I DID IT!



I wrote 3000 words today, and also finished most of a bottle of wine (beautiful, beautiful wine). And it's not even LATE yet.

I remember, in 2003, when I hit 50k, I was SO PSYCHED, had to take a brisk walk up the hill (wearing the very same sweater I'm wearing at the moment, now that I think of it -- weird). But then in 2004, even though I made it to 50k in time, I felt very "eh" about the whole thing. Like, eh, that's over, and eh, my ending sucks, and eh, whatever. (This is probably a byproduct of the fact that I was very much a Disillusioned Teen at that point.)

This year, instead of forcing out a terrible ending, I just kept writing until I hit 50k and stopped, mid-scene. I mean, I know I need to revamp the entire book anyway, so why bother finishing the ending? I got TO the ending, anyway, so it's not like it's a mystery.

And, I'm pretty damn happy with myself. So, I'm gonna finish this bottle of wine, and watch Lost on Netflix, and knit, and sit here being proud of myself, trying not to think about what an enormous piece of absolute shit I just produced.

So, here I am. Three days of NaNo left. More like two, actually--I work until 11pm on the 30th, so it would be a REALLY good idea to have the novel done before I leave for work that day. (For some reason, validating my wordcount on the website and getting the associated goodies is actually something that matters to me, even though I think it shouldn't.)

And I'm on track. I broke 45k yesterday, and now I just need to keep going and get that last 10% of the novel out. I don't expect I will actually get to the end of the story, but it kind of doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, because I realized somewhere around the 30k mark that the story I've been writing all month is only one thread out of at least three and possibly four that make up this story as a whole. In fact, I suspect almost everything I wrote this month will get thrown out as I figure out which scenes require different PoV characters, etc. etc. etc.

Oddly enough, I don't feel bad about this, even though I've worked my butt off trying to get these words written. I'm learning the shape of the story, and what it needs, and how to make it stop crying when it wakes up in the middle of the night, and which foods make it spit up, and I've got its dirty diaper schedule pretty well memorized. (Yeah, I know we use childbirth metaphors for writing a lot, but nobody ever acknowledges the dirty truth.)

So, all in all, I'm in pretty good shape! Just . . . I'm gonna whine now.

( You can skip this, if you want )

Not only did I get to 25k the other night, but I finished the next day slightly ahead, and today I've built up my lead so that I'm only about 500 words behind tomorrow's wordcount goal, with a wordcount of 29,537. It would actually not have been very hard to get that last 500 and get to 30k tonight, which would be pretty cool, but I'm very tired, and I think that being SO CLOSE will give me more motivation to write tomorrow before work (which is something I find difficult, on the days I work 2-11.)

I am so proud of myself for not wasting these three days I haven't been at Walmart. (I had two days totally off, and then today I worked for the newspaper, which is barely work at all. Except for the getting up at 7am part.) Basically, I'm awesome!

. . . well, not that awesome. Because, oh God, my novel is bad. It's bad, bad, bad . . . not fit for fertilizer. I'm really glad it's getting written, but God, I'm going to have some serious excavation to do to pull the very few diamonds out of this pile of stinking shit, once November is over. (I recently compared November to a month-long bowel movement. Which is a disgusting metaphor, but isn't it true, you guys?)

Now, I have to try to get myself to go outside and look at the meteors. I know if I do it, I won't regret it, but it's COLD outside, and not particularly warm in the house, so I'm worried that if I go out there, I won't be able to warm back up before bed.

Ah well. Suck it up, Emma!

Spent my day hanging out on a sheep farm! There was much knitting, and wool talk, and some sheep wrangling. (I held the clipboard to record which sheep were getting sent to slaughter. It was a little bit sobering, but I am determined to not to be a meat eater unless I'm willing to look my dinner in the face first, so . . . yeah.)

And now, it is time for NaNo! I'm hoping to hit 25k today, since it's the halfway point, and I feel like if I can reach the halfway point on time, I can reach the end on time. And I'm at the point in the story where we get the big scene that is the transition between the first and second halves of the story, which should be full of drama and hopefully easy to write.

The only pitfall I can see is that suddenly we're moving into a part of the story where the nine-year-old who's been my point of view character so far will not likely be present for many of the scenes I want to write. (I can use "In Space" to fudge a lot of stuff about this story, but I'm pretty sure that even In Space, children aren't generally present when their custody, for example, is being discussed.)

But, I also don't really want to abandon her as my PoV character, because . . . I mean, it's been pretty much 25,000 words, and that's an awfully long time to go before suddenly breaking PoV. Especially since there's no other character I'd want to commit to for the second 25k; the nine-year-old does need to come back for it. If I didn't need her later, I could see dividing the book into two parts and having a different PoV character for each.

As it is, I will just have to be creative about what I show and don't show. Fortunately, she is a pretty nosy nine-year-old. I already have her overhearing conversations and spying on things. I suppose she will continue that way. It is freaking hard to have a child as your main character, guys! Orson Scott Card got away with it in Ender's Game by making an entire society full of autonomous children, but if you're working in a world that's full of adults, there's not a lot kids can do. But my girl is determined to do it anyway.

I suspect that this is exactly the sort of thing you're not supposed to worry about during NaNo, but if I don't feel good about the story, then I don't enjoy writing it, so I need to make sure I'm comfortable enough with the format (if not the content) that I still feel it's worth carrying on.

I sort of love my life right now. I mean, there are parts of it that really suck, but there are also a lot of parts that are really fantastic and irreplaceable. And several of them are things that are completely unique to this particular place and time--I couldn't get them anywhere else. To wit:

A) The Doghouse Espresso, the little coffee shop on Main Street, is pretty much my favorite place in the world these days. I'm so comfortable here, and my brother makes me amazing coffee, and it's just such an unmitigated pleasure to spend my free time here.

B) My brother, period. We're living together for the first time in about five years, and it's been so wonderful developing a relationship with him now that we're both sort of adults. Honestly, it would be pretty miserable living where I do if he wasn't there. We share enough interests to be able to spend quality time together, and we're different enough that we challenge each other--it's basically exactly what you'd look for in a friend. Joe's introduced me to espresso--like, how to really appreciate good espresso, and also to good beer, and also to good music. Meanwhile, I've been lending him pretty much my entire Neil Gaiman collection and am getting him started on Diana Wynne Jones soon.

C) Beer! We have a local brewery that focuses on high quality, small batch beer that is pretty much earthshaking. I don't get up there as often as I like, but my brother does, and often brings some home to share.

D) My current Internet community. I was worried for a little while after I graduated from college that after spending so much time sort of disconnected from everything except LiveJournal, I wouldn't have much an Internet community to turn to after I was away from college. But it turns out, I'm surrounded by a rich, beautiful community of people I like, who entertain and support me. Twitter has been a huge help in that; I feel like I'm having little miniature conversations with people all day long.

E) NaNoWriMo. We're far enough into November now that NaNo has become a way of life--if I'm not working, I'm either writing, or (more likely) feeling guilty about not writing. Either way, I'm thinking about it constantly, plotting about how to find writing time (and motivation). My novel is complete tripe, but, well, at least it's getting written. (Although I'm quite behind. Sigh.)

I'm gonna brag, guys--I totally pwned at NaNo yesterday. I woke up early and dragged my computer over into bed with me and wrote 1000 words before I'd even stepped out of bed. Wrote another 800 works between visiting the coffee shop and my lunch break at Walmart. (I'm especially proud of successfully writing about 500 words during my Walmart shift.)

I also found time to run a Peace Corps-related errand in there. And I worked until 11:30. And when I got home, our Internet wasn't working (I suspect it still isn't), so I couldn't get on and brag! Very sad.

The problem is, I have to do the same thing today. Also, I am still behind, if you're figuring things at 1667 words a day--but my spreadsheet tells me that if I write 1722 words a day, I'll be fine. And I'll give it another big push on my next day off, which is Thursday. This month is anything but a sure thing, since I'm all over the place, productivity-wise, but I'm basically too damn stubborn NOT to win.

Now my lunch break is ending. Time to get back to the proofreading!

I'm doing NaNoWriMo again! I missed it a lot while I was in college, so this is VERY EXCITING for me. Unfortunately, since I have Twitter now, it's led me to neglect the LJ (whereas, before Twitter, NaNo would have sparked Much Posting here). Ah well.

Anyway, I just wanted to stop in pat myself on the back for everything I did today. I got out of bed by 9, and I had a marathon and wrote 1000 words in an hour, which at least twice as fast as I normally write, and then I hurried down to Montrose, got a polio vaccination, and ran three other errands all in time to show up at work by 2pm. Also, I wrote a couple hundred words on my lunch break.

So, my wordcount is behind, but I don't really feel bad. It was a full day. Trouble is, tomorrow I have to get up do it again--I need to get 2000 words at least before I go to work at 2. I think I will sleep now!

Stolen from deadvole!

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

I'm not very good about posting here anymore, am I? You should probably blame my awesome friends, who hear most of the ideas and stories I have to tell via instant messenger, which means I'm not left with a strong urge to write about them here on my LJ. Also, when I'm not stressed out, I have less to process here.

Anyway, I feel like I should record the information that I am now officially a Sales Associate at Walmart in the Jewelry Department. I have . . . mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I need the money very badly. (Living on $200 a month all summer was . . . interesting.) And my coworkers in the Jewelry Department are all quite pleasant and fun. In fact, the work atmosphere is surprisingly pleasant, at least on the human end.

But then, you've got the corporate end. And that's not so fun. I've had to sit through hours and hours of what they call CBLs (computer-based learning)--it's basically a Powerpoint slide narrated by a very bored voice actor, with a quiz at the end. Some of them are to convey important information (like how to pierce ears or operate a cash register), but a lot of them are just corporate policies for convincing the employees that Walmart cares about them. For example, they REQUIRED me to go in and work up a 'career plan' for my time at Walmart. Sam Walton said, "You don't have to leave Walmart to change careers." . . . seriously, the rest of my life at Walmart? I would rather stab my eyes out.

Then there's the obvious downsides, like spending eight hours inside of a Walmart. Brr.

( What's going on in the rest of my life, in list format )

I'm trying really hard to relax my perfectionism for this finals period--I knew that I would only survive if I managed to stop torturing myself over every sentence. I made a conscious decision that "good enough" would just have to be good enough.

Only . . . it's really, totally not working.

You guys. I just found myself wrangling a sentence, getting increasingly more frustrated and bogged down. My problem? The original draft of the sentence had read, "a typically Python-esque escalation," and I thought it sounded awkward to have '-esque' and 'escalation' right next to each other.

I HAVE GOT TO GET OVER MYSELF. Yeesh!

At least this is the last one. I'm on page 1 of 10, but when it's done, my college paper-writing ordeal will be over forever!

I wanted to share an example of how majoring in Classics has seriously modified the way I experience the world.

So, after discovering Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, I went into serious immersion. I watched it several times, and I listened to the soundtrack over and over again. And . . . the things I think about while I listen to it are not the things I would have thought before studying Greek and Latin.

The most obvious example is at the end of the song "So They Say". If you haven't watched Dr. Horrible and you'd like to see what I'm talking about, it's the first song on this section. (Spoiler warning: that's the last part, so if you plan on watching the first two, be warned. Actually, this whole discussion will be spoilery, though.)

Billy (aka Dr. Horrible) and Penny sing a few lines in duet, and I find the way they construct their sentences very telling. The lines go as follows . . . some of the words they sing are the same, and some of them are different, and the differences are important.

Penny	Billy
There's no happy ending	There's no happy ending
So they say	So they say
	Not for me, anyway.
Should I stop pretending?	Stop pretending.
Or is this a brand new day?	Take the chance to build a brand new day!

(I hope the table works okay. It's been ages since I've had to use one. I'm surprised I still remember how.)

At this point, Penny is sitting alone in the laundromat, where she and Billy usually get together to hang out, clearly disappointed that he didn't show up. Meanwhile, Billy is locked in his mad lair, missing the chance to be with Penny because he's so bent on plotting destruction for her new boyfriend.

So, look at the last two lines. Penny is in doubt. She thinks this should be a good thing, but she doesn't feel it. And her language reflects that. She uses questions--this is a good thing, isn't it? Should I stop pretending that everything is going to be wonderful and take the next best thing?

Meanwhile, Billy is changing, from the sweet, good-hearted, but rather ineffective villain he was in the beginning, to a more hard-hearted, bitter, and dangerous villain. His language indicates that as well--he's speaking in imperatives. Stop pretending. Take the chance. He's both exhorting himself to do something that's against his nature, and becoming a more assertive character, less of a push-over.

This is a far cry from his language in the first song, "My Freeze Ray", where he literally can't make himself speak. ("Wanna say / Love your hair / Here I go: / [incoherent mutters] . . . mumbling.") As Billy undergoes a transformation as a character, he undergoes a linguistic transformation as well. (Also related: in the first scene, Billy is practicing his evil laugh, and it's pretty pathetic, and very sweet. At the climax, after this transformation, Billy lets out a very long, impressive evil laugh.)

And it's so artfully done, too, because Penny's self-doubt is intertwined with Billy's growing resolve--they balance each other perfectly.

. . . anyway, yeah. I probably should turn that urge to analyze things back in the direction of my theses, but . . . it's sure more fun to analyze things that are so much fun.

My favorite thing about Aristophanes is that you can pull all of this super-serious stuff out of him--literary analysis, political commentary, you name it. But it is always, always laced with cross-dressing or fart jokes.

This is why I would pay huge amounts of money to see Monty Python performing Aristophanes.

(It appears that this year, instead of freaking out about finals and getting really stressed, I'm just making excessive amounts of relatively calm LJ posts instead. Is that really an improvement? Who knows. If you guys want to take me off your default view until next week when I'm less caffeinated, I'd understand. I'd be sad, but I'd understand.)

I'm starting to revise my short story for my Fiction portfolio. (I was going to write my Latin paper tonight, but I was sick of not getting anywhere. I'll finish this tonight and then do Latin tomorrow.)

Anyway, I'm looking through my stuff from the workshop (if you're not familiar with the workshop format, basically everybody got a copy of my story, read it, and--theoretically--wrote me a letter and handed it back along a corrected copy of the story), and there's this one copy I got back that both cracks me up and makes me wince. It's from one of the girls in the class I actually like a lot, so I'm not irritated, just amused. And, okay, a little indignant, but only on behalf of my love of grammar--it had no effect on my love of this person, or even my respect for her as a writer.

She crossed out half of my commas (literally, she tried to nuke five or six commas on every page). Commas are one of those tricky things that can be stylistic a lot of the time. Some people love them, and some people hate them, and a lot of the time there's no actual rule to back either opinion up. But my prose would be very, very different if you took out all of those commas. (If I'm ever a published writer, I hope I don't end up with a comma-hating editor, because there would be fights. Which I would probably lose.)

But the commas are a matter of opinion, not a Crime against Literature. But, on the last page, right before the most soaringly poetic passage of the entire story . . . well:

The original passage: "They are driving through the aspen groves as the sun clears the mountains, and its rays cut the thin mountain air . . ."

Her emendation: "They are driving through the aspen groves as the sun clears the mountains, its rays cutting the thin mountain air . . ."

HELL NO. I am NOT going to replace a perfectly good conjugated verb with a freaking participle! (This isn't Greek, after all.) This is the one passage in the story that truly can't survive a single linguistic slip-up, and there's no way I'm going to substitute a weaker form for a stronger one! Just . . . no!

(Let me just reiterate, I really like this girl. And technically, this is really another matter of opinion, not really a Crime . . . but seriously? A participle??)

Why is it so hard for the morons in my creative writing class to remember to put freaking page numbers on their stories? It's a workshop class, guys. We NEED page numbers in order to efficiently discuss your stories.

I have the strangest relationship with that class. It's got some of my favorite people in it, and some of my least favorite, and it's kind of a jarring contrast. It's my favorite class out of everything I'm taking this semester, but I always leave in a state frustration and righteous indignation.

I've never been around a group of people so composed of people who totally get literature, and people who are so far from getting literature that you wonder how they even made it through middle school, who are so incapable of grasping emotional complexity that you begin to contemplate whether they're even human. People who daily commit crimes against literature.

My particular problem is one girl who categorically condemns any character who ever acts at all like a jerk, regardless of how complex the situation that led to that jerky act is, when in fact the point of the entire story is to tell you that things are more complicated than they seem. She simply seems to be incapable of grasping the fact that some people read and write fiction because fiction is able to address issues that don't have easy, black and white solutions.

Look. If you're not willing to suspend your stupid, closed-minded, judgmental attitude for an hour and fifteen minutes, why the hell are you taking Creative Writing?

(On the other hand, I hesitate to admit it, but some people are actually fun to hate. I'm a bad, bad person.)

My rule when I'm writing fiction, especially for class, is that I try to never tell the reader anything she could figure out for herself. I try to only let myself show the characters' problems indirectly.

This makes for good fiction, and I'm always excited when somebody in workshop says exactly what I wanted people to realize about the characters. On the other hand, it's damned hard to write this way. I have to reject nearly all my first ideas of what I want the characters to say or do, and keep circling around them and rewording until I come up with an action or a bit of dialogue that will let readers figure out what's going on with the character, but without making it too obvious or trite.

Orson Scott Card wrote about how he showed one of his stories to another writer, and that writer told him, "This is a story about guilt, so the one word you cannot use is 'guilt'." Card says he had to rewrite whole passages to get around that word, but the story was better for it. That's what I'm talking about.

On the other hand, we're reading Slaughterhouse Five for my Good and Evil class, and Kurt Vonnegut pretty much tells you everything up front, and somehow still manages to keep you on your toes. But I suspect you have to be a really good writer to be able to pull that off.

. . . all this is basically a way of explaining why I'm still struggling with this damn story for Fiction Workshop. (Technically due an hour ago. At least I'm getting close, now.)

I'm a little sad, because I'm so fatigued at this point that I don't even have the energy to put the words together here on LiveJournal. Usually, my way of coping with stress is to write about it here. But I'm just too tired--there aren't any words coming. It's not tired as in 'sleep-deprived'. I sleep 6-7 hours most nights. It's a mental kind of tired. Or maybe just the result of spending so much of the rest of my time using words to articulate things.

I'll be so glad when this year is over.

Writing up the proposal for my honors thesis (still). I keep finding words that somehow haven't been added to OpenOffice's dictionary, and thinking, "How the hell did I write a 20 page paper about Dionysus without adding the word 'maenad' to the dictionary?"

I ended up doing almost NO work yesterday, except throwing together a rough outline of the proposal. I've got two pages now, though. (It's an 8-10 page proposal.) I just need to keep chugging. Damn is it hard for me to make myself write. I was going to say, "I hate writing," but that's not technically true. Even with academic stuff, I get the thrill of putting words together. What's hard for me is making myself stay in the word processor putting down words. It requires a kind of intense focus that I find very difficult and mentally draining.

I've been mostly avoiding snacking (see this post), but I've been drinking a lot of green tea, which means a lot of caffiene. My brother got me hooked on loose-leaf teas, and they're sooo much tastier than tea in a bag. I really need to get my hands on some loose-leaf rooibos tea so I can have something yummy and non-caffienated to drink. But, that won't be happening until I get some more money (and I don't get my first paycheck until the second week of October). Right now, I am B-R-O-K-E.

I'm writing my last paper of the Never Ending Semester (omg just make it end!), and I just wanted to note that not only is it titled "Lucian's Cynical Philosophy of Death" (which is funnier if you regard it as Lucian's Cynical Philosophy: of DEATH! than if you just think of it as Lucian's Cynical 'Philosophy of Death'). Anyway, not ONLY that, but . . .

. . . I just managed to use the phrase "epic vomit."

Oh yeah. Epic vomit for the epic win.

Okay, looks like I probably shouldn't expect my class to know what BLM land is (for this school there's a surprisingly wide range represented in my class--we've got two people from Washington, and some other states--but I think most of them are still East-coasters). I'll rewrite the sentence. It's a throwaway line, not worth glossing "BLM" and definitely not worth letting people get caught up on.

For those of you who were wondering, BLM stands for Bureau of Land Management. They own a lot of land out in the west. I mainly know about them because when I was a kid, my parents got a permit to haul a bunch of rock off of BLM land to build a rock wall at our house. (Yeah--rock. We have a lot of that in Colorado.)

Not back--I just need some input to help with the story I'm writing. It's very simple. If you see the sentence, "There was the Christmas Dad had gotten a permit to cut down a tree on BLM land instead of buying one in the parking lot at Safeway as usual," does the term "BLM land" make any sense to you at all?

If you answer, it'd be useful to know what part of the country you're from. I can't tell whether it makes perfect sense to me because I'm from rural Colorado and my dad's an outdoorsman, or if it actually is common parlance. I don't want to throw off the people in my class too much in the second sentence of the story, you know?