5 posts tagged “novel”
Well, first of all, I'm nearly done with my qual. Go me!
Second of all, I am still sick. The flu turned into the awful stuffy sneezes which turned into the coughing which turned into the sore throat which turned into the loss of voice and I have no idea what's coming next but it's gotta be something like broken bones or whatever. I get the feeling that this illness is not afraid to take the nuclear option. Anyway, Mom and Dad, I know you read this -- I'm not going to call until my voice come back; sorry.
Right now, my roommates are camping for a Wii outside a Best Buy somewhere in the outskirts of Portland. I'm excited. I just want to play "Twilight Princess" until my arms fall off is all. Of course, we've run out of cords and plugs (we have a PS2, a PS3, a Super Nintendo, and an Xbox 360) and therefore we're going to have to decide on something to unplug -- we've already benched the PS2, which is a pity because we don't have adapters for the memory cards yet and that means that when I finish my qual I can't celebrate by playing FFXII or FFX. Hopefully, they'll actually get a Wii -- the Target we called earlier sold out in 26 minutes -- and since I don't play anything on the PS3 or Xbox 360 I won't care what they unplug. Although, I guess we have Lemmings on the PS3, and the Xbox is really only good for Halo 2, which I am absolute shit at. So.
Lastly -- this semester. Lots of reading. I discovered, qualling, that I am indeed ready to go back to school, that I can indeed put in work in six-hour stretches like I need to during the semester. I'm pretty sure that's great.
I want to write more of my novel. With qual worries and a multitude of distractions, I've barely looked at it since November. I think that school starting again will be my cue to bring the novel off the back burner, try and get a couple hundred words every day. Since I know I can write upwards of twenty pages in a day, no sweat, and have them even be moderately readable, that ought to be a piece of cake. (Ought to be.)
Okay. Back to the qual, back to the grind.
does any photographer that i know want to take photos of me in my halloween costume some sunny day?
i'm really proud of it, and it's pretty much done, and i want to be able to put it online with project notes. i think i might be (gasp!) getting into costuming. i just am afeared that this is going to turn into cosplay, which is a little geekier than i think i'm prepared for.
waugha! but... if i grow out my hair, i'll be able to do so many cool things!
1. how did "the sweater song" become the song that one sings, raucously, while sloshed? well, that and "avenue q."
2. why do i immediately not feel like writing the story that i have been restraining myself from writing the instant i finish the research on it? this happens every damn time. i think it's nervousness. but it's a first draft: it's allowed to be the crappiest thing on the planet, as long as i finish it by new year's or preferably december. so i need to just do it! yargh.
3. why isn't the sports center open until noon on sundays? it makes no sense. i never feel like exercising after ten a.m., and i would have totally gone in for a run, but now i suspect i'm just going to yell at tim & allie about where the second season of "dark angel" is and sack out on the couch watching it. the slow atrophy of my leg muscles is entirely the fault of the sports center. i swear it is.
4. but back to the story thing: why is it so difficult for everyone, literally everyone, to restrain their inner editor when writing a first draft? it would almost be freeing. almost. but the thought of showing someone my unedited words makes me sick, and i know that if i leave my personal editing for later, i'll just end up either wanting to scrap the whole thing or not editing it at all because i have some bizarre mental image of the "perfect story," which i have obviously achieved. basically what i'm saying is that i'm bad at letting go of perfectionism. well, we all know that one.
5. as much as madonna sings about "beautiful strangers," why don't i ever meet any beautiful strangers? or at least any beautiful strangers that, you know, talk to me. of course, i'm probably at least one person's beautiful stranger who didn't talk to them. i'm willing to bet.
6. why have my roommates suddenly all become addicted to world of warcraft? why does world of warcraft suddenly seem appealing to me? why do i have these incredibly bad ideas, like getting world of warcraft, when in reality i have so much work that my head ought to explode first? how in god's name does tim find the time to play world of warcraft when he has a double-freaking-major and he's supposed to be starting his first thesis next semester? he's qualling too, gorrammit! he should be at least as stressed as i am!
7. this list has become entirely self-indulgent, which i suppose is the point of a blog, but.
so, i have to suggest the program that's done most for my developing the story i've been working on: voodoopad.
basically, this program creates an in-house wiki for you -- but it's a wiki the way it should be, where you can easily define what words will link to what pages and switch between the pages. it can export in eight different ways and it can import just about anything you want. this is seriously the most useful little program in the world. why?
okay, have you ever tried writing a story that required a lot of world building?
no, seriously. you know what i mean if you've ever tried to write epic fantasy or historical fiction. there are all these bit parts that you can't remember anything about; you just know their name. so then on page 10, mr. forgettable is black and has an armenian accent, but on page 137, he's white and speaks only french. no one notices, you look like an idiot when someone finally does notice -- or worse, you've pinned two separate plot points on him being french and him being armenian, and then you have to go back and screw with the whole story.
or culture. i can't remember what each district of rome was like! but if i need to send my characters to a place where there's lots of shopping, i can look up my map of rome and discover that velabrum had the biggest shopping district but subura would be the place m. caelius rufus would most likely hang out in the evenings, especially in his wilder youth. to quote paris hilton, "that's hot."
anyhow, this little doohickey is worth every penny i spent on it ($30 so i could have more than 15 pages), let me tell you. i am never going to have binders and binders-worth of stuff sitting around in my room, aging, again. i'll even be able to use it when i'm storytelling (in roleplaying games. it's like being a dungeonmaster. shut up, i'm a geek, this is no secret.)
What is your earliest memory?
Submitted by Megan.
i remember being about three or four years old. we still lived in lincoln, ne. i was bothering my father to play with me (i was an only child) but he was balancing the checkbook. he said, "in five minutes." so i went to the other room and loudly counted "ONE -- TWO -- THREE -- FOUR -- FIVE," because (a) i thought maybe i could fool him and (b) i didn't really know how to figure out what five minutes was.
----
in other news, i really think this historical fiction novel i was talking about is going somewhere. maybe somewhere big, somewhere worth going. i haven't figured out quite yet what its heart is, you know, what its point is, but i've got a damn good story. and it's even pretty closely within the bounds of history; i love it when characters just disappear from our knowledge of history and you can therefore do what you please with them, as long as it doesn't involve starting world wars or anything!
i'm slightly leery of reading sylvia's play, now, though, because it kind of is talking about the same exact time period that i'm writing about. when i've got my first draft down, maybe i'll read it, just to see what she did with it.
also, i'm channeling a bit of prospero in parts ("now i'll drown my book --") and i'm not sure how i feel about that. that is, i'm not sure whether my main character really would behave like i have her down as. guess we'll have to see.
