DO · pandas · like · cheesecake?

I'm falling behind on my 2,000 words per day goal, and it's not even Thanksgiving yet! (Though, considering I work on Thanksgiving and won't be going home, maybe that isn't such a problem. Not getting some of my dad's pecan pie, on the other hand, big problem there. I'll just make my own!) I guess that's what comes of having my friend come stay with me for the better part of a week? Oh well, she lives clear across the country, so it's definitely worth it. I'll play catch-up on my novel later if it means hanging out with my best bud now. (Especially if it means helping her shop for wedding stuff and dragging her to her first anime con, where we got to meet Vic Mignogna!) I'm supposed to be working on my novel right now while I have downtime at work, but I forgot to email it to myself so I don't know where I left off. Oops.

On a random note, I just found a note from January where I stated that I was participating in National Novel Publishing Month. I don't think I've thought about that since . . . January. I guess I failed at that particular goal.

I've hit the end of what I had planned, which, I'll admit, wasn't much to begin with. I really enjoyed knowing where I was going though. Maybe I should come up with a plan more often?
. . .
Nah.

So, I tried to make this 5-minute chocolate cake in a coffee mug recipe that I saw on the NaNoWrimo forums a couple of years ago? Yeah. I screwed it up somehow. Leave it to me. New York Cheesecake? Coconut cream pie from scratch? No problem. Microwave cake or instant Jello, on the other hand, I can't quite get the hang of. I think I need to stick to baking things in the oven, where they belong. Really, this is a good thing. Does anyone really need to be able to make their own, very large, slice of chocolate cake any time they want in just 3 minutes? Probably not.

I was killing time on the NaNoWriMo forums at work and started to feel sort of nostalgic for a few years go. I swear I could get hours and hours of endless entertainment on there. There was this thread in one of the forums called "If we weren't novelists" and people would post conversations or other threads where things were being discussed like, "How do I torture someone without leaving marks?" or "How do I hide a human body?" I always got a kick out of that thread. I wonder what happened to it? I used to enjoy the NaNoisms too, but not so much anymore. Now there are an awful lot of "Oh, I was IMing someone the other day and I typed-" and "I was talking to someone the other day and instead of saying what I meant to, I said-". Ok, so maybe I'm just being picky, but to me, a Nanoism is, as indicated by the name, a mistake made in your NaNoWriMo novel. While some of the things people are posting regarding, say, their chat conversations, are funny, I don't think of them so much as Nanoism as . . . well, typos. Or maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy.

I'm really enjoying this novel. Ok, so it's the beginning of the month and I haven't even gotten to the hard part yet. I know this. But so far, NaNoWriMo is going swimmingly. Not exactly as I planned, but smooth all the same. The villain, for example, is turning out way more likable than I had planned. The heroine is falling for him (how is this going to affect her relationship with the male main character once he comes on scene, I wonder?). Heck, even I'm developing a crush on the guy. However, last night I finally reached the part of the story where all of his dirty little secrets are about to come to light. Things are slowly falling into place. I ran into one snag about 800 words before I had met my daily word count, so I started asking for input from a non-writer friend. Though he normally falls back on the "I'm not a creative person; I can't help you" argument when I do this, last night he actually offered up some ideas. But only after complaining, "Hey! Don't give too much of the story away! I want to be surprised when I read it." Well, that's what you get for being friends with a writer and being the only other person awake at 5 a.m. Who else is going to give me useful input?
I hit my word count and stopped writing at exactly the point I wanted to continue most. I'm hoping that will be motivation to get to work tonight so I won't be telling someone again, "I'll get started writing after midnight. Oh. It is after midnight. Ok, I'll get started writing after about 2 a.m." Why can't my brain focus on this sort of thing during normal hours?

And trying not to skip ahead too much. I'm getting a pretty good idea of where the story is going and how it's going to get there. (Though, the closer I get to "there" the more I'll be thinking, "Oh my gosh! So many holes! What do I do?") Sometimes I really want to just jump ahead, because that part of the story is more interesting and my main character is going to be more interesting. But if I skip ahead now, I won't want to come back to this part later. And I'm trying to be realistic about this. A lady born in a historical setting is probably not going to jut her hip out and lay down the law to everyone around her. So even though the skirt smoothing and blushing and worrying about propriety isn't entirely fun, it is the way it needs to be. We'll work on that as the story progresses and she's forced to grow out of the proper little lady guise. In the meantime, I just need to make myself sit down and write. The more I write, the sooner I'll get to the fun stuff! Like finding out her charming fiance is a power-hungry, mind-reading masochist who likes to experiment on people and animals in his free time. Stumbling on his lab area is going to be fun. But first . . . skirt smoothing. It's ok. We can do this.

Another year of NaNoWriMo. Last year was my first year writing around other people, and I loved it. Kansas City had get togethers at this place called The Writer's Place that looked like a castle. I only went there a few times, but I loved it. The building was awesome, it was in a neat part of town, the people were nice. So, okay, maybe I'm mourning the loss of The Writer's Place being only about a half hour away from me. I've got friends who are doing NaNoWriMo here too, but I don't know how serious any of them are. Oh well. Even if they drop out, I've gotten through November alone plenty of times before. Which, speaking of . . . I still have a little over 1,000 words to write before I can sleep. I work nights now, so my writing time for the day doesn't start until about midnight. That's fine with me though. That's when I typically do my writing anyway. Only now I don't have to wake up in the morning for work. Sweet.
Time for me to run off and see if I can work any NaNoisms into my novel . . .

Word actually gave me this error message tonight:

"There are too many spelling or grammatical errors in "2008 NaNoWriMo1copy2" to continue displaying them. To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose Spelling and Grammar from the Review tab."

I'm so very proud. I think I'm tearing up over here. I mean, really? I didn't even know that was possible!

I'm in competition with a friend of mine to get the most words before the end of November. She went crazy on her word count and was several thousand words ahead of me, and I kind of wanted to hit 50K before her. So I've been writing like crazy. I managed to get to 47,000 after watching the late showing of Twilight last night, and then after staying up until 4 a.m., I slept in really, really late. So I woke up with only an hour and a half to write my remaining 3,000 words before I had to go to work. I was kind of freaked out about it, but in just a little over an hour (1 hour 10 minutes, maybe?) I had three thousand words under my belt. I am at 50K! Yay! Now I just have to keep the momentum going.

I work in retail, and it is absolutely mandatory to work Black Friday at my store. When my manager told me that, over a month ago, I asked her if it would be ok if I requested to work in the evening that Friday and told her I have an 8-hour drive home to see my family and that I really didn't want to have to start driving back on Thanksgiving. She said that wouldn't be a problem. Since I was the only person who requested to work at a certain time on the calendar at work (and since I requested it weeks ago), since I am the only one with such a long drive to see my family, and since my boss has other key carriers who can open/close the store if she doesn't want to, I thought there would be no problem at all with getting home for Thanksgiving.
Then I saw next week's schedule when I was working tonight. I'm scheduled to work at 8:45 Friday morning. Which means I will have to drive a 16-hour round trip and I won't even be home for 24 hours, and that I'll be leaving at somewhere around 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
. . .
Some days, it's really, really nice to be a novelist. Days like today, when I can come home and start writing my novel and brutally murder my stupid freaking manager.

This NaNoWriMo is turning out to be about as fun as having a tooth pulled. I stopped liking my novel several thousand words ago (somewhere around the same time I threw the towel in on my back-up novel), and it's a battle to make myself get in my 2,000 words every night. And not wanting to write but needing to get writing done has led to me going from writing a serious political intrigue on some nights to writing the most ridiculous word padding sort of stuff on other nights. I despair of this hunk of junk, and I don't think it will see the light of day ever again come December. I'm tempted to burn it. But, just for fun, here is a list. So far, in an effort to get to my 2,000 words, I have included:

* A Contessa who pretends to be helping out at a leper hospital so she can visit her secret lover.

* A side trip to Ireland to recruit some fairies to help out in the coup. (Since, by gosh, it's got to have Ireland in there somewhere!)

* A fairy named Miliani who, for two pages and only two pages, was a rather promiscuous alcoholic.

* An equestrian ecdysiast named Chiara.

* A few mentions of Playstations.

* A drinking game involving saki.

* A drunken game of adding "In your pants!" to the end of every statement.

* Characters shaking it to the song, "Shake It."

* One reference to the movie "In Bruges."

* One thinly veiled insulting reference to Hillary Clinton.

* One very badly disguised 3-page parable about Democrats and Republicans and what a terrible president Obama will be.

* One character explaining a very long story he told because the author has to meet her word count or "her motivational desktop background says it will show her Hagrid and Snape making out" and therefore she (I) can't be blamed.

* A few incredibly detailed random bits of scenery (tea cups, shirts, etc.)

* One dude inserted into my novel in a random, completely unimportant street fight in which he is killed. (This stems from an incident at work in which the loss prevention guy, in an effort to find out who had been stealing from the store, falsely accused me of theft to see if I was the one responsible. Since I wasn't, it all came to nothing, but I was still livid. A little pissed off about it all, I then went home and killed off a character named after him.)

* Various characters making comments like, "We'll continue this discussion when the author isn't falling asleep over the keyboard and too tired to research a name for me," and various instances of inserting "Pretend that never happened, I'll fix it after November" notes into the story.

Yippee. Totally craptastic.

(And just for the record, this novel is supposed to be set in a time period equivilant to sometime before the Industrial Revolution, so references to Playstation and stuff? They're a no-no. Oh well. I think I'm going to have Miliani's Leprecaun ex-lover make an appearance on the scene.)

I hate my novel. I don't think I've ever had this problem before. I absolutely hate and despise my novel. Venice? What was I thinking? I hate this novel. As if I haven't said that. A few nights ago I stooped to writing the most random crap in order to get my words. The next day I had to write tons of little asides saying, "Sorry, forget that happened. I'll fix it after November." I tried to be serious. Tonight I've got to write 4,000 words to catch up, and I'm back at the word padding again. So far I have:

* Added extra words in dialogue just to up my word count (i.e. "Nope, I haven't. I really haven't. So, no.")
* Added description of things for absolutely no reason other than to up my word count. (Hmm . . . let's have him drink tea so I can describe the tea cup. And the table the cup is sitting on. Oh. Spill some on his clothes so I can describe them!)
* Added a random bit of dialogue that is actually a thinly veiled insult to Hillary Clinton in order to amuse myself and up my word count.
* Have a character tell a random story with no point other than to give me something to write about that isn't my story and to up my word count.

I fail.

I am tired and getting so sick of this year's novel. (I don't remember this happening in past years. I wonder if it did and I just forgot it in the glow of winning on Nov. 30.) My second novel has totally been abandoned. So now I'm down to just the one, and it's like torture trying to write it. Tonight I finally resorted to writing utter crap. For example:

“Anastasio and Ciriaco and Alessia all made a trip to see the Contessa the next day, just because I SAY SO. However, she was having a clandestine meeting with her secret lover at the time, so she wasn’t home. In fact, though she had told them she would be there, and she had picked the time, they waited for at least an hour for her to return. Had they known where she was at the time, Anastasio would have sworn it shouldn’t take nearly so long, which would have caused a pretty darn awkward silence. So, fortunately for them, they were under the impression she was volunteering her time giving care to dying lepers at a nearby hospital. This lie only worked because none of them were aware there were no dying lepers at any hospitals in Venice. But then, no one ever claimed they were very smart. Which is probably why everyone in the entire novel keeps calling them fools.”

Ahem. I intended to get serious after that. I think, judging by the zombie graveyard comment just a few paragraphs down, I failed. Chapter 11 is just going to be one big, stinky hunk of poo. But, darnit, I will get my 2,000 words tonight!

I think I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of four days behind on my second NaNoWrimo project, and I have no idea where to take it. Probably safe to say I'm going to end up pitching that idea for now. Some day I will write it, because it will become the banned/challenged novel I've always dreamed of publishing. For now . . . I'm going to set it aside. On the bright side, my main NaNoWriMo novel is moving right along. I'm one day ahead of my word count goal, which is slightly higher than the normal 1,667 words needed for 50K. My parents do have me slightly distracted, but I can deal with it. And now, at fifteen minutes after midnight, I'm going to start hacking out my 2,000 words for today. Oooh. Maybe I'll fall asleep while I'm writing and make some funny mistakes!

It seems like nothing can make my week better after my election night disappointment. I volunteered to work a split shift today, only to find out later that my parents have decided to come visit me. Which would be great if I weren't working all weekend. I spent last night trying to figure out how to get my word count today in between work and my parents. I finally determined that I'd just do it over the five-hour break I had between shifts and devote the rest of the night to my parents (since they'll probably be leaving tomorrow morning and I won't see them until I get off work about 9:30 p.m. anyway). Then today rolls around. My manager asks me to stay an hour later, the other manager asks me to come in two hours early. (I said no, but I feel guilty now so I'm going to try to go in one hour early at least.) My five hour break has transformed into a two-hour break to eat and novel. Plus my mom just called to tell me a guy I went to school with died today. Grand. So now I'm exhausted, angry, stressed and sad. (And thinking maybe I should give up on writing two different novels this month.) One thing is for sure . . . God help any customers who walk into the store tonight. I am going to be one moody little retail worker.

(And now I stop procrastinating and write.)

The election and all that comes with it (the anxiety, the let-down when the results were in, the seething anger, etc.) have distracted me. It's ten minutes until midnight and I still have 2,871 words combined to type on my two NaNoWriMo novels before I meet my word count goal for tonight. However, anger can be a fine motivator. I WILL finish. And, Mr. Soon-to-be-President, I WILL obliterate you in fiction.

Three days into NaNoWriMo, and plodding is perhaps not the best word to use considering I'm one day ahead of schedule on my main novel. (And one day behind schedule on my second novel. It evens out, maybe?) But in any case, I'm still hanging in there and trying to pester my roommate to 50K as I go. Today I wasted some very valuable writing time by finishing a book I was reading, Looking for Alaska. Some books I read and think, "Wow. I can do that. I want to go write now!" Some books I read and think, ". . . I will never, never be able to write something so brilliant. Not as long as I live. Why do I even bother?" Looking for Alaska is the latter. I'm trying to ignore the inner voice that is telling me that and just keep going anyway. It doesn't help that as I was writing my second novel last night, I kept thinking, "This is truly terrible. I'm not ready to write this story yet. Maybe I should just write one novel this year and put this one aside for a few more years." Oh well. I will try to keep going and not to let the anxiety of the coming election overcome me. I feel like I'm watching some huge storm brewing on the horizon, and I don't know if it will just blow over or if it will contain tornadoes. In any case, I think it's best to remain calm. It won't be the end of the world. No, not even if Obama is elected.

I'm twenty-two and a half hours into November and have only 1,000 words done on my novel. I can blame my roommate for this. We watched anime during our Halloween party, and I was forbidden to start writing while we watched. So when we stopped watching at 3 a.m., I went to bed instead of getting writing done. That is a first for me. Oh well. I will catch up!

Less than a month to go before November, and there's a lot to get done! So far, all I've really managed is to make some motivational desktop backgrounds and a couple of character avatars. Yay me! Now I've got to do the stuff that's actually important. Namely, finish editing a previous novel before NaNoWriMo starts. I also want to reflect some more on this year's story, though. Plus it occurred to me tonight that I need to name my characters. Last year, I left that little task until midnight Oct. 31, when I could have been getting writing done. Bad idea. I think this year will be good though. I live in an area that's actually somewhat populous, so I have write in parties nearby for the first time ever. My roomate (and friends nearby) is competing, so for the first time ever, I can have actual face-to-face contact with someone else who is competing. And then a friend challenged me to beat her, so I've got extra motivation. I think this will be a good year.

After years of participating in multiple online writing groups, it occurred to me that I'm not anymore. I'm in only one slow-moving group now. Part of me misses the days when I could stay up until all hours of the night making stories with friends in multiple groups. Mainly, though, I think I'm glad to leave it behind me. I don't miss the drama that always surfaced with tension between writers. I don't miss suffering Mary Sue characters in silence to keep from hurting someone's feelings. I don't miss people who would bore of a storyline and bring it to a stop just as things were getting interesting, leaving characters and storyline doomed to limbo for all eternity. Yes, I've had my fill of unfinished stories. So maybe this is a good thing. Now I can focus on what is really important - my stories and my writing. So . . . good riddance! I only wish I hadn't wasted so much time.

It took me three years, but I have finally moved away from home and to the big city. A friend needed a roommate, so I quit my job with the newspaper and moved up here. My mother has since been answering questions like, "Did she go there because of a boy? What do you mean no? Moving up there without a job? She must have moved to be near a boy!" Now I am no closer to my goal of going back to school for my master's degree, but I have at least found a job - even if it is only part-time in retail.
One of the nice things about all this is the effect it's had on my writing. Something about working in newspaper just killed my will to write. I don't know what it was. I hated journalism. I hated writing news articles, and I never felt any pride in them. It feels like for the last two years I've done nothing. Well, I wrote loads during each November when National Novel Writing Month came along. But outside of November? Nada. I couldn't bring myself to do much of anything. Now that's finally changed. Retail may have terrible pay and I may starve until I find a different job, but at least I can write again! Well, sort of. It's coming back to me slowly. At first, I wanted to write, but I was hesitant to work on anything. Now I'm not writing much, but I'm doing well at writing every day, at least. It's like being a shy girl going back to her lover after years apart. Well, not that I'd know. I have the worst luck in the world where the opposite sex is concerned. (Or people in general, really. But the male species especially.) But I imagine that's what it's like.
Anyway, it's a good feeling to get back into the groove of things. Or to take the first few steps in that direction, at least.

Ok, so when I take over the world, I think I'll decree that anyone who spoils a series can just have their head chopped off. Generally, I'm pretty good about avoiding spoilers unless they pop up in odd places. (Like on the entrance page to a fan website or anywhere before the book/series has even been released.) Then two days ago I was reading comments on an anime music video to see if it got good reviews. The first comment? Asked what episode the main character died. I wanted to scratch their eyes out. But ok, I let it pass and hoped maybe, just maybe, they were wrong. I figured I would just avoid all mentions of the series online from now on until I've seen it all. Then today, my coworker mentioned the same character followed by blurting out, "Did you know he dies?" I could have killed her. Death to people who stupidly blurt out major spoilers.