It's a national holiday weekend in some parts of the world? How did you spend your week?
I took the week off of work to work the beta edits on my book. I'm still hoping to get it out the door in March. The only snafu so far is that I spent most of yesterday playing, of all things, the Sims 2. I think because it's so darn easy to write a book that way -- I just click on the sim, click on the computer, and click "Write a Novel". Ta-da! And remember how I said I can multi-task and write while playing MMO games? I totally can't do that with the Sims. Even though, and this is key, I think I can. *sigh*
How did you spend your week? Also, how are you doing on NaNo?
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42k words and almost to the end. I'm worried I'm going to finish about 1k words shy @.@ at this rate.... I can't concentrate when everyone's home and playing video games. I do much better writing at work. I may end up on a writing binge on Monday instead.
I haven't made any progress since the 13th.
Thanksgiving was at my mother's boyfriend's house, I'd never been there before. It's a nice house.
My sister found her first gray hair, though gray might be an understatement, apart from her hair dye (which makes it an unnatural shade of red) the hair was colorless. The hair dye is part of how she knew for sure it was actually her hair. If she'd redyed her hair instead of letting it grow out in it's natural color she never would have known. Anyway, she screamed like you wouldn't believe, both in terms of volume and length of time. I should point out that this is my older sister and I had my first gray hair (originally located by her) years ago.
Afterward my sister and I came back from the middle of nowhere where my mom's boyfriend lives (I think the motto is, "Not the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from here," or something to that effect) the plan was to drop in on my dad and his father, we knew he wasn't home yet and waited at Occupy Maine's encampment, with thought it would only be a few minutes (as in, "I'm going to go in and say hi, you can come with me and wait in the car,") but it turned out my dad's car broke down*. It took two hours for the tow truck to arrive. That time was spent at the encampment where it is cold. If you ever plan to visit or join such a place I recommend dressing more warmly than I did (of course I dressed not knowing I would be outside at all beyond getting from houses to the car and getting from the car to houses.)
I note that there are real life internet trolls. Occupy Maine is set up in a public park which means that anyone can show up and there is no moderation. Two separate trolls were there. One male, one female. They were apparently unaffiliated and used entirely different techniques, but they were both using trolling techniques you've doubtless seen many times on the internet.
Occupy Maine is set up directly across the road from the county courthouse and government center. (I know this because there is a sign on the building.) I find that fun. You can also see city hall from there, it's next to a fire department, and a garage in which I have noticed that police vehicles are kept is right in the area. It seems to be in the thick of government.
After two hours the tow truck arrived for my dad, we picked him up at the service station his car was delivered to and said hello and happy thanksgiving to him, his father, and his father's girlfriend as part of delivering him to his home (they live in the same building, he's in the second floor apartment, his father on the ground floor. His father owns the building.)
And that was my day.
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Wait, I forgot something. Have I ever mentioned I love Sarah Vowell? I know I have elsewhere, but I don't know if I have here. Anyway, I love Sarah Vowell and yesterday I saw something by her that I missed when it first aired. Be warned that she's extremely, and in my opinion hilariously, rude towards the British and, to a much lesser extent, Abraham Lincoln.
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* My sister's car broke down already. I never had a car and don't drive, but my sister my dad and my mom all have cars and right now my mom's is the only one that works.
Well, I'm at about five thousand words writing, which is fine, because it was very clear early on that this was going to be a short story and not a novel (five characters, and at this point one is "dead", two are missing, and one has pretty much gone clinically bonkers, so... what else can happen?) However, the plotty bits that remain in my head indicate that I'm only about halfway through, and there are huge dumps of tawdry and depressing remaining, which I hate to write. Bleah.
But this was an exercise designed to challenge me in all sorts of ways -- to work on expressing character through surface description rather than dialog or interior monolog, to work on being grim and not permitting myself a happy ending, etc.
As far as Thanksgiving goes, we haven't feasted yet; we're saving that for tonight, when hapaxdaughter gets off work and hapaxson gets back from his high school band trip. We did see the Muppets last night, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND for unabashed sentimentality and honest sniffles and feel-good set pieces and muppet-fu.
My NaNovel endures; I crossed the 40K mark last night, so I'm just where I need to be. I'm hoping I can sprint ahead at last this weekend - I try every weekend and something always happens to stop me - because I would hate to upload on the evening of the 30th and find that due to wordcounter disagreements I'm 2K short or something.
Around the 25K mark, I realised that I didn't feel at all like I was halfway through, so I'm kind of expecting the story to reach all the way to Legitimate Novel Length (75K?) but this does not in any way seem like a bad thing to me.
I do find I'm better-appreciating how some good authors fall into what have always seemed like obvious pitfalls, to me. And I'm at once excited and intimidated by the thought of getting into the second draft, but I'm trying to keep my primary focus on another 10K in <6 days. (It would help if I didn't always feel like I'm just hitting my writing stride around 11:30 PM. I can stay up typing happily until 3 o'dark if I've nowhere else to be later, but that's not going to work on a weekday.)
the best thing about being all growned up is that you can have pudding for supper
For those of you who are also Chaotically aligned, like me, I do highly encouraging cheating a little if you must in order to "win" NaNo. There's usually a lot of really nice coupons for the winners that benefit both the winner and the entity being bought from. If there's a Scrivener coupon this year, I'm definitely going to buy their Windows version, and if CreateSpace does a coupon, I might use them as a print distributor next year.
Otherwise, I'm gonna be comparison shopping, I reckon.
At last check, I was a couple of notches due Good from True Neutral. I tend to think of myself as a True Neutral with Good habits (as I implied before when blogging about Heroic Villains - my actual compassion is kind of limited but I've decided to pretend otherwise).
I tend to take the 'druid' variant of True Neutral, summarised as "Get the hell off my gorram lawn" and thorny thicket walls, and thus am ambivalent about being offered coupons, but bigods I am going to win NaNo anyway.
My new writerly friend here in the city broke 50K at the last Tuesday write-in, for which she received the appropriate high-fiving and boundless scorn (both from me). She claims that it's not nearly good enough work, whereas it sounds awesome to me, to I'm trying to tell myself that the same is true of my own writing. Truly there is no power so strong as convincing myself that a terrible first draft is okay and even mandatory.
Well I have boundless scorn and a fair degree of admiration for you, person who's graph of writing per day moves steadily upward at almost exactly the pace it ideally would.
Truly there is no power so strong as convincing myself that a terrible first draft is okay and even mandatory.
And the corollary is the writers motto: My goal isn't to beat the best thing ever written, it's to beat the worst.
Assuming you're like me and a single Margaret Atwood reading sends you into paroxysms of inadequacy and failure. :)
Thanksgiving was great. I was with my family for Thanksgiving dinner for the first time in six years, and it was awesome to just sit back and eat really delicious food. :)
NaNoWriMo is going as planned. I reached 70,000 words over the break. As the month isn't over yet, I'm setting a new goal for myself of actually finishing the first draft by the end of the month (80-85k or so, it looks like). It shouldn't be tough to make it. The characters are very close to the final few games, most of the unimportant ones are dead, and the remainder are rapidly hurtling towards their final fates. I'm already thinking of ways to improve the book on the second draft, including rounding out some of the character's personalities a bit more and giving their separate plot lines stronger themes to tie each line together (1), but overall I'm very happy with it. (2) This is the first novel I've done that is
a): serious
b): completed
c): in less than several years
Plus, as the end of the book nears, I get to start killing off the jerks and villains, which is always an awesome point in the book.
ALso, I just found a new cover of Chess: The Musical. And while it's not great, it has a couple of cool flairs that I like. So overall, things are going great.
(1) One thing about the novel, which I am a bit concerned about, is that there are two main characters who basically never interact until the very final match.I want both plot lines to have their own arcs, in addition to the overall arc of 'beginning, training, small tournaments, invitationals, Interzonals, championship tournament, final match.'
(2) I also want to go back and go over the quotes I've peppered the book with, both to spread them equally, to make sure I have at least one quote from most of the World Champions, and to make sure I don't use anyone twice.
You can write while playing MMOs? I'm impressed; mostly, if I find myself hanging out in an MMO doing something other than playing it, I'm reading blogs or something while waiting for (a) the other raid members to come back from afk, (b) my crafting run to finish, or (c) some monsters to invade a zone I care about so I can fight them off for phat lewts.
My Thanksgiving involved Greek food, pecan pie, and board games. I recommend you try a game called Dixit if you like Apples to Apples but wish its cards had some awesome art on them. Pergamon is an interesting archaeology-themed strategy game, but if you care at all about the field of archaeology in real life (as my mother does) you will likely find its inaccuracies incredibly irritating.
Mostly crafting, I confess. I love "Apples to Apples", so I'll have to check that out. It's a great family gathering game because the rules are so simple.
chris the cynic: Anyway, she screamed like you wouldn't believe, both in terms of volume and length of time. I should point out that this is my older sister and I had my first gray hair (originally located by her) years ago.
I once knew a woman who had her first grey hair at eighteen. It's not nearly as much a sign of getting awfully old as the reputation would have you believe.
(By the time I met her, her hair was entirely grey. I never learned how old she was, only that her children were 21 and 17.)
Pthalo: the best thing about being all growned up is that you can have pudding for supper
I choose my non-dinner (and sometimes dinner as well) food myself, and I've found I settle into a pattern. Blueberry yogurt, two or three snack-type things (typically some cheese crackers (Cheez-Its if available, Goldfish if not), a thing listed under “healthy” in my mental filing system (mostly fruit, orange juice, milk, or cheddar) , and sometimes a third thing; no more than one of these may be chocolate), dinner, chocolate one or two times. I've made ramen and scrambled eggs once each for lunch over the past couple months, and it felt weird having hot food that wasn't dinner. (Also weird having dinner that isn't hot.)
The dinner rotation is fairly small, too, though I've added a few things since the time I tried to come up with seven meals for a weekly on-my-own* hypothetical menu and struggled. (Some additions are because now I eat them, some are that now I cook them.)
On special occasions, though, anything goes.
Loquat: I recommend you try a game called Dixit if you like Apples to Apples but wish its cards had some awesome art on them.
Apples to Apples is awesome. I just played a few rounds with family and friends this afternoon.
Pergamon is an interesting archaeology-themed strategy game, but if you care at all about the field of archaeology in real life (as my mother does) you will likely find its inaccuracies incredibly irritating.
Mom has a degree in archaeology, so probably not.
*Here defined as not having help in preparing it, but able to buy as much meat and disposable gloves (to compensate for the raw meat squick) as necessary.
Dixit on BoardGameGeek. Half the point of the game is the pretty pretty card art. Most of them are weird enough that the deck can also double as a handy source of writing prompts.
Now I'm curious what MMOs you play that the crafting takes so long. I used to play Aion, which had an insanely time-consuming crafting system, but then Aion was designed for the Korean market, where most everyone pays by the hour rather than by the month. One time I made a super-high-end helmet that required my character to sit at the forge banging out subcomponents for literally 7 hours, no player input necessary. I was pretty happy when I moved to Rift and found out that even the most rare and valuable crafted items only take like 2 minutes of crafting time.
I farm grains and flour in LOTRO to make in-game gold, which Husband and I then spend on shinies. It's relaxing. VERY low income, but profitable in bulk. :)
Will, are you on Brandywine? There's someone standing right on top of the Shire Vault Keeper Hobbit. He's been there for two hours. I do not understand trolls. *eyeroll*
Our Thanksgiving was on Wednesday, since my mother had to work on "real" Thanksgiving. We played five rounds of Apples to Apples, and came to the conclusion that there needs to be a way to play cards as the opposite of what the prompt card says. That way you can actually have a shot when the prompt is "cuddly" and you've got a hand full of things like "dark alleys," "charging rhinos," and "skinheads."
Also, we're seeing the Muppets movie tonight for a brother's birthday, and mother's hair went gray early (which probably means mine will as well). It's odd how all those random tidbits people mentioned in this thread relate to my life.
I took this week of to go on vacation from work.
I have yet to have a day this week where I haven't done something around the house or otherwise that required my attention, whether it was the rain causing water to come up in my basement in far too much amounts, or helping prepare for the harvest meal, or anything else.
I may have to take another week off at some point so that I may actually have a vacation and sit about and play games.
...Dixit, however, looks pretty awesome every time I see it. Perhaps it will get got at some point.
We played five rounds of Apples to Apples, and came to the conclusion that there needs to be a way to play cards as the opposite of what the prompt card says. That way you can actually have a shot when the prompt is "cuddly" and you've got a hand full of things like "dark alleys," "charging rhinos," and "skinheads."
That's not how you play?
The way we play the judge for the round can pick whatever they feel is the best response. Something hilariously wrong sometimes is the best response in the judge's eyes.
Rikalous: came to the conclusion that there needs to be a way to play cards as the opposite of what the prompt card says.
This is--at least in our original kiddie copy*--one of the recommended variants. I think they call it “Crabapples”. (There's also “Apple Turnovers”, where you pick the green card most fitting (or least, if you do them both at once) for the red card.)
*We later bought an expansion pack from the adult version, but expansion packs don't come with instructions. (It did come with some rather...risque cards that we abandoned in the bottom of the box as they came up. (Though the “Leather and Lace” flew right over my head. I didn't realise I'd done anything embarrassing putting it down for “Fun” (I was thinking of the Stevie Nicks song; it was Mom's turn for judge, and she likes Stevie Nicks) until I heard the quality of my parents' laughter.))
chris the cynic: The way we play the judge for the round can pick whatever they feel is the best response. Something hilariously wrong sometimes is the best response in the judge's eyes.
Also this. We weren't deliberately doing Crabapples when we had “Annoying: Abraham Lincoln”. Though I suppose if you look at it a certain way...
It's become something of a family tradition that we celebrate Thanksgiving on Wednesday. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that I used to own a retail store, so I had to be home for Black Friday and my mom's place is six hours away by train, so I'd have to travel on Thursday. The other is that my sister who is a firefighter/paramedic is prone to volunteering to work Thanksgiving (it's a twelve hour shift). I went up on Monday. Unfortunately, I've been battling a cold since last week Thursday. I'd thought I was getting over when I left, but no such luck.
I took my housemate to a science fiction convention (Darkover) about a two hour drive from here today. Now I'm afraid to lock my car because its security system has gone wonky. I've told her she can find another way to get home. I don't trust my car at the moment and I can't get it fixed until Monday.
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