNo experiences. Because I've wanted to for a year and a half now and I'm going to do it.

Also also, I'm going to be beginning NaNoWriMo dressed as a pirate. Arr.

Ten and a half hours to go.

Bad influences...

I have this tendency (whether brilliant or irritating depends on my current obligations) to be very strongly influenced by works that I have recently been immersed in.

For instance, recently, I've been plowing through Princess Tutu, an anime about a duck who is changed into a girl who is changed into a princess to bring a prince's heart back to him and defeat an evil raven. (And despite the ridiculously fluffy title and the potentially-saccharine theme of the power of ballet dancing, I highly recommend it. Get through the first few episodes and it takes a swift turn for the dark and emotionally wrenching.)

Now, I'd already been sort of wanting to try my hand at some meta-fiction, but this show really brought it home for me. I want nothing more than to write a tragic old-school fairy tale wherein the characters might just actually know that they are characters and are trying to rebel against their fates. I mean, I really, really want to write something like that. I already did, then this show went and exacerbated the want.

Thing is, NaNo is in two days (cue the hyperventilation) and I've already got an idea for it. I want to write that idea. I don't think I want to change novel plans just forty-eight hours before NaNo starts.

This always seems to happen. I have an idea that I'm excited about, then I watch a movie or read a book and fall in love with the theme or setting and want to emulate it and can't at first because the original idea isn't compatible with the influential theme or setting. It's frustrating.