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I thought I’d make this post on SEX and OPEN RELATIONSHIPS all the more tantalizing by hiding it behind this alluring “more” link. If you’re sexually squeamish, or hardcore religious, don’t click it.
Continue reading “One for the open relationship blog…”

Last night’s writing didn’t go so well. I guess I was “distracted” by laura when I got home, and then I HAD to pay bills, (seriously) so by the time I was “free” for the evening, it was already after 11:00.

Three days in a row I’ve tried to finish the previous day’s writing in the morning when I get up. This morning was the worst. Not only was my brain as foggy as it is most mornings, but words seemed foggier still. Yesterday’s word count was only 1249 total. I think I had 800 last night, and that means I did about 450 in a half-hour this morning. That’s still pretty good, but maybe I had more than that from yesterday, I’m not sure.

I guess it’s not the worst day’s total I’ve had. (I put up a link to a list with each day’s total from the novel page itself.)

My plot is not really working itself out as I’d hoped. I wrote in a “bad guy”, but now suddenly “the corporation” is becoming the bad guy. So where does that leave my other bad guy? It’s like one plot line wants to be this huge society-wide conflict, while another plot line wants to just be some kind of murder mystery set in outer space. I know it’s early yet, I’ve still got about twenty-one thousand words to go, but I have to try and tie them all up together somehow. *sigh*

Last night I failed to make nanowrimo a priority. I started writing around 10, or even 10:30, and at midnight, I still only had 700 words or so. I was then in and out of consciousness in my papasan chair until about 5am. This isn’t the first time this has happened!

Fortunately, I woke up this morning, groggy, but full of words, and I quickly brought that 700 to 1900 in less than a half hour!!! How I performed this feat while still blurry-eyed and half in the clutches of my sleep-deprivation, I do not know. But perhaps what I need is more of that. Less thinking, and more writing while sleepy, drunk, or otherwise out of my head. On this subject, I found this article quite topical this morning. (And absolutely fucking hilarious.) I’m raising my glass to Modern Drunkard Magazine.

This weekend was incredible. Just after my last update, I started reading the NaNoWriMo forums, and discovered that many fellow nano-ers were meeting in a coffee shop at that very moment. (2pn on sat afternoon). It was to celebrate the halfway mark. I was surprised at how few of the people there (including myself) were not yet at the halfway point. I could taste it though–21,000 words as of that afternoon. I’m going to have to pick up the pace in order to finish on time.

I was also surprised at how many nano-ers were festies. With one exception, everyone I talked for any length of time to at this thing was renaissance festival employee, or had been in recent history.

In the reading department, I heard back from DrFrag, and he won’t let me read any more of his novel than he’s already posted online. Oh well. This weekend I also began re-reading Vurt, by Jeff Noon, which I’ve always considered one of my favorite novels. I’m not finding it as instantly successful as I did the first time I’d read it, but the prose is beautiful, and it is still remarkable for many, many reasons.

Sometime last week I started getting The Writer’s Alminac in my email inbox. In general, I think he picks some awesome poetry. And the factual information is quite interesting as well. Anyway, I found out today that they’re published on the weekends too! (Which means that I had three poems to read this morning.) There was also this quote from writer Chinua Achebe in his book Anthills of the Savannah (1987).

. . . [It is] the story that
can continue beyond the war and the
warrior. It is the story that outlives the
sound of war-drums and the exploits of
brave fighters. . . . The story is our escort;
without it, we are blind. Does the blind
man own his escort? No, neither do we
the story; rather it is the story that
owns us and directs us.

Obviously, I’ve been thinking a lot about story lately, and this struck me as quite interesting. I’m at the point in my novel where I have to decide if there are going to be warriors… or if it’s more of a detective type thriller. I can’t quite decide. The scope of the novel will depend on my decision.

One more thing about this last weekend: Last night, Laura, Nate, Jason and I went to this art show/gallery that my brother was in. He had a wall of his stencil/collage art hanging. It was in a tattoo shop, and they had a DJ. It was pretty awesome if you ask me, and I ran into a bunch of old mutual friends. I bid on two of his pieces, and am not quite sure when I’ll know if I won them.

I have done all manor of procrastination so far today, even resorting to the hilariously atypical cleaning-the-kitchen drill. I also re-worked many of the templates for the novel blog, and added the portion of the entry I wrote last night that I’m not “sure” about.

So here goes the big question: Should I include the hermaphroditic sex scene in my novel? I’m not so much concerned at the content, but more that it’s atypical of the novel thus far. I’d love to hear what people have to say about including sex scenes in novels that are not necessarily about sex, in general. (Although I suppose I could go to the nanowrimo forums for that, which I’m NOT going to do today) and of course specifics about my novel are always appreciated. I seriously wonder if anyone has actually read any of this piece of crap.

I’m going to get writing just as soon as I post this entry. I have a goal of 5000 words today. This would put me up to 25,000, which is where I should be (half-way there on the 15th, baby). If not, I’ll just count on catching up over the week of thanksgiving, which will be super busy for me, (thanksgiving and x-mas with the relatives in Iowa) but I also won’t be working that week.

Why do I have this feeling I’m gong to be writing like crazy on Sunday the 30th?

Now for the bad news. Despite bragging about the novel to an old friend I hadn’t seen in literally YEARS at the concert I went to last night, I got home and had absolutely no desire to write. In fact, I was such a zombie that I just sat and watched Nate play video games for what must have been an hour before I drug myself upstairs and threw myself in bed (where I promptly read for another hour instead of getting the sleep I SO needed and deserved.) In fact it is not so much that I had no desire to write, but that I had a negative desire. On a scale of one to ten, my desire to write was a negative thirty. In fact, I didn’t sit there and watch Nate because I was interested, or out of some desire to play the game myself. Oh no! I sat there because it was like doing nothing, and nothing was exactly the only thing I could think of that was a better idea than writing.

So this means I’ll have to write a 5k day. Did I plan this subconsciously to see if I could do it? Some part of me thinks I did. Only problem is, what day is it going to be? When do I have the mother-fucking time to write all day? Certainly not this weekend, as I’ve got SHIT planned in the middle of both days. Maybe SHIT is just code for “things you do in your break from writing all day”.

It is again 7:30 AY-TO-THE-MOTHER-FUCKING-EM, and this time I’m feeling it. Yesterday, I was all “oooh, it’s so pretty in here, sunrises are the best!” Like I was some pansy-ass kid on a fieldtrip to the flower garden or something. Now that my skull is threatening to implode as torture for not resting it long enough on my silken pillowcase, (And even though I don’t even USE a pillow in bed, that hard mattress sounds as soft as silk right now.) I see this sunflower on the horizon for what it really is, a daisy growing from a dung-heap.

I am not even focusing properly.

Well, there you go, double dose of me on the soon-to-be-caffeinated trail to terror that is the AM. Wish me willpower; cause staying awake now is almost as hard as writing two thousand words at midnight.

Last night, (for real last night, not yesterday’s last night, as in the last post’s last night), I went to see Cloud Cult at the Cedar Cultural Center with Laura and my friend Ryan. The old friend I ran into was this guy Ray who I knew back when I used to play music. He was there working the soundboard.

It was a decent show. I felt like they were pretty scattered all over, and also like they maybe were trying to sound like some other band… *cough*Sigur*cough*Ros*cough*, an impression I never got from their album (I’ll let you know about he new one after I listen to it today). But still, Sigur Ros are pretty lofty company, if you can pull it off, and we all agreed that we’d go see them again, if only to find out if they bring the horrible stage dancers to every concert with them. (The guy painting a canvas on stage was cool though. If I ever have a band, and am doing a CD release party, I’ve got to remember to get me one of those.)

On the downside of the evening, I feel pretty horribly because my brother John told me about the concert back last Saturday, and asked me if I wanted to go. I said sure, yes, I was excited even, and he said something like “cool.” And that was it. Not “Cool, can I call you at 7:00 the night of the show from a coffee shop by your house and get a ride?” It was just “cool.” But I still feel bad as hell about it. I was down there at six, and I didn’t get his message until 9:00, right before the band went on. (My cell phone is unreliable as hell, and I think it may randomly just decide to turn itself off rather than suffer the indignantcy of allowing me to hear it ring.) So yeah, I had been wondering where he was, then I checked my messages, and I knew. I’m a shitty older brother.

Whatever anybody tells you, sleep-deprivation is not your friend.

I forgot to post this yesterday when I wrote it, which means when I say yesterday (next time I say yesterday) I mean Wednesday, when today is Friday, and the day I wrote this was Thursday:

I felt like writing twice yesterday, and both times I didn’t DO it… then when I finally sat down to, I was horribly depressed and couldn’t remember what I’d wanted to write about earlier. Finally around midnight Laura reminded me that the point is to just write it, and not care about whether it’s going to ultimately “work”. I wish she’d told me that around 10:30, when I sat down to do it and would rather have put a gun in my mouth. So I began writing in earnest around midnight. The whole day I was thinking that day’s 2K would be a breeze, but I only ended up getting just under one.

I was also surfing around on other people’s novel pages (for those of you asking how the hell I could only have gotten 1000 pages in over two hours), and there are some really good ones out there. This guy, DrFrag who has apparently already written over 51K (but has only posted excerpts) is absolutely fucking hilarious. I really want to read his novel. I wonder if I emailed him if he’d want to share it with me. I really just want to see if the whole thing is as good as his excerpts.

It’s pretty insane how many people have already finished. I have this feeling that if I were making a living writing, I’d have to be writing over 5K per day as well. (That’s one way you could have already finished.) It actually doesn’t seem that implausible. When I’m “on a roll” I can easily whip out 2K in a couple of hours. If I had all day… well, hopefully I’d be “on a roll” more often… like two or three times a day.

It’s a little weird showing up to work before anybody else. Laura’s car is still el-busted, and I had to drive her to work again this morning. I decided just to come in rather than go home and sleep for another hour as I did yesterday. This may be the earliest I’ve ever shown up to work. I am the only one here. My boss, who claims she wakes up at 5:30am isn’t even here.

There is a nice yellow sunrise glow about the office.

The previous portion of this entry was written before I got distracted by what I’m suppose to be doing at work… actual, er, work. It’s hard to believe that I have already been here for an hour and a half, and it is still an hour and a half before I usually get here. (Yes, I got here at 7:30, it is now 9:00, and I usually waltz in around 10:30. Insane.)

Here’s hoping Laura remembers to call and have her car towed to a repair shop today sometime… (not to mention calling the repair shop itself.)

I’ll update later about the novel… lets just say it’s not getting any easier.

Nine o’clock, and I’m just getting started for the day. Tonight’s 2000 isn’t going to be easy. I think I’m hitting that second week difficulty that the newsletter was discussing. I avoided that feeling by starting a new plot-line last night. Consequently, I wrote several hundred extra. I may actually be caught up now with my daily goals, but I did the calculations, and I’m not yet caught up to where I should be if I had started on day one.

I am just whining like a little bitch.

I finished a novel I was reading today. The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm. I think I’ve mentioned it before. I have this document full of descriptions of the novels I’ve finished before. It’s just a huge text file, and there are entries all the way back through 1995. Nearly eight years of reading history. It’s full of spoilers, as the original reason I started writing in it was to remind myself what each book had been about. But anyway I think I’ve decided that I’m going to enter them into movable type. That way I’ll be able to look at the list in different ways, and enter new ones from anywhere, instead of having to paste them in when I get home as I have sometimes done. They will probably get their own blog. Look for a side link here soon.

Anyway, I’m off to write. Wish me luck.

A universe spins around me. In my bubble, I’m writing. Outside of the bubble, others are lost and cannot find their way back. Still others are already far ahead of me. I will not burst the bubble… I must not read other people’s novels in progress… damnit.

Last night I got together with Alex, who is also attempting this crazy nano-rhino thing. We didn’t do all that much writing, but I saw lots of pictures from when he went to boot camp. And we smelled like smoke when we left the coffee shop. Actually, I did write a bit, and it was immensely helpful to get out of the house to write. (Plus, free wireless access!) I think next time I might go by myself to find out if part of the help was his company, or if it was all location that did it.

Unfortunately, my word count is still short after the weekend, (what happened to being more productive when I don’t have to work?) but not nearly so much as I was on Friday. I’m less than a thousand words behind now, not including today’s 1900.

Actually, I know exactly what happened to my word count. Laura decided we should go x-mas shopping on Saturday because her Marshal Fields discount was going to expire on Sunday. We have most of the shopping done for my dad’s family and got quite a few other things while we were at it. (Including the PS2 Eye Toy I mentioned yesterday, which is super fun, and JakII, which is not as much as it could be–It’s possible I’m not far enough into it yet, who knows?)

In other news, I am finally able to use MT-Blacklist, and after following “The Less Easy Path” to installation, I was overjoyed to have eradicated the 30 spam comments I received just last night–all in one fell swoop. I am very seriously contemplating sending jay allen some money to show how much I appreciate his efforts.