NaNo's going well, if a mite slower than usual. My word count, I mean - it could use some improvement, but I'm feeling pretty blah about it at the moment.
I've also taken to writing down whatever pops into my head about my stories, characters, etc. I started that in '06, with Shadows and Moss, though until now, I hadn't done it since. The irony of having only done this one thing for two stories that are both set in the same timeframe and with the same very, very basic plot (search for cure to save the Cyzargavrie) hasn't escaped me. Oddly, I tend to be humourous when I write these things. Shadows and Moss entries were very lively - more so than the current.

So because I'm bored and have nothing better to post, here's Monday's:

Saturday November 1, 2008
3:33am: Ah-ha! The sausages strike again!
Poor Baela’s confused. Why am I noticing a pattern here? In Shadows and Moss, Adan takes Nadya to one side and speaks to her about the conspiracy. In Nightmares and Cross, Adyal takes Baela to one side and speaks to her about… well, I don’t know do I? I haven’t finished writing it!
Oh, and in other news, Baela is psychic.
.
5:39pm: Mother of god, can’t I write anything without going creepy?
Oh, and I’ve put the ‘nightmares’ in Nightmares and Cross.
.
6:59pm: I seem to have intimacy issues. Every time two of my characters are left alone, something’s up. Conspiracies, getting information for unheard plots, outright creepiness and scares… geez, have these people ever heard of a *normal* conversation?

And once again a large amount of time has lapsed between my last post and my newest one... urgh. Oh well.

So I've had an absolutely insane week; an acquaintance dies, there are TWO fires in town, a relative of mine has surgery, which pretty much takes me out of the picture for most everything except RL until she's fully recovered... my latest assignment is reading The Art of Sun Tzu and marking it for relevence to myself. While spring-cleaning my room, which was last spring-cleaned sometime in the middle of last year. And fending off attacks by four-legged, aggressive, highly aggravated spiders I'd previously sucked up into the vacuum cleaner. And doing NaNoWriMo (yay!).

Yes, folks, I am truly insane.

Also, since I ordered in my demotivational posters, my room looks like an art gallery. Perhaps this has some bearing on my precarious sanity as well.

Wow it's been a long time since I last posted here! So you'd think a lot has happened (just don't even get me started on the computer issues)... well, one great thing, one good thing, everything else's been pretty dull - unless you count the nose-bleeding volume of the music at someone's 21st at the pub the other night (it doesn't happen often, but I have sensitive hearing and a tendency to want to sleep sometime before five-thirty in the morning). Oh and the uh, lawn mower race.

I swear I'm not joking.

Aye, so really, the good news is I got through April Fools and got past my word count goal of 15 000, reacing 15 307 words in total. And then did SoCNoC (Southern Cross Novel Challenge) in June, reaching 20 764 words, with 29 236 left to go. I then went on to win Zing Thing in July, so overall I'm - by my standards - a very busy writer, and a very happy little camper.

Also, I signed up for a writing class, Holly Lisle's How to Think Sideways, and it's fantastic! I didn't come into the course with many expectations - different schools I was in (way back when. Ha!) would hire authors to present a class on writing, and a few times, the English teachers themselves had a go at it (ironically enough, the only ones who tried that were published authors themselves). Those classes were interesting, but nothing actually stuck. And unfortunately, I remember virtually nothing they taught me.

Which is the reason this class just blew me away.

Besides the advantage of not being in a classroom with someone at the head of the room trying to make themselves heard over the class' usual furore, it's the approach.

Holly incorporates left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking - the muse and the conscious mind. When I go to work on one of the lessons, I'm not sitting down making a list of whatever I happen to think would fit the story. I'm actively evolving it, I'm involved in it.

These plans are something that I actually can (and do) care about, because unlike the approaches I've been taught in the past, and the approach I've been using up until now, it's creative rather than analytical. I've learned that intuition really won't ruin my story - and I've come to realise that the biggest thing I've been doing wrong, was I wasn't feeling enough, I wasn't identifying with the stories I was working on. And I honestly believe that was why I've failed to turn so many great ideas I've had into stories which worked out. I was enthusiastic about the ideas, but I wasn't really... hm... relating to the characters or storyline in the way I needed to. I'd lit a fire in the fireplace, but I'd neglected to remember the wood.

For most people, that would be a redundant statement, but for me... well, it's an eye-opener. And it's only up to Lesson 5! I've been having fun with this new approach (clustering in particular), and I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of it brings.

I did a stupid, stupid thing last night. Purely by accident, of course, but somewhere between 500-1000 words have now vanished forever from my Word file. I have no idea how - I accidentally pressed a few buttons, and it magically deleted the first quarter of the chapter. I also lost the last few lines of my previous chapter, but since I'd only just finished writing them, they were easy to replicate, with the original wording intact.

Still irks me though.

Also, my bedroom has been invaded by spiders - one on the bed, one each side of the bed, and one fell out of my nightie when I picked it up. I think maybe they're trying to tell me something. Like don't try to get some sleep. I've been obliging them, mostly because I don't have any choice in the matter.

However. Data losses and spiders aside, my word count is lookin' pretty darn good. My story... does sort of lack a coherent plot at the moment, but I'm getting there. As soon as I re-write the beginning and then finish off Chapter Five, I'll at least have tied together some threads. Also, I've upped my word goal. I'm just writing too efficiently to keep 10k as my goal - I've been averaging over 1, 00o words per day, and I've signed up for a consistency challenge at the 1, 000-word-per-day level.

Of course, my main problem is that I write like mad for the first few days, then the stress of RL creeps in and I can't write anything else for the rest of the month. Hopefully I can stop that habit with the challenge. The world needs more challenges.

However, so far I've had to deal with irate husbands coming back from the dead to rescue their spaced-out wives from state-sanctioned medical experiments, even though the character in question's being saved from the experiment means she can't escape herself when it's half-way through and go on the war-extending rampage-like thing that would have made her the villain of the piece.

I've also been afflicted with a crazy ex-mercenary who thinks he's Frank Spencer.

So here's the word count:

6,212 / 10,000 (62.1%)

Now I remember why I love writing: the sheer euphoria after hours of grinding your fingers down to bone and the keyboard down to dust, the lovely comments when you've done something right, and the helpful CC when you haven't!

... plus it doesn't hurt that I put good music on when I write!

I have been writing for the April Fools writing competition (pick your own goal - it's fantastic - means you can up your goal if you start to look like reaching it) since 12:01 exactly. I wrote for two hours and thirty-one minutes, and I have two thousand, one hundred and sixty-six words.

Yes, those figures are exact. No, I don't have a life, why do you ask?

Better yet, the music I was listening to (Velcra's new album, Hadal) arrived today - two days' shipping! Priority, of course, but I got them from Finland - and I'm lucky if parcels from my own country take two days to deliver, never mind the other side of the world! Plus, they were really cheap to buy - one CD in Australia costs about $30, two is roughly $60 - Hadal and Consequences of Disobedience, along with shipping, cost me only $37!

So all in all - fantastic day. It can only be improved with some Pepsi Max and further watching of Babylon 5 Series 2 (also newly arrived) and Farscape Season 3 (Crais is not dead, I swear!).

... at some distant date in the future, an archaeologist of some technological variety is going to dig this blog up and wonder how the heck anyone could survive thinking like this...

Shadows
Shadows of fanblades flash by, and I remember only him. Sitting with his feet propped on the table, chewing the end of a pencil, intent on a crossword puzzle. I’d tease him about being an old woman, and he’d playfully jab at me with his pencil.
Sitting with my head thrown back against the hard wooden chair, watching the fanblades go round and round, shadows dancing on the ceiling, passing oh so quickly… wondering if this is life. Because he died today, ribs crushed under the wheels of a car. Honda Civic. He was only twenty-nine.
And I’m still here.

Them
What will they be like, a hundred years from now? Looking back on us with a smirk, us and all our modern pretensions. What will go through their minds when they read our literature, our holy books, our lives – like sport to them, as it was to us, or will humanity change and overwhelm?
Because I can’t help but wonder if our habits will apply to them, or if they will overcome them. Or if, more likely, they will take the worst of humanity and set it spinning to excess. We all know the tales and the precedents…