How do you pluralize the last name "Devereaux"? I know that, pronounced aloud, it would just be "Dev-a-ros," but how do you spell that?
         In my NaNovel, I've written Devereauxes, but it looks so awful.
         It's a French last name originally, obviously, but they're so American, several generations in the United States, no one speaking French, and anyway, it's other people (specifically, news anchors) saying it. How do I spell it? How would I spell it in French? How would I spell it in English? Is there a standard way to show pluralization of foreign last names?
         I suppose it isn't a big deal, but every time it comes up, I take several moments to rethink it. It's taking away from the flow of writing.
         In other news, I have realized that since I never watch the evening news on television - preferring newspapers or stories online - I don't have any idea of how news anchors speak or how stories are introduced or how long a particular story might be discussed or, pretty much, anything about it. Maybe I'll make myself watch it tonight. It's sort of important to what I'm writing right now, and every piece of newscaster dialogue I've written sounds so stilted and lame.
         At least I'm writing. That's an improvement over last week. And tomorrow, nine hours on planes and in airports: plenty of time to nap and be productive both.
 

         At one in the morning, it gets increasingly difficult to spell the word "Kyrgyzstan." It doesn't help that many spell checkers don't think it's a word (including Writing.com's: the line above glares read at me. Wrong! Wrong! Sorry, it's spelled correctly). I added "Kyrgyzstan" to the Microsoft Word dictionary, but then whenever I wrote "Kyrgyz," as in the language or the ethnicity, there it was, that squiggly red line, angrily demanding that I try again.
         I used to have the spell checker turned off on Word, because it was so irritating, telling me to spell things differently or rearrange my sentences in weird, stupid ways. But I can't figure out how to do it on Word for Macs. I'm sure I could figure it out, but...waste of time.
         Anyway, my paper ended up being pretty good, in my opinion. I am almost an expert on modern Kyrgyz politics now. The only problem: I forgot to change the title.
         Whenever I write a paper, I give it a funny interim title while I'm still working. It makes me laugh a little, lightening my mood somewhat while in the throes of an intense writing session. I always change it to something more professional before the end...
         ...except last night, when I forgot, and electronically submitted a paper called "Kyrgyzstan: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same."
         Sigh.
         I guess it could have been worse. The other interim titles I had at some point during the past two days were "Bakiyev to the Future," "Race for a Kyrgyzstan" and "Kyrgyzstand By Me." Those might have been harder to explain.
         I'm bad with titles anyway. See above.
 

         Sigh. It's so hard to find the "My Blog" link now. I keep going to the spot I'm used to finding it, only to click and click and get nothing. Well, one time I clicked on "contests" instead, but it's hard to reorient myself. Hopefully I'll get used to the changes soon. When my mind isn't addled by NaNoWriMo, perhaps...
         Speaking of: I broke 15,000 words this morning, which is good. I'm two days ahead, which makes me very pleased, especially considering that I have a paper due Monday, two due Tuesday, and a proposal due Friday. The plan for today: NaNo for an hour; work on the Monday paper for an hour; NaNo for an hour; work on the first Tuesday paper for an hour; NaNo for an hour; finish the Monday paper. I am getting better about measuring out my time. Good at it? No. But better.
         Tonight is my friend D---'s birthday party, which will be awesome. I haven't hung out with him or any of my study abroad friends in quite a while (besides in Russian class, which obviously doesn't count). I am quite certain that the entire night will just be people getting plastered and dancing to crappy pop music, but I could use some of that. Just not too plastered, or I won't be much help in tomorrow's early morning writing meeting.
         But it will be really fun. I can feel it already. I might even get E--- to come with.
         I've been dreaming about NaNo, and it still hasn't helped me figure out how to show the unease my main character has when someone with her same name dies. And I keep making notes to myself in the margins of the page about things that need to be fixed in the rewrite. Is it pathetic that I'm already seeing the fractures in the story and how to fix them?
         Hey, at least I'm not trying to fix them. That's what next year (or the next, or the next) is for. Also, fixing the problem that all three of the teenage boy characters are essentially indistinguishable. Yeah.
 

         It is almost fitting: for my 450th All This Useless Beauty entry, I start NaNoWriMo anew.
         Considering how underdeveloped the idea is, it's going well so far. Chapter One, finished, comes in at 3461 words. That's long, really long for a YA chapter, but I can already see what I'll cut and move elsewhere. I'm just not doing it right now. Because that's NaNo, people. Writing in chapter one a bunch of filler that you'll move elsewhere but you need to get it out, vomit it onto the page, so that you don't forget.
         I remember writing Recommend Me a few years back: I made extensive notes, with index cards for the various events and characters. I had a stack of at least eighteen or twenty, and the night before NaNo, I commandeered the kitchen table and spread them all out, rearranging them again and again until it all fit together. I redid that several times over the course of the month, so sure I didn't want to miss anything. It worked for RM, but this novel -- I'm too embarrassed to include its stupid working title -- isn't that way. This is far from the distilled idea I had for RM. This is entirely seat-of-the-pants.
         Some people, I've heard, make big spreadsheets with all the information they want to include. Chapter by chapter, listed in order in Excel. This is sort of like the 21st century storyboard, connecting the dots and doing summations easily, so it can all be indexed later. I might need to do that in the rewrite of this novel: I need all the dates to match up. But for now, it can all just take place on generic June and July days.
         Onward, readers, to chapter two! Death before dishonor.
 

         Like a bad reality TV show, today's entry is a follow up to "riddle me this" , the "Riddle Me This" results show, if you will. This entry, then, will have all the hallmarks of a good reality TV results show: hilariously dramatic music, a visit from a B-list celebrity, lots of drawn-out pauses before the big reveal, and a slew of crocodile tears at the end. Hope you'll stay along for the ride.
         (Commercial Break: Voting in the aforementioned entry hasn't closed, so if you have yet to weigh in for your 500 gift points, drop by. I'll update the results here if more answers come in.)
         We've received sixteen responses, which seems like a lot, except when you consider that according to Summary Stats, this journal got 35 views on Thursday and 48 on Friday. Come on, lurking readers, what are you afraid of? I'm hardly intimidating...but I digress.
         Of the sixteen responses, eight people had heard the phrase "getting an MRS" before. Exactly half of the group! How definitive. Two of those eight included with their responses the caveat that they thought it was an LDS phrase, which would be statistically significant (25%) if the other responses didn't mirror the conservative culture aspect of the phrase. I suppose that its frequency in LDS circles (some circles -- it appears not to be ubiquitous among Mormons, either) is due to conservative culture.
         (Is it horrible that I laughed aloud at highly evolved 's comment that in her experience, it referred to past eras? So, so true. The percentage of female BYU students who finish four years of school doesn't scream "21st century.")
         Although the masses seem quite divided (a fifty-fifty break. Really? Not even one person to tip the scales one way or another?) I have, after this discussion, made the decision to remove the reference from my novel. I feel like it's safely established as something that isn't primarily LDS, or even primarily regional, but it doesn't seem common enough to belong in RM's teen lingo. Hopefully I can come up with something that Summer can say with even more disdain. Time to be original...

*
The numerical breakdown, if you're curious; I know I would be...
(New data added 10/26)

"Getting an MRS"
Yes: 10
No: 8

Of yes answers (region):
Northwest: 1
Midwest: 1
Southeast: 3
West: 2
Canada: 1
None given: 2

Of no answers (region):
Northeast: 1
Midwest: 0
Southeast: 0
West: 2
England: 1
None given: 4

Of LDS respondents:
Yes: 1
No: 1

Understand it despite not hearing it:
Yes: 3
Maybe: 1
No: 3
No answer: 1

By education (yes):
College: 7
No college: 1
Unknown: 2

By education (no):
College: 1
No college: 2
Unknown: 5
 

If you haven't offered up your two cents in yesterday's entry, "riddle me this" , I encourage you to do so. It helps with my novel and satiates my curiosity, and, perhaps most importantly, there are gift points to be had!

         Not that I'm a fan, but the latest Sarah Palin news: http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/10/23/palin_endorses_hoffman_in_ny-23.htm...
I just can't figure this woman out. Really. I have her narrowed down to three possibilities:
She's so inept that she sabotages her own party without knowing it;
She's blinded by ideology, so much so that Republicans aren't conservative enough for her;
She's secretly a Democratic operative who not only guaranteed Obama a win in the 2008 elections but is working to keep the House Democrat-controlled, too.

         Being partial to conspiracy theories, I like to think it's the last one. How delicious a story, right? She could be a spy in the middle of the Republican party, carefully choosing only soundbytes so ridiculous that no normal human being would buy them. (Not that no human beings seem to agree, just that no normal ones do.) It'd be a shrewd move for the Democrats.
         As some of you are aware, for last year's primaries, I re-registered as a Republican so I could vote for Ron Paul. Right afterward I switched back -- the Libertarians need my registration, you know, to keep party status in the state -- but the damage was done, I guess. My parents' house still gets mailed "District Alerts" from a local Republican group, although my dad reregistered to vote for Ron Paul too, so I can't take all the blame for that.
         Unfortunately, something that is entirely my fault is the amount of conservative junk email I get now. I've mentioned before that somehow I mysterious got on the Democratic Governors' Association listserv; I'm also, somehow, on the listserv for "Gun Alerts," "Socialism Alerts" and "Conservative Action Alerts." That a lot of alerts. I don't know how conservatives function, being on alert all the time.
         Here's the problem: if it were genuinely a "socialism alert," I'd probably be all for it. If, for instance, it were an email that gave me updates on socialist countries' abuses of citizens or violations of civil liberties, I'd probably like it a lot. Instead it keeps reminding me that Obama was born in Kenya and wants to kill my grandmother. Scary! Except that neither of those things relate to socialism.
         Next week, I'm giving my class presentation on Maoist policy and the Miao in 20th century China. Now that's what I call socialism! Maybe I should write a Socialism Alert about it...
 

         Even if you don't normally read me, I hope you'll drop in to answer a quick question. Answer in blog comments, even a simple yes or no, for my thanks and a few gift points.

         Now that I have your attention, I have a quick usage question for you. Do you understand, or have you heard before, the phrase "getting an MRS" regarding girls in college?

         This came up in today's writing meeting: in RM's "Chapter Nine"  [13+], one reader didn't understand the phrase, and the other did. I initially assumed that this must be a cultural thing, that perhaps it is an LDS turn of phrase (much like the initials RM themselves, which when spoken aloud make me think "returned missionary"), but since the other reader had heard it before, I wondered how prevalent it is.
         For obvious reasons, I need more than two opinions, so I'm asking you: have you heard the phrase "getting an MRS" before? Do you understand, for instance, the following sample exchange?

"What is your sister studying at Arizona State?"
"Oh, she's just getting her MRS."

         If this is a regional thing, cultural thing, etc., I'd rather not include it in my novel without explanation or at least a winking sort of allusion; however, if it is as prevalent as I thought it was, I'll certainly include it. It fits.
         So, good readers, tell me true: have you heard this before?
 

1601409

The Cost of Living  [GC] Martina receives an unusual proposition. By: Lorien

         Clearly, the solution to me not writing enough is just not to do anything else. Yesterday, after the midterm, I did nothing but work on this story and watch SVU. Last night after dinner, I came back and pushed through the remainder of the third section, and boom, suddenly, 2200 words later, I'm done. "The Cost of Living" (god, the title is still awful) wraps up at 9100 words. Sweet.
         Ah yes. I didn't do any studying or homework, or even start researching for my Russian presentation tomorrow, but I did conclude the very rough first draft of this bizarre story. That makes today a good day.
         It's really long and pretty strange, but if you have the time and interest to read the beginning, I'd be quite grateful. There are still a lot of things I don't like about the story yet, but they all take place in the second and third sections, and we all know I'll probably work on them instead of doing any homework again tonight.
         Yes yes. This is why I am such a winner.
 

         For the third time in four days, I've dreamt about produce shopping. Being partial to fiction, I decided to look up this topic on a dream interpretation website. I learned that "to dream that you are shopping for food and groceries signifies your hidden attempt to buy the attention of others."
         Wowza.
         Have any of you noticed me doing this lately? Or perhaps trying and failing to do this? Apparently my subconscious is a major attention whore. You be the judge:
         In the first one, Friday night, I dreamt that when I finished all my tasks at work one afternoon, my boss sent me to a mysterious downstairs room of the building where a number of hipster kids/Brown students were putting fruits and vegetables into bags, which would eventually be sold to poor people in the neighborhood. I started loading up the bags, which was difficult, because all the fruit in a particular bag had to be the same color, but on the big table, the fruits and vegetables were completely mixed up. After I had completed three bags, the overseer came over and yelled at me for putting too much fruit in each bag. Apparently I needed to be weighing the bags on a small kitchen scale. For example, he told me, some people wanted more berries than apples, hence the need for the weighing. When I pointed out that, um, that didn't make sense, he fired me from my regular job.
         In the second dream, Saturday night, I dreamt that E--- and I headed to the grocery store for our weekly food supply. All he wanted to buy were frozen pizzas and cans of those ready-to-bake biscuits, while I was analyzing prices on different sizes of whole chickens. When we came to the produce section, I saw that snow peas were on sale, so I went to get a large bag of them, though there were other types of peas in there too. A middle-aged woman with a baby was also getting snow peas, and she told me that she recognized me from the newspaper. I smiled a little and kept getting snow peas. She told me that in general she liked my opinions columns, except for the very first one, which was "awful. Just awful. And stupid." Then she dropped her bag of snow peas.
         In the third dream, last night, I dreamt that my mom and I went to the grocery store to get some apples to make a pie. This would have been easy except that the fruits and vegetables were all mixed together, not in rows like at a regular grocery store. I was digging through the grapes (to make a grape pie...?) underneath a bunch of small bags of carrots when I jerked my hand away from a weird, wormy, spidery-looking bug. A man also looking for grapes told me that I needed to be more careful digging around because I could get stung by that bug. He said they especially like to live under fruits.
         I may be weird, but at least I have excellent dream recall.
         So, faithful readers: thoughts? I don't lend a lot of credence to metaphysical, New Age claims of dream interpretation, but I do think that recurring dreams must indicate something. Something must be going on in my life that fruit keeps showing up in my dreams. I must be subconsciously fixated on something related to groceries, maybe, or shopping, or inappropriate mixing of produce. I'm not sure what it is, but I doubt it's the attention of others.
         But, then again, who am I to disagree? Everybody's looking for something.
 

         ...if people weren't so idiotic.
         I just took out the trash, down to the trash room on the first floor, and as I took the stairs back up I found myself following this slutty-looking drunk girl wearing heels and a miniskirt. When I glanced up, I realized that she was not wearing any undies beneath that miniskirt. Way more of her than I ever wanted to see.
         Yay feminism.