SO HEY, I STILL HAVE MY HAIR. Which means my nano novel made it to 50k! AND THERE WAS GREAT REJOICING. But seriously, it felt anticlimactic because the book still isn't done >/ And it derailed sooo many times. Like I don't think I've ever had a project with this many continuity issues.

And this is the last bit I wrote (STILL IN THE MF HOSPITAL):

“I don’t want your help. You should leave.”
Eva’s eyes were starting to water again. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
Ishida’s face was impassive. “Where did you say Raley was?”
"He stepped out." She swallowed. “I…think he was having some trouble seeing you like this.”

And then I was like "OKAY, THERE'S MY 50K, FUCK IT." Left hanging much?? Really I wrote about 1.5k on the 30th and should have written more, but I was already getting sick and feeling lethargic. Oh yeah, I'm sick :( I should be thankful because it's not the flu and it's not really that bad—just a sore throat, sniffles, and general tiredness/aches.

OH LOL I thought I had a fever last night because I woke up and I was sooo overheated D: But then I realized James had just accidentally turned the heater UP ALL THE WAY (instead of off) so I grumbled and got up to turn it off, but I was still burning up so I opened the windows. Then I had to wait up (this was around 3am) for it to cool down so I could then go and shut the windows so we wouldn't wake up freezing. Neither of us slept well last night :/

I took the world's slowest walk today. I had to go up the hill (not that much of a hill) between 30th and 39th and seriously, a turtle could have kept pace with me. By the time I got to my intended destination (coffee shop as motivator!) it was almost closing, but some dudes were trying to have a business meeting there so the barista was like "uh, you can hang out for a while if you want." Score! I felt slightly better with coffee in my system and the walk home went a lot better.

ER, OKAY, BACK ON THE TOPIC OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

I also finished doing/posting those 30 drawings with shayna611! (in runaway_tales ) That was a good project and I got some decent portfolio stuff out of it :) It was fortunate I had most of those drawings done earlier in the month though, otherwise I would have been in trouble. But anyway, lots of good practice drawings expressions, which I am hoping the program I'm applying to next month will like.

Massive thanks to everyone who looked at and commented on my drawings! ♥♥♥ I truly appreciate it!

AND I GOT A PORTFOLIO UP! You can also see the somewhat anemic thing on flickr now: CLICK CLICK CLICK! On that note, I think I'm just going to go ahead and connect this LJ with my actual name/work. Really, the worse thing non-lj friends can learn about me from this is that I write porn and say "fuck" a lot. And I think people care less about that in the art/design world than in other fields :P

And I joined Wriye for 2010! More about that soon, perhaps.

And I was going to end with a rant about the post-nano "Pep Talk" by Peter Carey (did it piss anyone else off, or am I alone in this?), but this entry is already really long so I'll save that for later.

My nano novel just derailed—but it's okay! It just looks like we're fleeing Reno now. Sooner that I'd been expecting. So now all those plot point cards I have...just have to take place while everyone's running for the coast. Yeah...I think we can fix this...

Anyway, my nano playlist is significantly shorter this year so I went actually included almost of the songs I've been writing to (minus those that really sucked). I noticed significantly more songs with female vocals made the list this year. Perhaps a symptom of having more female characters. I can dig it.

18 mp3s . 66.2 mb zip file . download

So with Halloween (which I spent helping James move his stuff instead of eating candy* or dressing up—BOOO to being a grown-up!!), October draws to a close.

I'm not going to beat myself up about my novel revisions—which I'd say are 1/3 finished right now—because that was pretty wishful thinking that I would finish those in a month. I did work out the problem I was having with my plot and map out some strategies for fixing it...so that could have gone worse at least!

And NaNoWriMo planning really came together this week! After a certain amount of panic (why did I promise to shave my head?? Am I crazy??) I managed to through together 2/3 of an at least semi-coherent plot! Sticking with the Nano idea I posted about previously, but retitling it Grift for the time being. I have 27 index cards of scenes and all my major characters (including the villain!) have been figured out.

My only concerns right now are that the "big" con the characters pull is not that interesting D: Oh, a Jamaican switch? La-dee-freaking-da. Even though it's not the main thrust of the story, I still hope I can eventually come up with something better. Oh, and I'm still trying to figure out what the heck happens with Oliver. And I have no idea what'll happen at the end. But I can't be alone with that last one.


I want to stay up and start writing after midnight, as is traditional, but I might be too dead after all the moving adventures to really give it my all until tomorrow. GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE KICKING IT OFF TONIGHT, THOUGH!!

*full disclosure: we did eat some Starburst to keep from crashing when we had to delay lunch. Then I gave the remaining ones to a trick-or-treater who had the misfortune of stumbling onto my doorstep. I live in an apartment and wasn't expecting any kids to come by, okay? At least I didn't give him those three remaining Camels in the junk drawer. See, I'm responsible.

I see you guys talking about rewards for meeting your NaNoWriMo word goals.
Here's my NaNo pledge:

IF I DO NOT REACH 50K THIS YEAR
I WILL SHAVE MY HEAD

(oh, eta: this was suggested by james)
And yeah, I'll post pictures to confirm. But hopefully, it won't come to that :D

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of art/design stuff this month, but I didn't forget about...



( wherein I make very little progress on revisions )

So, planning. That has been going just all right too. The good news is that I've worked out a lot of the important backstory and managed to overcome what I thought would be a huge stumbling block. This will be meaningless to everyone who is not me, but I FIGURED OUT HOW TO GET AROUND SENDING ISHIDA TO JUVIE \o/ Because that was going to cause me a monster headache in research lol. And I think my solution adds to the story.

( character stuff where I lament the fact that everyone needs aliases )

( and my villain woes )

Ugh, the more I think about that scenario the more it seems totally bogus. My instincts are telling me to come up with something better. Back to the drawing board! THERE'S STILL TIME!

So I realize I'm probably going to need a couple more days to recover from November before I can start writing again, which is kind of funny. I might need a couple more days for my brain to recover, period, because on November 30st I wrote over 10,000 words and that was totally insane for me. SO MANY WORDS! Anyway...

Lots of thank yous and hugs to all my friends who were supportive along the way and left me nice comments :D :D :D Even though I kind of abandoned you guys. I'll try to be less negligent.

SO OK, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, MY FINAL NANOWRIMO ROUND-UP:
then you won't have to hear about it again for a good long while


Hehe, this is my wordle. WOW GUYS, THE NARRATOR IS OBSESSED WITH SOMEONE NAMED ADAM! Could you tell?? This made me laugh because of all the teenager-speech-pattern words that made it in. "LIKE" and "KIND OF" were pretty common. After Adam, it looks like Stacy, Lionel, and Teek got the most name shout-outs. Dillon is the narrator's name, but since he's the one telling the story, it didn't get used that much.

RANDOM REFLECTIONS:

- After going through about seven long-ish working titles (the best was "What Would Andy Warhol Do"?) I decided on the title Homecoming.

- I included one dream sequence. It's the only thing the novel written in present tense. This is probably the only sneaky thing I did, because initially it just seems like a continuation of the previous scene.

- I knew someone was going to send the narrator an envelope containing a small item of sentimental value. I figured it would be a ring from a Cracker Jack box, but it turned out to be an embarrassing Polaroid.

- The main characters ingested six Vicodin and two hits of E over the span of the book. They also smoked pot exactly once.

- The weirdest scene was the one where the narrator and his female friend shave their legs together in her bathtub.

- The hardest scene to write was probably the scene where the characters took Ecstasy because I knew I was way overusing the words "awesome" and "amazing."

- There's a three person fist fight at the end of the book. I was looking forward to writing this scene the whole month.

- There is absolutely no sex in the whole novel! There are three kisses, but one is a peck, and one happens in a dream.

FINAL NUMBERS:
# of words - 72,385
# of pages - 181

More word on the subject later; right now I don't know if I have any more words in me. But let me tell you, this is the longest thing I have ever written BY FAR and I AM SUPER PLEASED WITH MYSELF :D :D :D

CONGRATS TO ALL MY NANO FRIENDS TOO! <3 ALL MY BUDDIES MADE 50K!

So, my nanowrimo novel (which as of now, has about seven working titles but nothing I actually love yet) clocked in at over 24,000 words today. My characters just decided that they wanted to take Vicodin and play Street Fighter on the SNES. Um, yay?

I read something from Chris Baty about how all novels have a soundtrack you come up with as you write. I've been working on a lonnnng playlist to accompany the story in my head, which I pared down to 21 of my favorites to share with y'all :) NANOMIX 2008:


I decided we had to be friends, me and Adam, who was sitting in detention and picking at a cafeteria baked potato in a little paper tray. I saw him flip off Mr. Newman when he wasn't looking. Yeah, we had to be friends. There's a small bit of teeny-bopper pop rock, but what do you expect from a story about high-school students?

1. in my head | the ballet
2. aside | the weakerthans
3. know your onion! | the shins
4. in your arms tonight | stephen trask
5. tire swing | kimya dawson
6. blister in the sun | the violent femmes
7. fake it | seether
8. somebody told me | the killers
9. satan said dance | clap your hands say yeah
10. turn it on | kim wilde
11. girls room | liz phair
12. diagnosis | the weakerthans
13. so nice so smart | kimya dawson
14. young folks | peter bjorn and john
15. the good that won't come out | rilo kiley
16. lost in you | sugarcult
17. reconstruction site | the weakerthans
18. i hate the war | the ballet
19. shitloads of money | liz phair
20. fuck was i | jenny owen youngs
21. fists up | the blow

(expect excerpts tomorrow.  you're so excited, I can tell! <3)

12,566 / 50,000 (25.1%)

So this has been fun, so far :) Somehow I managed to start out really strong over the first weekend and I've been basically doing the minimum since then. It's kind of nice not to quality-censor what I'm writing at all and just let myself go off on tangents, rest assured I can tighten it up later.

I still don't have a good one sentence summary of what I'm working on, probably because not much has happened in the story yet, but I will be posting ~*tunes*~ and maybe some short passages later.

In the mean time, have my first line:

The really amazing part was that I didn't wind up in the guidance counselor's office sooner.

...yup! I'VE GONE YA ON YOU.