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Random thoughts and ideas about writing... |
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This journal will probably be mostly about new writing ideas and discoveries, with the odd other thing thrown in with it. I'll do my best to keep writing here regularly, to keep the creativity going and keep me in the habit of writing. Plus if I keep coming back everyday to update my blog I should end up writing other stuff on writing.com too... I will trick my imagination into writing if I have to! (hopefully I won't need to trick it, but just in case  ).
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| Well, NaNo progress in the last few days has been a bit shaky; failed to meet my target Sunday, and although I managed today, I'm still behind. Hopefully I can still manage, although it's starting to occur to me that I have quite a lot of uni work mounting up. I've been getting behind on most things just lately- I did catch up on everyone's blogs, but it's always difficult to get onto the internet from home now that the uni network had messed up the home one, so I am behind on blogs again- but not as behind as I was, I don't think. Recently, I just seem to have noticed that everything is really random, in a mildly absurd kind of way. Like when my best friend got flowers from her other half, and then realised she had no vase, so we filled her waste paper bin with water to use as a vase instead. And then to top up the water, the only container she had was a teapot  Oh, and today we walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and there were seven male japanese students stood around in their boxers doing each other's hair. That happened tonight, and it was really quite odd.Speaking of odd, I have found my replacement for Fred the talking goat- today I wrote in SwiSwi the talking ferret. It's too soon to tell whether or not she'll be any good, but hey, it'll spin the story out for a few thousand words- I gave up all pretence at quality a while ago now, and am planning to try and rescue the draft a little next month. It has just occured to me really, that next month will probably be just as hectic as this. I'll be re-writing my first ever novel still (which was put on hold for NaNo), editting/finishing my NaNo novel, and I have a load of assignments and presentations for December too. Hmm, this should be fun.... |
Okay, so I actually did make my target on Monday- and yesterday and today. It was a struggle but I eventually dinned it into my head that 100 words of writing= 1 page of reading my book. That kind of messed up today, when I though I had read five pages, like I was allowed, and then counted and it was seven  But, hey, it doesn't matter!Currently, on Day 15, the midpoint of NaNo, I am on target, at 25855 words. It isn't a massive lead, but it isn't behind, which is the main thing. I have, I admit, resorted to word padding, rambling, horrific typos of the worst degree, and out and out bad writing- but at least my inner editor is well and truly gone- for this month at least  On the downside though, I have to admit ot being behind on reading everyone's blogs again. I seem to be particularly bad at this just lately, and tomorrow I am going to make myself catch up! I'm having great trouble stringing sentances together though, so comments may or may not appear... I will post here whether or not I have caught up though  And I must once again ask you to assume that I said whatever you wanted me too.Now I just have to hope that the good feeling from catching up on all of your blogs will suddenly give me a second wind for my NaNo Seriously though, everyone keeps talking about getting your second wind around this time.... um, well, no. Not yet anyway. Still, it is by far the most concentrated writing I have done so far, so now all I have to do is drag it out another fifteen days!Unfortunately, I wrote out Fred the talking goat, and well, it seemed he was more crucial than I thought, It seems a bit dull without him. I can't write him back in, because he's stranded in another world with a tribe of people worshipping him, but I'm considering writing in Swi-Swi the talking... uh, any suggestions? |
| The days of not wanting to write, and actually not writing have begun. I let myself have Saturday off, since I had planned to allow for one day off, and I was ahead anyway. Then yesterday, I really didn't want to write, and only did half of my target. TOday I still don't want to write, am tired, and already starting to get behind. I really don't feel like writing though, and even though I've got a low target for today, I know it will take forever if I try to reach it, and I've been really tired all day. I knew this would happen at some point, and I can't help thinking that it's not going to improve again. I don't have any time to just sit down a write uninterrupted for a long time, since my best friend's laptop broke, apart from late at night when I'm too tired to write. I really want to win NaNoWriMo, but quite honestly, I just get bored of writing one story continously for so long, and this one seems to have lost all interestingness (and I don't care if that's a word or not, I'm using it). I don't know whether to work at today's quota until I go to sleep, or whether to just let it go and do something fun. I think I should write, but I'm faily sure I'm not going to  |
| Well, the first thing I saw when I logged onto the NaNo site today was a news item about it being 'back up your novel day'- which was when it occured to me that I haven't backed up any of my writing for about two months. I have now though, and it's all safely on a memory stick I need things to remind me about that more often. As well as saving my NaNo novel to memory stick, I also made it into an item here!
It's absolutely horrific writing, typos and all, but I've put it here anyway, since I doubt anyone will get far enough through it to see the worst bits I honestly didn't realise that I was capable of writing so badly as in patches of that novel (I wasn't sure anybody was capable of writing that badly) but apparently I can, when it's 11.45 and I have 500 words left of my daily quota. Seriously, patches of it are written with no thought, at top speed, and are barely readable through the typos, but the great thing is, it really does seem to have killed off my inner editor. Admittedly I'm planning to start editting the moment November's over, but until then, I am able to leave the novel where anyone can see it, just as it was originally written. I do hope that the quality of writing from my NaNo doesn't creep into my blog though I don't have to worry about my other writing just yet, as that is all on hold until NaNo has finished.It seems hard to believe that I still haven't missed a daily target for NaNo though, even if the writing is awful. Okay, I'm failing on most of the other November resolutions, to make up for it... lets see... I will do my nephew's birth chart (it wasn't done in time for his birthday, so I bought him something instead, and this will be for Christmas now) Er, well, I haven't started yet, but there's still time! But still, one goal is going well I guess it was a bit much to expect to do NaNo and keep up with everything else. |
| I've just been looking at the stats for my contest, and took a quick look at the top referring URLs, since I seem to be getting an unusually high number of non-member views. There were three different google searches that had lead to my contest, but it wasn't those that confused me so much. How on earth could anyone get to Create a Culture through www.iaea.org? It's a website about atomic/nuclear energy! Yet, two people, apparently, got from there to my contest. That's just plain odd- have the stats gone crazy, do you think? Anyway, aside from that- although I will just note that as of today there are now ten entries into the contest- I was, as always going to talk about NaNo. I can hardly believe it, but I still haven't missed a single day of writing, or even come short of my target for one day. Every single day, including today, I have met my targets, and so I am now at nearly 17000 words  Unfortunately, things aren't going quite so well for my best friend, who is also doing NaNo. The problem is, about a month, maybe a bit more, ago, she dropped her laptop. It wasn't a big drop, but it was enough to damage it, and although it can be fixed, and the insurance company are paying for it, they are taking a long time over it and she hasn't got the laptop back yet. She did manage to borrow her gran's laptop, which apparently her gran bought and then never used, but somehow or other, it appears that she has broken that too. Okay, she didn't break it, it just broke. We were writing together sunday evening, when all of a sudden she gave a shout because her laptop had suddenly turned itself off. She turned it back on, and it worked fine- for a few minutes. Then it did the same thing again. It has been doing that ever since, and so, even though she was ahead when it broke, and doing really well, now of course, she is behind, with no way to access what she written so far (doesn't even have a backup on memory stick or anything) and nothing to write it on anyway. I suggested handwriting it until she got the laptop fixed, but apparently she can't do that- something about it not really being NaNoWriMo without a wordcounter. Which is fair enough, I can't go three seconds without hitting word count, so she's not the only one with that. It is a shame though, because it was fun, both of us doing NaNo together. Also, I know this is a really selfish reason to be sad her laptop isn't working, but now she has nothing to do, and talks to me all day when I'm writing. I love having her up here to talk to, but I can't talk and write at the same time. A couple of hours just to write would be so nice... but then the other day I was mentally complaining that I never see anyone to talk to up here, so I guess it's a good thing really It's only today that was a problem, because I had a 3000 word target, and that is challenging even when someone isn't expecting you to keep up half of a conversation at the same time. I just about got there though, and apart from causing writing to be more difficult, it's good to chat to her I hope her laptop gets fixed soon though- no, not so I can write in peace (I'll just get up early and do it tomorrow) but so that she can do her NaNo novel again. Oh, and homework stuff too, I guess. But I know how annoying it is to have no internet- I don't want to imagine having no computer at all. I haven't had to go without my computer to write on since... my holiday last year, when I was away for a week and hadn't yet bought a laptop. But even then, I knew exactly when I would have my computer back, and that was before I started using the internet much anyway. It's weird to think that I only started really using the internet at all in the second half of last year. Maybe that was why I used to be able to write more... I get much more easily sidetracked now. |
| Well, I did write my 1000 words on Saturday after all, and my 1500 on Sunday, although both were a struggle- as, I think, today's 1000 will be. I have hit the days of 'can't be bothered' and have other stuff to do anyway. I'm going to try and do today's writing, because I know me, and once I've missed one day my motivation will half. At the moment, the knowledge that I would be breaking my so far perfect record is what keeps me writing to reach each daily goal. Hopefully soon I will get some inspiration and actually feel like writing, but for now... bleh. I don't really have much else to say... other than to complain about being freezing because they never seem to want to put the heating on in the uni housing... *wishes we had control over the heating ourselves* |
| Okay, so I've hit the 'it won't matter if I skip one day' phase... Yesterday I kind of didn't write anything, because my target was 500 words, andI wrote that just after my last entry, so technically I met my target for yesterday, despite not writing in what I normally count as 'the day'. Today, I have a target of 1000 words, and am yet to even open the document, let alone write anything. That's not to say I deffiantely won't... but probably... I should go do that now, but I don't really want to. Meh, I'll tell you whether I did or not tomorrow...On the up-side, the NaNoWriMo meet-up yesterday was fun, I think there were... seven... of us there. It was back home, but I got my Dad to come pick up me and my best friend from uni straight after our lecture, so we got there in time For my non-NaNo news of the day, I've got a couple more entries for Create a Culture, so it's up to nine so far. No where near last round's 24 of course, but it's still a decent number, and there's still the rest of the month left yet |
| I am actually having trouble believing that I've reached my second daily target. I had no inspiration at all today, and each hundred words seemed to take forever but I kept writing, even though I actually wanted to play Age of Empires, and I managed my 3000 words! I actually did think that I wouldn't manage it today, which makes it seem even better that I did- even if I only got there at twenty minutes to midnight, I still did it! Just. I'm at 7084 words now, so I'm two days ahead Which is brilliant, because I learnt from the last two attempts that however much I try, I cannot write every single day for very long, and therefore I am expecting to skip days somewhere along the line. I'm actually please I did the summer NaNo, and the practice October one, even though I failed both, because now I know what my weakness is going to be before I even get there, and can get enough of a headstart to (hopefully) stop it becoming too much of a problem. Of course, it's only Day Two, and I know at this point in my summer NaNo I was thinking it was all easy, and was ahead on my wordcount, and then I shortly after skipped three days in a row, making myself horribly behind, to such an extent that I never recovered it. But for once I'm going to try and be optimistic... helped along by the fact that my goal for Day Three is just 500 words, and I'm probably going to do that in a minute. It's the start of next week that will be tough, I think, but hopefully I will have a big enough headstart to get through that... By the way, I am very sorry that I will probably be very boring this month, talking constantly about NaNo, but it's what I'm thinking about, so any entry on anything else would probably be painfully short. Until I get fed up with NaNo and am desperate to talk about anything else, of course |
| Well, NaNo seemed to start pretty slowly, and ideas weren't coming particularly fast, so I didn't write a huge amount last night- I was too tired to do much really. It seemed a bit easier after a night's sleep though, and even though it wasn't exactly wizzing by, I was surprised how quickly I reached my target for day one- 4000 words. I knew it was an ambitious target for me, especially since I haven't written that much in one day for ages, but at least now I can be proud that I did it, as well as knowing I have a bit of a headstart (which I will need, because I know perfectly well that I will not be able to write every single day). Tomorrow's target is 3000 words, and I'll be really happy if I manage that. It also means that I can drop down to about 500 words on Friday, which is going to be a pretty busy day. I have to pack ready to go home for the weekend, then I have a lecture, and then as soon as I get home I'm going straight to a NaNoWriMo meet up party. It will probably be gone 9pm by the time I'm free to write, and I'll be exhausted, so 500 words that day is quite enough! Oh, and I solved the problem of what to call my talking goat- Fred. Yes, in a total fantasy world I have a talking goat named Fred; well, it is NaNoWriMo. Anyway, I knew it wasn't going to be all serious, because I can't write like that- somewhere along the line, a hint of comedy will creep into my writing, like it always does. I don't think I could ever write full blown comedy, but I can't cut out a hint of it, and quite honestly, if I ever did manage to, I'd get bored of the story pretty quickly. I prefer to read things that have a few comedy moments anyway, so it makes sense that I'll write like that too. Actually, that's not entirely true, because what I write isn't always what I read; I read a lot of fantasy which involves the typical epic journey on horseback kind of thing, but I've learnt from experiance that I absolutely cannot write that, at all, ever. So now I write stories where the characters stay put, or can get quickly from one place to another; like in my NaNo, where the character changes worlds simply by writing a description of the place she wants to go to. In my main series that I've been working on for years, it's more of a sort of modern day fantasy world type thing, so they tend to get cars when they want to go somewhere, which is a lot easier to skip over than a month long difficult journey on horseback. Oh, and me and my best friend are already planning our 'thank God it's over party' for if we win- as a kind of encouragement. Basically, we're going to order a chinese take away, and of we both win, we'll be really extravagent and order something duck related, which we both love, but which is too expensive for normal. Now I really want a chinese... and I have to wait a whole month for it! Well, actually, we were going to have a smaller, cheaper take away when we both hit twenty five thousand words, so I won't have to wait a whole month at all. Anyway... original point was, yay, I reach my first NaNo target! |
| There're just over two hours until NaNoWriMo starts (probably under two hours by the time I finish this entry) and I still have no characters. I'm seriously considering throwing all sanity to the winds and starting from the point of view of a talking goat, simply because the goat is unlikely to become overly important, so if I mess them up I can just switch to my real main character (when she arrives) and leave the random goat behind. Unfortunately, I don't have a name for the goat anymore than I have a name for the main character. The snacks and stuff didn't work out exactly either, because the shop was out of dip, so we'll be having pringles and chicken, without any dip. We still have the wine though Also, my best friend has remembered that she has to get up reasonably early tomorrow, so we won't be staying up writing for long. Or she won't, and I might end up writing alone in my room, because at least then I get a good start on NaNo without having to get up at a reasonable time to do more writing tomorrow. I have a posible name for my main character, also derived from sheer randomness- Kilenya. That was the name which meant 'coughing fish'. Oh, I can just see that the quality of this novel is going to be so high! But at least it should be fun to write! |
| I didn't go home this weekend, but my parents came to visit me today, and we went down to the farmers market in the high street, which was great. There were loads of free samples of stuff, and I ended up coming back with an odd assortment of things like honey on the comb, blue goat's cheese, smoked fish, and this weird dried out beef type thing (texture of leather, but tastes good kind of thing). It was great to get to see my parents even though I wasn't going home, plus it breaks the weekend up a bit, which is always good here. Seriously, weekends here are so boring! I'm going home again next weekend, so I'll just have to try and remember to get onto the internet and blog from there, since blogging everyday is part of my November resolutions. Oh, and to read everyone elses blogs, because I have been awful with that just lately- I'm very sorry about that, by the way! I'm trying to catch up a bit, but if you don't find a comment, sorry, my mind is completely out of gear right now and I'm having trouble stringing sentances together. If you could only see the typos I'm correcting as I go along.... Oh yeah, and the point was that if I don't comment, I've probably still read the entry, and thought a comment, but kind of lost the plot after that... just assume I said whatever you wanted me too I'm really looking forward to the start of NaNo, although I'm really worrying now how hard it will be to type- I seem to be making a ridiculous number of typos all of the time right now. I don't know what happened, but it's like I've lost the ability to type normally. Okay, I can guess what happened... I used to type one handed, and now I'm switching over to using both hands, but my right hand doesn't know how to type, and I have no idea how to coordinate both at once anyway. Anyway, I was talking about NaNo, not typing.... (you see what I mean, with being a bit all over the place? Or have I not mentioned that anyway?) Yeah, me and my best friend are both doing NaNo, and we're going to take our laptops into the kitchen Tuesday night so we can start writing together at midnight. We've even got snacks organised! We have chinese style chicken drumsticks (yes, we're going to have to get lots of tissue to avoid making the laptop keys messy) and crisps and we're going to get dips. Oh, and we have wine of course .I just hope she (my best friend) is feeling better by then though, because she's been kind of ill the last few days. She says she keeps getting all dizzy, and having to lie down (she's certainly tripping up a lot more than normal) which can't be good for writing... or anything else much. But hopefully that will have passed by Tuesday and she'll be feeling fine... Oh, and hopefully the bugs will have left the kitchen by then! We went in there to get tea tonight and kept getting attacked by these disgusting bugs that were all over the floor! Naturally, we both yelled and stood on chairs, and then our other housemate came in and screamed and stood on a chair too... yeah, three girls and a load of bugs is not good... Anyhow, I rambling again.... I think that was everything... *wanders off to ramble vaguely somewhere else* |
| Both yesterday and today I logged on to find a nice five star comment for Create a Culture along with a 1000GP donation A very nice surprise, especially two days in a row! So now I can feel happier that the prizes are a bit bigger, and I have a lovely five star average for the contest (the only item of mine that does have a five star average!). There are six entries now, which isn't as many as I was expecting, but there's another month to go yet, so I'm not going to start worrying about it. I don't know whether I'm getting less entries this time because I've already run it once, there's a longer deadline, or the prizes are smaller, but there were deffinately a lot more entries this far into the last round. Ah, well, maybe it won't be quite so hard to judge this time |
 The stupid log on page for the uni network keeps yelling at me because of the virus checher on my laptop being out of date- well if they didn't give me such a confusing one then I would understand how to update it!I haven't got a clue how to update this thing, and anyway, I've already got my own virus checker which works perfectly and gets all of its updates automatically- like every other virus checker I've ever owned. But no the uni only recognises their own virus checker, which gives me ten tonne of options, none of which I understand, when I click 'update'. Bah! Anyway, now that I've finished my little rant Sorry about that, but I just had to get through all the warnings to get here, so it was kind of at the front of my mind.I've just realised that today (tomorrow sort of, but it's past midnight where I am) is the last day of my practice NaNo, so I guess I won't be finishing that afterall, since I forgot about it again all week. Anyway, I should be concentrating on planning for the real thing by now! Speaking of the real NaNoWriMo, I have a problem of a rather problematic nature. My character driven novel is currently lacking even a single character. The main character is blank, and the rest aren't even solid enough to qualify as blanks! It's a weird problem for me, because I usually start with the characters and struggle with the plot- and yet I have no problems with this plot at all, other than the big blank space currently labelled with the somewhat generic term of 'the main character'. So... if any of you happen to see a stray main character wandering around somewhere, point it in my direction please |
| Apparently it's not the wine that makes me say things like 'at least I have rambling to internet on'- I am currently perfectly sober, and yet I just said to a friend that someone had been 'toasting puns' (posting tonnes)! If this is what I'm like now, I hate to think what rubbish I'll be saying/typing by the time I've completed NaNoWriMo  But I still have internet, so who cares? |
| Is it too soon to do another drunk blog? Possibly- especially since I seem to have been correcting most of my typos so far. And I didn't finish the bottle of wine, I only had half, so I'm not that drunk. Having said that, I recently typed 'smapped' instead of 'spammed'... I did correct it though! (though was originally typed as thugoh, by the way) Meh, I'm just rambling. But At least I have rambling to internet on! No... wait.... I have internet to ramble on! Yeah, that's it! Hmm, I'd better stop now, and blog again when I've not had anything to drink... it'd be interesting to do a blog entry where I didn't correct any typos at all, but I'd feel too sorry for anyone reading it to do that... I make a lot of typos, especially lately. |
| I just got back to my room and... I have internet!? Woohoo! As long as it stays. Yesterday the same thing hppened, but then it crashed again later, so I'm not going to be too hopeful yet. At the moment though, it is running, and at normal speed! *celebrates* |
| I didn't forget to blog- my internet has died. It's gone- Sunday it was slow, yesterday it was so slow that I spent over half an hour just trying to get to my blog- and then the internet crashed altogether. I think it's going to be gone all week, so I might not be making many entries this week after all. Typical. Also, sorry about being behind on all your blogs- just as I'm about to seriously start catching up, this happens- but next week I'll be able to catch up on everything properly! I don't like not having internet! |
| I'm not doing brilliant with blogging every day am I? To be fair though, I have a slight excuse in that I don't have internet when I go home for the weekend, so the last couple of days I couldn't blog. *ignores the rest of the week* I've had a good weekend for writing though, and got loads done on rewriting my novel. So much so in fact, that I'm considering taking up my practice NaNo again, even though the deadline is this Friday, and I've not really done a thing for ages, so I still have 20000 words to do. I did over 6000 just yesterday though- much as I would like to claim having written so much straight off, most of it was copied and pasted from the first draft, and just editted to make it sound better, with a few extra paragraphs and things thrown in. It was fun writing it though, so I'll probably work on it all week, even though I probably won't reach my target and I should be planning for real NaNoWriMo, which is creeping up worryingly fast. I went to my Nan and Grandad's diamond wedding anniversary party this afternoon, which was fun, and we all got to see the card they got from the Queen. As always, the family made too much food, so I came back to uni with a box full of cakes It's my dog's birthday today too! He's seven years old today I would post a picture, but I'm not good at these things, and they're all saved on the home computer anyway. Just imagine a golden retriever, but slightly shorter than usual because of being part labrador. There you go! (I'll post a pic of him another time, when I figure it out and am at home).Finally, I have decided to start doing New Month's Resolutions. They're exactly like new years resolutions, but since I normally give up within the first couple of weeks, these are a bit better for me I think. So, I'm going to write my November resolutions here now, and I can add to them over the next week or so if I think of any more. Like with most resolutions, I expect to fail almost all of them, like most people do, but at least I'll be good for the first few days of each month. So; I will blog everyday. I will win NaNoWriMo. I will keep up to date on everyone elses blogs. I will do my nephew's birth chart (it wasn't done in time for his birthday, so I bought him something instead, and this will be for Christmas now) That's enough for now. Oh, and whilst I remember to say- my nephew has just started walking! He still falls over quite a bit, but he can manage from one end of the room to the other most of the time; except for today, because he had new shoes, so someone had to keep hold of him all the time whilst he was walking. I think that's it for today... I have rambled enough! Hopefully I will remember to blog tomorrow too! |
| Okay, another one of them drunk blog things... we ordered pizza and ddrunk wine again. Except this time it was just me and my best friend on the wine, and she only had abou a glass and a half, so I drunk the rest- it was quite a strong wine too I think. Um... yeah. They said, 'oh, the pizza will be there in about an hour' and then twenty minutes later they turned up with it! Which was good, even though we hadnt't got the money ready yet, because we were hungry. We had the wrong number though, and ended up phoning pizza hut first, which was embassasing when we had to say 'oh no, we don't actually want you, sorry, we'll just hang up and phone dominos' but we had to hang up on pizza hut, because they didn't do the pizza we wanted. Plus there is a BIG student discount on domino's. Um, haven'rt wrote anything today... going to the cinema tomorrow... uh, I'm gonna go log off now... I think... catch up on blogs tomorrow morning when I have nothing to do. |
| Okay, well I logged on today to find a nice collection of blog reminders in my inbox. Ooops. Well, partly it's the fault of me going home for the weekend, and not being able to use the internet from my laptop there, since the uni network has messed up the home network. But it was also because really not a lot has happened. I haven't been writing much, more out of laziness than anything, so I will be starting that again soon. Um... what else is there.... okay, there's nothing. I've just been too busy reading The Crow to do much else- it's a really good book. I've gotten behind on reading everyone else blogs too I will deffinately make sure I catch up on everything tomorrow (not tonight because it's late, I have a lecture tomorrow, and I still need to produce 'a piece of art' for said lecture).Sorry I've been a bit absent from WDC for the last few days, hopefully my mind will return from wherever it's gone sometime soon. |
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