Hmmm. I seem to be made of win.

It's 10:14 on the last day of April and I just finished my NaNoWriAp! Still cutting it majorly close, but I technically finished more than an hour earlier than I finished last month, so I'm calling it an improvement.

Final word count: 52,996

I was listening to my Bon Jovi playlist for the last part of the story, so it ended up that "Always" (which is, incidentally, my favorite love song of all time) was playing when I crossed 50k and "Have A Nice Day" was playing when I finished.

Phew.

I'm going to go sleep for like a week now. Except that actually I have six huge exams coming up. So actually I'm going to go study.

*Sob*. Life.

Phew. Could I cut it any closer?

Forty four minutes left in March, and I am FINISHED!!!!

Total word count: 51,577.

Phew. That was crazy. The song playing? "Loved Ones and Leaving", HP 5 soundtrack. Weirdly appropriate (as was the Hall of Prophecies for when I hit 50k.)

It is... goodish. As I said, I wrote most of it the first six days of the month, and did the last twelve thousand words or so between yesterday and today, which means that I had over twenty days in the middle to forget every single plot point I had going from the beginning of the month. So I'm pretty sure that it's a bit disjointed and... blegh, but it's not poorly written. I mean, the end was rushed. Poo.

Doesn't matter. I am DONE with the first three nanos of the year - only nine to go!

Whoa, what are the odds

I just checked my word count and it is EXACTLY 50,000 words. "The Hall of Prophecies" from the HP5 soundtrack was playing.

Gah I still have a lot more story to get through, though. Must keep writing! Must keep writing! Although technically I have officially won already.

With an hour and a half to go before the time is up, but hey. Winning is winning.

DOWN TO THE WIRE

It's a little after 8 o'clock PM on the last day of March and my MarNoWriMo is not complete. As in, 4,000 words shy of complete.

It's really coming down to the wire with this one. Basically what happened is that I wrote ridiculous amounts of words for the first six days of the month, and then didn't do anything again until... yesterday. Niiiice time management, Stace.

Anyway just thought I'd let you know that I'm mildly panicking. Now it's time to go WRITE LIKE CRAZY!!!!

Agony Agony DIE DIE DIE

Three months into NaNoWriYe, my entire lower right arm is about to FALL OFF. It's killing me. My wrist hurts the most, but it goes right down to my fingertips. AUGH!

At first I thought it had something to do with my burn - about a week ago I was making this pineapple upside down cake and I dropped it while I was taking it out of the oven and smashed my arm against the top of the oven trying to catch it. Second degree burns from pineapple upside down cake - I know. Anyway the burn has been bothering me, and it was hurting yesterday, so when my arm, like, exploded today I thought the burn had something to do with it.

Anyway now I think it has something to do with the insane amounts of typing that I've been doing. Sigh. Spectacular.

I - drank - so - much - coffee!!!! *Twitch*

I really love espresso. Unfortunately, I am unable to channel the energy into, you know, productive things.

But not this time! I have just crossed the finish line of the world's greatest Calculus Marathon. Sixteen pages of freaking calculus study problems, holy crap I rule the world of mathematics! Oh man. I sat there with assorted episodes of House, Psych, Flight of the Conchords and Firefly playing while evaluating more integrals than have ever been evaluated by a single person in a twenty four hour period. That's the good thing about math, though - it's the only kind of homework I can do while watching tv.

I'm also 30k into my NaNoWriMar. My protagonist superhero is attempting to escape from the sewers of the enemy lair. I wrote all 30,000 words in the first six days of March and haven't gone back to it in ages because my workload at school has become so heavy that it is CRUSHING MY SOUL. Anyway I'm going to pick back up with it today, and let my MC out of the sewers.

AND I've officially passed the big Three-Oh in the MAD Book Challenge. Thirty freaking two books down in the year of 2009. Highlights? The Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton (thankyouthankyouthankyou Marshall for recommending them to me), the collected works of John Green, Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule, and my favorite book in the world - Terry Pratchett's The Truth. Oh, and The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. I've been meaning to read that for ages, and I finally borrowed it from Sarah... Oh man it's fantastic. If you can read it without crying, you HAVE NO SOUL.

Ah, in looking back at my list of books, I see that I have written "The Harvey Boys" instead of "Hardy Boys". Hmm. Oh, and I haven't written down the other two Anita Blake books I've read. And I just finished Jumper by Steven Gould (holy crap, Marshall has recommended like everything I've read.) Never mind, I've read thirty five books this year.

WORD

Or, more appropriately, WORDS. Three thousand and twenty five of them, to be exact.

I just started writing my MarNoWriMo* about an hour or so ago, and I'm trucking right along. It's a fantabulous superhero novel and I'm writing it in the POV of an unidentified first person narrator, which I'm really enjoying, to my surprise. I'm actually really liking this one, too. Things are going well.

*Technically that stands for March Novel Writing Month, which is a little redundant, but that's how most of the people on nanowrimo.org refer to nanos that they write outside of November. Personally, I favor NaNoWriMar, or National Novel Writing March. I think I'll stick with that from now on. Yeah, it totally sounds better.

But anyway, I expect I'll be done with this one earlier in the month, this time. The February one was good, but it was very... plotty. Whereas an X-Men inspired story pretty much never comes in contact with the word 'plot'. At least, not in the same sentence as the word 'good'*.

*Not that I'm saying anything bad about X-Men. James Marsden in sunglasses? Hugh Jackman? I mean, even with the uglyugly hair, he's still all Hugh Jackmany. And... did I mention James Marsden?

Two down, ten to go

Oh, wow, when you put it that way it sounds dreadful.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have finished my FebNoWriMo. NaNoWriYe is going well so far - two nanos under my belt and still not particularly stressed, so things are looking up! This NaNo was about a magical carnival. It was inspired by Deborah - when I frantically confronted her, panicking about my complete lack of plots for FebNoWriMo, the first thing she suggested was "karate-chopping sandwich-making elephants", and I know how to take an idea and run with it.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" was playing when I finished the whole nano - coming in at a grand total of 53,019 words. "Lights" by Journey was playing when I hit 50,000. Oddly enough, if you switched the two around they would have been appropriate for the scenes I was writing at those moments.

So, this nano started out all, like, pure comedy, and ended up weirdly sentimental and... I don't know, emotional? I got kind of dark for a while there. Then again, it also has a pretty big reveal at the end, and I didn't screw up the surprise either (which I normally do). It's actually reasonably hard to see it coming, I think.

And I did write over 10,000 words of it between when I got home from school and now, so.... Yeah. I swear I've written this nano in like six marathon writing sessions and the rest of the time I've just been lazing around trying not to feel guilty about not writing.

Happy Valentine's Day!

<3s for all!

Seriously though, this has been a good Valentine's Day. My NaNoWriMo t-shirt, No Plot? No Problem! book, and NaNoLand Chronicles book were all officially Valentine's Day presents. I also managed to snag the last box of Indiana Jones Valentines at Target on the half-off sale, thus acquiring many fabulous Shia LaBeouf Valentine's Day cards and temporary tattoos.

Plus I finished reading THREE very Valentine-appropriate romance novels recently. In order of how much I liked them, they were: "Having the Boss's Babies" by Barbara Hannay (which was so sucktacular that the best that can be said of it is that it was short), "Fulk the Reluctant" by Elaine Knighton (which was also sucktacular, but had the benefit of being unintentionally hilarious), and "Let It Snow" (which was actually sort of awesome. It's got three stories in it; Maureen Johnson's was good, John Green's was predictably MADE OF WIN, and Lauren Myracle's was okayish).

AND, in the spirit of Valentine's Day, I decided to give the MC of my current NaNoWriMo a love interest. Her name is Red and she knits, and she's totally perfect for him. J is being adorably awkward around her at the moment (aw). Plus, I'm officially over halfway done with my second nano and not remotely stressed out (yaaaay).

This is in no way related to anything (but since when do I care?), but I am currently dancing around in agony over the fact that I do NOT have the sequel to Terry Goodkind's "Wizard's First Rule", which I loved. I must must must have it. Now. But Sarah is bringing me "The Book Thief" to read tomorrow, and I... gah, I have to read that too. So, poo. But at least this way I have a couple guaranteed-to-be-great books lined up, especially after reading all those sucky romance ones.

The tables have been turned

You know how you can be having a really crappy day, and then suddenly something happens that just makes everything better?

I've been feeling a bit stressed out recently, due to the fact that I have a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR SUPER FREAKING MAJOR project due in school on Friday, and a poo load of tests and stuff, AND an essay due soon which if I do not pass, I will literally not graduate (not that I've ever failed an essay in my life, but I still manage to freak out).

And so when I got home from school I was ready to hit someone. But then we went to the library.

I am a HUGE supporter of libraries. Libraries are, I believe, the source of justice and light and kittens and rainbows. I LOVE libraries. I've worked in them for four years, and librarians are some of the coolest people I've ever met. But I haven't been to a library in almost a year, on account of having the most fantastically epic library dues in the universe (because my family all uses my card, and my sisters both lost books. That made it worse, the fact that I couldn't go even though it wasn't my fault.)

And anyway, today I HAD to go to the library to get a school book, so my parents paid off my card. And I checked out books! Books! From the library! AHHH! I hadn't realized how much I missed it until I went back.




Oh, I also should mention: know that plan I had to write a NaNoWriMo every other month this year? I'm taking that back. I'm doing one EVERY month, in what (if it's not the first) is at least one of the first NaNoWriYe s ever. Bring on National Novel Writing Year, 2009!

My FebNoWriMo is a humorous novel about a magical carnival and it is currently pwntastic.

I am tired, but also victorious

I just won my first NaNoWriMo of 2009.

At 50,655 words it is not particularly lengthy, but--and I hesitate to say this--it is actually... decent work. Like, reasonably well-written. I find this surprising.

"Elevation" by U2 was playing when I hit the 50k mark, and "Beautiful Day" (also by U2) was playing when I finished the novel.

It is now one o'clock in the morning and I got like four hours of sleep last night, so I am very, very tired. I shall celebrate more in the morning.

For now, I'm going to bed.

Life, and more importantly, SNOW

Holy crap, I am so HAPPY right now!

Reasons that Staci is happy:

• Today it SNOWED. Six inches of snow, which (for somebody living in North Carolina) might as well be a blizzard. I haven't seen this much snow in what seems like forever.
• Because it snowed, school was cancelled today.
• I just found out that school is being cancelled tomorrow, too.
• I have almost 32,000 words in my January nanowrimo, which I'm pretty sure isn't technically on schedule - but now that I don't have school tomorrow, I'll be able to write like crazy.
• And did I mention that my current nanowrimo pwns the world?
• I finished the first seven books for the book challenge and am almost done with numero ocho. Go me!
• Today Danielle and I filmed a movie entitled "The Abominable Snow Dog Strikes - AGAIN!" in which I star as a really, really stupid hiker who almost gets eaten by a villainous snow dog (but escapes to a hiking lodge just in time). This is a very, very awesome movie.
• Speaking of Ceilidh, this is the first time she's ever seen the snow and she freaking LOVES it. There are very few things in the world cuter than puppies seeing snow for the first time.
• I sort of crocheted a square. Almost. I still think I need to get Marshall to show me what I'm doing wrong (because there is no way I am doing this right), but it was better than all of my other attempts.
• I went to Michaels and I bought a huge bag of BUTTONS! For some reason, I really like buttons.
• I started working on the Man Scarf (long story) again, and it's getting pretty long (although Ceilidh did tangle up the skein of yarn, and it took me six hours to untangle it, causing a mental breakdown so big that I missed Owen's (that's Marshall's brother) play and suffered a massive "Staci you are so stupid" guilt trip. However, I am DEFINITELY going this weekend).
• Because there was no school today, I got to stay home and watch the presidential inauguration, which was awesome. And then we made an Obama cake. And it was a really, really good cake.
• IT - IS - SNOWING!

Ah! Happiness!

(However, I did just realize that there are more posts labeled "Nanowrimo" than there are posts labeled "life" on this blog. This is both entertaining and in some, sad way, a little bit pathetic.)

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!

Today is awesome

...for several reasons.

Undeniably number one:

OMG I JUST WON NANOWRIMO!

I mean, technically I won it like fifteen days ago when I finished my first fifty thousand words, so I should qualify that statement by saying that I just EPIC WON NaNoWriMo. That's right - the final word count comes out to 101,041 words, and I finished two complete novels, all within thirty days.

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE THOUSAND WORDS.

Pwn!

Other reasons why today is awesome:

It's St. Andrew's Day! Woohoo! Let us party!

It's the first Sunday of Advent, which is my favorite time in the Church year. Yaay!

December starts TOMORROW! Which means that Christmas is coming! Which means that Christmas Break is coming! Which means that the NEW YEAR is coming - and I am so excited about 2009 that it's just ridiculous. More on that later.

And I will just never get tired of saying that I wrote ONE HUNDRED AND ONE THOUSAND AND FORTY ONE WORDS in thirty days. And it wasn't even that bad - I took plenty of days off and, frankly, I've had a harder time doing my fifty thousand word ones in past years.

I'm printing off my nano as I speak... It's going to take forever, it's over two hundred pages. The first one, I mean - the second one is over two hundred pages too, and together they're more like five hundred, but the second nano is sucktacular and I'm not even going to bother printing it. The first one pwns, though.

Oh, and Marshall and I were going to get together to bake cookies if I managed to write all one hundred thousand words (my goal). So, Marshall, it looks like it's cookie-baking time.

Hooray!

In which Staci Just Says No

Curse you, nanowrimo word count demons. I refuse to be bossed around. I don't WANT to write right now. I WILL NOT DO IT.

NO.

Ahhh. I feel free.


Not that I'm condoning taking a break from your nano. It can be a BAD idea, if you're behind schedule (I'm not right now, but I will be if I don't write today). I am, however, enitrely, one hundred per cent behind taking a break when you can afford it, just to show the Evil Word Count Demons of Death who's boss.

Oh, fail

So I'm about 15,000 words into my second NaNoWriMo - ahead of schedule and almost homicidal with stress. (I cruised right through suicidal and am looking for more). But yesterday I made a discovery that kind of eased the stress.

See, my second nano is being written on a seperate word document, because it would take forever to open the document if I put both nanos on the same one, and because I don't believe in putting all your eggs in one basket (I have an amazing ability to lose word documents). This is fine, except when I have to find out my total wordcount in order to update my account on nanowrimo.org. Then I have to add the word counts of both nanos.

So yesterday I had 12,008 words of my second nano written, plus the roughly 51000 of my first nano. That should come out to around 63000, right? Well, I was using the little calculator from the accessories folder on the computer, and I must have clicked a wrong button, because somehow I ended up calculating my word count as 69,992 as opposed to the (correct) value of 62,992.

So, essentially, I've been walking around since then under the rosy impression that I had SEVEN THOUSAND MORE WORDS than I had in actuality.

LAME.

This means that even after writing today's required 4,000 words, I still won't have the word count that I thought I had yesterday. How freaking uncool is that? I don't want to update my word count on nanowrimo.org, either, until I pass 69,992, because if I update it now with today's wordcount, it'll look like I wrote negative 1000 words today.

*Sigh*. On top of that, I'm working on an enviro lab, and apparently every single teacher I have decided this is the *perfect* week to give tests.

Gah.

Because I WIN!

.

A few moments ago, I wrote the final words of "Seventy Three Escapatoria: Or, How Rob and Larry Saved the World". At 50,948 words, my NaNoWriMo is complete. The song "Wheel in the Sky" by Journey was playing on my iTunes playlist when I finished. It is done.

I am currently eating a celebratory cupcake and trying to happy dance and type at the same time. This is my... fifth novel? Something like that. At only 50,948 words and 245 pages it's my shortest one, but what can I say? I didn't rush this one, nor did I try to stretch it out. It just naturally finished at right around the 50,000 word mark.

I WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YEEESSSSSSSSS!!!! FESTIVITY! PARTIES! CELEBRATORY CUPCAKES!

And here's the thing - it's only November 15th! I finished my NaNoWriMo in exactly half the time that I needed to. And it wasn't a rush at all - I barely ever wrote more than a hundred words on any given week day, and I didn't even get a chance to write every weekend. Technically, I've written this whole thing in only a couple of days.

And that's why I've decided that I am officially going to write another one. Yup, starting tomorrow NaNoWriMo numero dos is going to be in the works. I've had an idea this was going to happen ever since the beginning - NaNoWriMo has been getting easier and easier for me, and I was pretty sure that this year it wasn't going to be much of a challenge. Hence, Novel Due.

If I manage to finish a second 50,000 word novel, it will be the most awesome thing EVER. (I mean, besides the stuff that the Supernatural Word Count Robots with 400,000+ are doing). I am suuuuper excited!

Onward! Here comes NaNo number two!

.

The philanderer

So I was writing this English essay about "Hedda Gabler" when I realized that I had used the word "philanderer" about eight times. But I couldn't think of a synonym. I sat there for like ten minutes agonizing over it, but really I just wanted to type "man-whore" and see if the teacher said anything.

Finally I just tried to look up a synonym, but Microsoft Works has like a freaking PG Thesaurus and it doesn't have an entry for anything vaguely dirty. So I sat there for ANOTHER ten minutes looking up every word for "whore" that I could think of.

And then I realized, this is totally the weirdest essay I've ever written.



(As a matter of interest, I finally settled on the word "womanizer").

Who needs standards?

I was talking with my friend Marshall today at school, and somehow we got on the topic of writing. I'm of the opinion that there's two kinds of writers - the Writer and the Author.

The Author is a bit full of himself, a bit uptight, a bit of a snob. The Author sits in quaint little coffee shops and writes while looking down his nose at people. The Author writes about things like moral ambiguity and the perils of mankind. Nobody likes Authors.

Writers, on the other hand, are a certifiably insane class. These are the kind of people who spend every November frantically typing thousands of words a day, who write their best at four o'clock in the morning, who find inspiration in things like towels and kitchen appliances. They write about things like hovercraft car chases and Pop-Tart heists.

Authors are way too serious and dull. They are the sort of people who can make a book about vampires dreadfully boring. Not so with me.

This year for NaNoWriMo I have decided to approach it from the Writer angle rather than the Author route (which I have taken an unfortunate number of times in the past). It's going to be set in modern times, and it's going to start out with a guy who decides he wants to be a pirate. I honestly don't care where it goes from there. It's Nanowrimo. It's supposed to be ridiculous.

Realism is what editing is for. If you spend all your time during the drafting process worrying about minor details, you lose the spirit of the project. That's how you end up creating these weird, dead, limp sort of stories that just kind of flop over and don't do anything. The best things I've written were created when I was in one of those screw-the-plot-outline moods and just wrote random stuff. Reign it in later. For now, just do it for fun.

Not that the philosophy comes to me with difficulty. Yes, I have written both a hovercraft car-chase and a Pop-Tart heist in the past.

I can't wait for November!