HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Oh my gosh, it's 2009!

MY New Year's Resolution this year is to do a NaNoWriMo every other month, because I'm awesome. Well, actually it's more because I'm not awesome--it seems like lately, I only seriously write in November. For the rest of the year I write short stories and poetry and attempt to work on my long term project, but I don't really get very far.

So this year is going to be a crazy, kick-butt jump start to my writing. That means about an hour ago, January nanowrimo started for me. My word count is currently 0.

But that's okay, because just a couple months ago I wrote a whole nano in 12 days, and I've got 31 to do it this time. All is well in 2009!

Plus the Book Challenge is starting today. I was reading this book called "A Drop of Scarlet" by Jemiah Jefferson, and I needed to finish it before the New Year or else it would cut into Book Challenge time, so I spent a lot of time yesterday finishing. It was sort of dreadful--it's written in first person, but like every single chapter it changes POV and it's confusing as crap. Once the POV was a schizophrenic guy (THAT was crazy). Anyway, this is what I got from the book:

Vampires are promiscuous. Oh my, they are. They also swear a lot. Then this one vampire, who was also a scientist, created a drug that works on vampires, and then all the vampires got high. This made the vampires MORE promiscuous, and also way more violent. Then I think some of the vampires committed suicide, but it was really weird and I'm not sure what was going on. And then they got high again. And were promiscuous and violent.

It was one of those books that consists of lots and lots of tense conversations and almost-fights, and a few scrabbles here and there, but nothing really satisfying. At least, not up until the very end. The last, like, two chapters were really good. But for a couple hundred pages I was wading through immensely complicated backstory--and with the story being narrated from a million different POVS, that was really hard. I think this might have been a sequel to something, because authors just don't make backstory that confusing otherwise.

Oh well. Out with 2008 and in with 2009--I'm putting "A Drop of Scarlet" back on the shelf and exchanging it for "Looking for Alaska" by John Green, which promises brilliance and pure, unfiltered awesome. I can practically see the awesome oozing out of the pages while it sits on my bookshelf.

Happy New Year, everybody!

I am a bad, bad person

So, I have no excuse for not posting in ages, because a lot of stuff has been happening.

First, my cousin Lee came to visit. I haven't seen him in almost a decade, and now he's married with a baby on the way--the last time I saw him, he was a teenager and I was, like, seven. It was totally weird. But anyway, he's hilarious. The whole family watched The Village--it was his first time seeing it and he talked through the whole thing, so he got all confused (it's one of those movies you have to watch carefully). He latched onto the first twist and just started making wild theories about old people the whole time. We haven't let him live it down.

And then, omg, CHRISTMAS! It was epic! My sisters and I have this tradition where we all sleep in my room on Christmas Eve, and, more importantly, we steal some kind of kitchen appliance (weird as that sounds). Last year we stole the toaster and made toast on Christmas morning, but this year we decided to step it up a notch. We initiated Operation Hungry Squirrel (as named by my sister Danielle), in which, over the course of three days, we stole everything we needed to make homemade waffles and hot chocolate on Christmas morning. Seriously.

We even fed my mom a fake story about stealing the tea kettle, so she wouldn't know what we were up to. Then we stole an ancient coffee maker and used it to boil water for the hot chocolate. We stole a waffle baker. We stole all the ingredients. We even took mugs and real plates (we were going to use paper plates, but then we figured that if we were going to do this, we had better do it RIGHT). For some reason I got put in charge of most of the thievery, and the only thing I didn't steal was the waffle baker, which my little sister Kelsey smuggled upstairs in a pillow. We even stole a lunchbox full of ice and stuck a water bottle full of milk in it for the hot chocolate.

So at 2:00 on Christmas morning we made waffles and hot chocolate on my bedroom floor. We had stolen some bananas to go with it, and some candy canes and a bar of chocolate. My parents think we're crazy, but it was epic.

And then for Christmas I got a grand total of fifty six books--so many that I got a bookshelf as one of my other presents. Now I have like my own personal library in my room (I already had a lot of books to start with)--with two full bookshelves. I had to rearrange the furniture to fit everything in. And I got a camera, which I'll be using for the MAD podcast's up-and-coming vlogs (starting January 5th), and a new headset (which actually works) for recording. Oh, and in another podcast reference, I got the Prince Caspian movie (our first episode was about Prince Caspian).

Annnd we got a Wii. Omg, we got a Wii.

Hooooly crap that thing is fun. I can't tell you how long I've played the James Bond game. It is fantastic.

And Wii baseball is suprisingly fun. I went on the Mii creator thing and created, like, the coolest baseball team ever. I'm there, of course (my Mii looks disturbingly like me--it's freaky), but then I made the coolest dream team ever. I've got Harry Potter, Cher, Ghengis Khan, Oprah, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and (my personal favorite) Mick Jagger. It is absolutely bizarre how spot on the Mick Jagger Mii is.

So anyway I played Wii baseball for hours, and I have no muscle tone whatsoever in my arms, so I am in horrifying pain right now, which kind of sucks. However, I have like a bajillion books to read, so that makes things a LOT better. I actually just put down "Harry, A History" by Melissa Anelli (which is really, really good by the way). And I already finished "Intensity" be Dean Koontz (oh Dean Koontz, why art thou so made of win?) and "Legwork" by Katy Munger (a well written mystery, but I guessed the ending waaay early).

Problem is, I have so many books I want to read, but I'm trying to make myself wait until the New Year to read some of them, so that I can count them for the Book Challenge. But with the entire collected works of John Green sitting there on my bookshelf, and a new Terry Pratchett book, and Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia, which is about a crime-fighting velociraptor (not even kidding), it's REALLY FREAKING HARD.

Gaaaah. Must wait. Must wait.

Holy crap, things just happened

...In my otherwise currently boring life.

I made my account on Ravelry! Woohoo! If you happen to be on Ravelry, I'm "StaciMCL". I wrote a very non-interesting About Me section. Ick. But I haven't had time to really check out the site yet because I'm suuuper busy.

Sarita lent me her USB drive so I could put my audio from the last episode of the MAD Podcast on it. Holy crap, it's been taking me WAY too long to get this audio to her (and it is an extraordinarily fantastical episode, and I want to LISTEN to it for heaven's sake) so I am excited to finally be done with it.

Speaking of the Podcast, our episode about the Series of Unfortunate Events books v. movie discussion is coming up, and I haven't read the books in ages. So I'm borrowing them from Marshall--currently I have the first three. I finished reading the first one a while ago--I started reading on the bus, and it takes like, an hour and a half to read one of them, which is amazing. It goes very quickly. I still think the movie is better, though, but I'll save that discussion for the podcast.

Annnnd... Okay, so actually like nothing happened, but I'm grabbing at straws here. For whatever reason my life has been incredibly boring lately. Gah.

Ravelry lies

Like a week ago it told me my invitation would come in four days.

Liars.