These are not my shoes

23,579 / 50,000 (47.2%)

Am so horribly behind on NaNo, I've developed a serious WTF attitude. Which means I've given in to the dark side of the force and am now bouncing back and forth between my novel (which I hate like I've never hated before) and several WIP-fics. Hey, at least I'm writing. On the bright side, it seems to be working to keep my juices flowing, even if I'm basically writing twice as much for half the result. Whatever.

It does mean, however, that I've currently got not one but two AtS fics that are nearly ready for beta-ing, and a good start on a Bones fic that I'm hoping to get inspired to finish after tomorrow night's eppy. Whee! One more day until Bones!

Speaking of television, Frodo betrayed me last night. Well, actually it was my traitorous cable converter, which occasionally ignores Frodo's instructions, freaks out, and switches to a completely random channel. So I TiVo'd (TiVoed?) an hour of some Spanish crime drama instead of Grey's Anatomy last night, forcing me once again to embrace the criminal element and dl the episode. Which I will be watching as soon as I'm done with this update.

In exciting fandom news, however, I found an AtS/House crossover fic by flurblewig recc'd on the Better Buffy Fics list (thank you, astridv!) that is HI-larious. No, really, it is. I laughed until I cried. Ask Mr. Sus. I turned so red he assumed I was reading porn. Go forth and read it.

ETA: Okay, that fic URL is totally on crack, but only some of the time, which is weird. Whatever. Chapter one is here.

I've been a very bad girl, NaNo-wise. Mikijean came to town for a few days and I totally blew off all of my writing while she was here. But seriously? I can write all year round, but how often to I get to spend time with my friends who live out of town? Not often. So I refuse to feel guilty about it. And then, of course, there was Thanksgiving and all the grocery shopping and house-cleaning and cooking involved therein, so I am waaaaaay behind. Oh well, bugger it. Who was the genius who decided we should all try to do this in November, anyway?

16,052 / 50,000 (32.1%)

The visit with Mikijean was awesome. I bought the new Buffy Chosen set so we watched a bunch of episodes of Buffy, plus some Firefly DVD extras, some Arrested Development (*cry*), and the first six episodes of Veronica Mars which I'd Netflixed. Plus I made her watch two episodes of Bones so she could witness the phenomenon. And I taught her knitting and she taught me quilting, so we crafted while we watched. And then austin360 came down on Sunday and we all went to Harry Potter. The movie was eh. But Cedric is teh pretty, and we all cried like babies at the end.

Thanksgiving was also nice. We had a few relatives and a few friends over. I took a break from the whole brining ordeal this year and bought a smoked turkey, which was nice. I cooked my ass off all morning and then spent the rest of the day eating and drinking. I love Thanksgiving.

Actually got to go to the Renaissance Festival today. Yay me! It was tons of fun. Got a henna tattoo (around my bicep, like Faith), ate sausage on a stick (dirty!), drank cider (mmmmmcider) and wore a flower wreath on my head all day with bells and ribbons (so girly!). Oh, and I tried out a longbow at the archery booth and rocked it like Legolas. Well, not quite, but I did hit the target a respectable number of times. Guess all that research I did on archery back when I was writing my other novel (the one that remains unfinished) paid off. Also, the munchkin got her hair braided with flowers and Mr. Sus bought himself a kilt and an awesome pirate shirt to wear with it. It's way hot on him. No, seriously. Hot.

And now I'm back home trying to do my NaNoWriMo work for the day and it's killing me because I'm tired and my brain isn't working. And I've hit sort of a wall in my story and I need to do some major brainstorming to pad some of the plot and I can't because of the tired and the brain not working. Also the cat vomited right near where I'm working which is so not cool.

So instead of writing I'm updating my LJ and waiting for the pizza we ordered to come. Maybe I'll just blow off today and spend the rest of the night watching TV and painting my toenails.

NaNoWriMo is still sucking. I worked my ass off over the weekend, and for a brief while on Saturday night and Sunday morning, some of what I was writing actually started to feel like it didn't totally blow. But I'm still going too slowly, trying too hard to write well instead of just write. Which is dumb, because for all the time I'm spending trying to write something that doesn't suck, it still pretty much sucks, so I should have just blurted out the first thing that came into my head and moved on. Except that most of the time the first thing that comes into my head sounds like it was composed by a chimpanzee with a second-grade reading level, which is why I can't bear to write it down.

And then towards the end of the afternoon yesterday I started feeling really burned out. So now I'm in this "I hate this story, I hate these characters, I don't want to write about any of it anymore" place, which is so not cool.

I think part of my problem is that at this point I've written a lot of the scenes that were firmly in my head, and now I'm faced with the bits that I'm not exactly sure how to deal with--which is the price you pay for weaknesses in your outline. Plus--and this is really bothering me--the characters are not talking in my head! Dialogue has always been easiest part of writing for me--which is why I started out writing screenplays and had to work up my courage to attempt narrative fiction. Usually, when I'm writing something, the characters are constantly chattering at me and I can usually sit down and spit out a few pages of dialogue on pretty much any subject, which may not necessarily be usable, but can be a handy jumping-off point/brainstorming session when I get stuck. Now? Not so much. These damn people have nothing to say. Or, if they do, I have no idea how they'd say it. Obviously, it's time to suck it up and do some writing exercises. Oy.

Word count = 9500/50000

And, the munchkin's home sick today, not so much because she feels sick, but because she's developed a dry, barking cough so unrelenting that no one in her class would be able to concentrate if she were there. So, yeah, not a lot of writing time for me today. But I'm taking her to the doc in a bit, and then I'll spend the day doing some of the stuff that I've been putting off and letting slide around the house while I've been buried in my novel. And maybe I'll make some time to do some writing exercises, too. Steering the Craft, here I come.

On the bright side, I got to watch "Grey's Anatomy" last night, and GA is love. (And why the hell don't I have any GA icons? Must remedy that.) Why didn't I request a GA fic for the bubbleficathon? Oh, yeah, because I requested a "Bones" fic, which is also love. *hee* Oh, and I got my assignment from the lovely em_meredith and I am tres excited! To the point that I have a huge urge to start working on it right now, which would be all kinds of bad and wrong.

And speaking of allowing myself to become distracted by fic, I'm very tempted to sign up for elvenjen4's varietypack100. Someone stop me before I hurt myself.

Day One of NaNoWriMo went off without a hitch. Managed to get my 1666-word quota done with a few hours to spare before I had to pick the munchkin up from school today. I just have to do that for the next 29 days and I'll be done!

Speaking of the munchkin, Halloween last night was cold and rainy. She was adorable, though, dressed in her butterfly costume with boots and an umbrella. And a lot of kids didn't go out so the neighbors were desperately trying to give away all of their candy.

The A Scanner Darkly preview the other night, by the way, was super cool. We were the very first audience to see it and Richard Linklater was there (along with a large posse of producers and studio folk) to watch us watch his movie. And then afterwards we filled out the questionnaire with questions like "How would you rate Keanu Reeves' performance?" It was like voting in my own personal Oscars.

I'm not gonna say anything about the movie itself, though, because I promised Mr. Sus I wouldn't. He's a huge Philip K. Dick fan and is really excited about this movie (he couldn't go because he was gaming with the boys) and doesn't want to be spoiled or tainted by my impression of it. Besides, they're probably going to change it before it's released anyway (based on my invaluable feedback, no doubt).

Yay "Bones" tonight! Yay "House" tonight! Yay the return of Fox television!

I've decided that this year I'm finally taking the plunge. That's right, I'm doing NaNoWriMo.

I'll never make it, but I figure it that it'll be a good exercise anyway. My biggest problem as a writer is that I'm so self-critical that I obsessively revise and re-revise everything I write, until I get so frustrated it's not perfect that I finally just give up and never finish. I've never perfected the fine art of the spew draft, and it's a skill I need to acquire if I'm going to see anything through to completion.

And the great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it's all about quantity over quality. So I'm going to see how much I can write, without going back and revising or starting over, or worrying about the fact that it's all crap. It's supposed to be crap and I'm just going to leave it that way! At least until December 1st, anyway.

I've got my idea, I've started my research and I'm going to see how far I get. The big problem with NaNoWriMo is that it's in November, and Thanksgiving is going to throw a major wrench into any writing schedule I manage to get myself into. But that's okay, I know it's coming so I can plan around that week. Because no one can be expected to write whilst in the midst of a turkey-induced torpor.

So anyway, if you don't hear much from me in November, that's why.