Minor victory

I totally won the word war I mentioned in my previous blog. I'm eagerly awaiting my prize of unspecified chocolate, which may have to wait until after Thanksgiving Break, because she's really busy.

In other news, I probably won't be writing any more until Thanksgiving Break. Lots of assignments have come up, and although I've knocked a fair bit out of the way today, there's still a lot to do.

I did a homework assignment and a quiz for my Information Security class. Although not very difficult, those were time consuming and involved looking up a lot of facts. They made my brain tired. I texted my writing friend to complain, but she just told me to get to work and quit moping. It was good advice.

Then I started reading A Stone of Hope, which I have to read and write a paper on by Tuesday. I'm not worried too much, I started the last book the day before and still got done. Using online summaries, I wrote up a basic outline with some simple ideas for the paper. I'll flesh that out as I read, which will help because I can skim through a lot of the material.

I also learned Python today. And by that I mean I've never looked at the language before, and I am now nearly as competent in it as I am in C++. I picked it up in about six hours. I'm not some crazy fast learner, or anything, Python is just that awesome. It brings me back to my high school days, when I was first beginning to program, learning QBASIC and enjoying every minute of it. After a few hours of stressing out over all the work I need to do, it was an excellent way to relax.

The pressure is still on, but looking back at all I've done today, I feel confident that I'll be able to get everything done. Go me.

Thirty-three Thousand

I like that alliteration. It's cool.

Ok, so it took me a day longer than I had planned. But I broke past thirty thousand. Then I pressed on for another three thousand words after that. I'm caught up with NaNo! Well... I'm three words behind, technically, but screw you, I'm caught up!

One of my writing friends challenged me to a word war last night. We're racing to see who can get ten thousand new words first. She got five thousand before she went to bed. I've just written seven thousand. She'll probably write the rest of hers before I even wake up tomorrow, but maybe, just maybe, I can win this thing.

The winner gets chocolate, so I'm super-motivated. I'm half tempted to press on and get the last three thousand right now, but I'm far too tired and my story has reach a sort of boring point where it just feels natural to stop and take a break. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Twenty... erm... two thousand words

Ok, I'll admit it, I've been slacking off quite a bit on NaNo. Yesterday I had an excuse (had to write a paper for class), but the weekend I had mostly open, and all last week I did a lot of sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, I was kind of down, but I shouldn't have let that slow down my writing, especially since writing is fun and would have made me feel better.

But whatever, that was then, and this is now. I've only got about twenty-two thousand words, which means I'm behind. But I'm not too far behind. And given the pace I've shown I'm capable of in the first week, I can still totally do this. So tomorrow, when I get out of class, I'm going to sit down, open up my computer... and check Facebook. But after that, after the Facebook, then I'll eat lunch. At some point I'll do some writing. My goal is to hit thirty thousand words by Thursday night. That's an average of four thousand words a day in the next two days.

I've got some cool action scenes coming up in the plot, and action scenes write easy, so as long as I sit myself down and make myself write for a few hours a day I shouldn't have too much trouble. I'm going to try to do extra tomorrow, because my Thursdays are usually pretty full. I just have to remember to take some time out to study for an exam next week.

I think I'm going to try to push myself to keep writing daily after NaNo ends. Even just an hour a day, without worrying about wordcount, just to keep me moving throughout the year. I'm not sure how I'll convince myself to do this, but they say that it takes only twenty-one days to get yourself into a new habit. I think I'll spend December pushing myself to write for an hour a day (trying for the same hour every day, maybe 10pm when I'm usually not doing anything). If I can keep it up through December, then in theory it should be easy to keep it up indefinitely.

I'd start the habit-forming now, but for two things. One, starting at the beginning of a calender month gives more of a feeling of structure to the attempt. And two, I foresee a hectic, inconsistent pace of writing through the rest of NaNo for me, which would detract from the attempt to make writing regularly a habit.

I've got two stories competing for my attention after NaNo. One is about a really cool pair of characters that I was eager to write a month ago. The other is a newer idea, much darker with dozens of characters and a much more epic plotline. I'm not sure which I'll start on, but I think it'll be the pair of characters I've already done some planning on. The epic story will have to wait, but in the meantime I'll probably do some idle planning for it. Hopefully I won't lose interest, as I've done with similar stories before.

Twenty Thousand Words

It's the end of the first week of NaNoWriMo, and I've made it to twenty thousand words. Quite an accomplishment, and I've still got hours left to write tonight.

My goal for the evening is twenty-five thousand words, but I'll be content if I fall a couple of thousand words short of that goal. I was hoping to push for thirty thousand, but I've already lost the race to thirty thousand against my writing friend so I'm not really motivated enough to push myself that hard. Twenty-five thousand would be a fantastic finish to the first week, halfway to the ultimate goal in a quarter of the time.

Week two is the dreaded "why am I doing this" week, where productivity drops and motivation plummets. I think I'll be bothering several friends to do write-ins with me over the week, to keep me going.

Onward, to victory!

So...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if someone consistently does not talk to me, should I not make the assumption that the person in question simply does not want to talk to me?

It's been bothering me a lot, lately. There are several people who act like they like me, but then they never actually talk to me. If we run into each other on campus or if I say something to them through Facebook they'll be friendly, but they'll never initiate conversation. And that's really annoying. If someone rarely hangs out with me, never initiates conversation, and seems distant and unresponsive whenever I do talk to them, then I think it's fair to assume that this person just doesn't really like me.

I may have to do some editing on my Facebook friend's list soon.

NaNo Update

NaNo was going well, but now... not so much. I'm not behind on my wordcount yet, but only because I got so far ahead in the first two days. Yesterday I didn't write at all. I was going to, but then the friend I had hoped to write with was too busy, and another friend came over and distracted me, and... I dunno, no writing got done.

Now I've lost all my momentum, and building it back up won't be easy. I'm going to try to write tonight, but I'm not really sure I'll be able to motivate myself. If I do manage to get going, I'm hoping to hit ten thousand words before bed.

Wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo has begun!

The first day of NaNoWriMo has come and gone. I thought I'd celebrate by finally making the blogging switch over to my actual Google account instead of the temporary one I've been posting from.

The day went well. I procrastinated through most of the early afternoon. And most of the late afternoon. But by about seven-thirty in the evening I kicked my butt into gear and started writing. Got in a good thousand words in an hour.

What really boosted my wordcount, though, was the small writing party I had at the library with a couple of other NaNoers. We gathered around a table at nine o'clock, and for two hours we sat typing furiously at our keyboard. Each of us added about two thousand words to our wordcounts during that couple of hours. Also, my story now randomly contains a Grue, thanks to a conversation near the beginning of our gathering.

So I typed a total of three thousand words into my favorite text editor today. Nearly twice the actual goal of one thousand, six hundred sixty-seven words-per-day. And that with several hours of procrastination! If I can get my butt in gear more often on the days my schedule is empty, I might just push this story well past fifty thousand words and into the range of eighty thousand.

Hanging out with fellow writers was great fun, too. They sound like they have interesting stories going on, I can't wait to read them after all is said and done.