livingtech

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.

I spent a lot of time thinking about plot this morning. Is it better to plan it all out, or to just let it happen? I have a rudimentary idea of where things are going now, but I feel like it’s pretty cleche, and I haven’t figured out certain motivations yet either. I keep changing my mind, actually.

I think I need an entirely new and fresh perspective in the novel, perhaps I should bring in another plotline… I only really have two right now, even though I’ve got about three different perspectives. I really should have gone the absurdist route with this… I think I would be much happier writing in random strangers that just die horrible deaths. I don’t know how I ended up with this crappy drama, although i guess drama is really what keeps you reading. There has to be some plot or motivation. Is it too late to change my tone entirely? I’m afraid it probably is. I’m keeping everything plausible, at least to me, and I guess I should just finish and be done with it. If it sucks ass, I can let it suck ass… But I guess the whole point is that I’d rather it didn’t.

So much doubt, so little writing.

I’ve told myself today that as soon as I catch up to where I “should be”, I’ll let myself play all these video games that I’ve been meaning to play. Last weekend I picked up the new stupid Morrowind with expansions, and Ape Escape 2, (which is pretty fun, I took a break and played it briefly the other day), and then yesterday I picked up Jak 2, (I’m SUPER excited about it) and this PS2 Eye thing… there are like 10 games that come with it, they all look pretty stupid and simple, but I’m excited to play them anyway.

OK, enough procrastination. I’m off to write myself into as many corners as I can find!

[novel update: I’m at 437 words, at 9:38pm. As soon as I post this blog entry, I’ll be starting in earnest. I’ve even taken my laptop into the bathroom with me. Yes, I know that was something you didn’t want to know.]

I was blogsurfing today, and stumbled upon this guy who was talking about how he cheated on girls, and how he’d never been able to stop. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that what he wrote about his emotional perspective and relationship “history” seemed at the time very similar to the way I would describe things. Actually, the more I sat there and thought about it, the less our histories sounded similar, but at the time, it “struck a chord” (that’s the way I put it in the comment I left on his blog). When I write about people’s blogs, or their entries, I usually link to them, but I don’t have the link handy, and I wanted to post this stuff…it’s all stuff I wrote that I thought I was going to post in response to his blog entry… but then I realized that, at the end of his entry, the message was clear, he wanted to change. He had met someone new, and he really thought this would be a new leaf for him… so much of what I said below just wasn’t relevant. (I went on about my open relationship.) So I deleted it from the comment, and decided to post it here instead.

I guess my point is that I knew at an early age that I was going to have trouble with commitment. Even in my 2 year relationship (3 years if you count the year afterwards that we kept trying to make it work, even though she could never trust me again) we started out with a 1 or 2 month period where we were “dating other people”. (Until we both decided we were “it” for each other. Last mistake like that I’ll make.) Almost every relationship I’ve been in has either a) had a point where my girlfriend decided she didn’t want to be in this open relationship anymore, or b) fizzled because somehow lack of commitment turned into lack of intensity (to be fair, there may have been any number of other factors involved in any of those “fizzles”.) At least, that was true until just recently.

A little over two years ago, I went through what felt like a very long dry spell in relationships. I only dated one or two people in a 2 or 3 year period… and I was just about ready to abandon the whole idea of “open relationships” entirely. It seemed the older people were the less likely they were to accept the idea of a serious relationship where you could still date other people.

Then I met my current girlfriend. We’ve been dating for 2 and a half years, and are still going strong. We’ve both “made out” with other people plenty of times… (we have a “no sex” rule–intercourse only, oral sex is fine). Anyway, it’s working great. We’ve lived together for over a year, and I think this truly is “it”. I mean, why would I ever leave her? Why would she leave me? We’re both happy with the situation… So take it from me, it can work, you’ve just got to find the right girl.

Yes, I wrote all that crap in a comment on someone else’s blog. But I changed my mind at the last minute. I’m now returning to my regularly scheduled slavish novel writing.

Well, I’m about 1000 words short now. My completing this beast depends on being able to write more on the weekends than I can during the week. I have plenty of excuses for last night… I didn’t start actually writing until at least 11:30 (and not really until midnight), but those are still just excuses. Hopefully I can eek out more than 2000 today, and catch up fully by the end of the weekend. I think I’ve decided though, that if I don’t complete by the end of this month, I’ll make every effort to continue until I do finish. If that means it takes me two months, so be it.

Where is this enthusiasm while I’m writing?

Well, I’m a couple hundred words behind… (never mind that my story is going nowhere fast.) I’ve noticed this novel is doing wonders for my blogging. This week is the first one in probably months that I’ve posted four days in a row.

There is an immense sense of accomplishment that goes along with finishing my obligatory 2000 words. So far I’ve only felt that twice, and last night I was tossing and turning the whole night, agonizing about whether I should get up and try to finish again. I hope tonight I can actually motivate myself to get 2200 words in, hopefully before it’s time for bed. I have family dinner before I can start, which isn’t going to help anything.

Alex sent me a link to Blovel 2003 this afternoon. I will probably sign up… but since I’m posting my actual novel to a different blog than I normally post to, they’ll only get my novel updates, not the blog posts about them. When I surfed the site earlier, I found that the meta-novel posts were actually more interesting, I felt than the ones of the actual novel. It’s probably a lot like reading the nanowrimo forums… which seems incredibly addicting. I’ll bet there are hundreds of people who don’t finish each year from just reading those forums. I also wonder if anyone has done a percentage study/comparison of how many people post on the forums regularly, versus how many people finish their 50.000 words.

I discovered today that amazon’s new “search entire text of book” feature is good for something. You get to the end of their “sample pages” you can just search for the next page number! I’d never make it through a whole book that way (I’m guessing), but I’m excited to try! Who wants to make bets about how long the page numbers will be searchable?

Also, I’ve decided I really want to read Rucker’s The Hacker and the Ants.

(PS, this entry is over 330 words, words that could have gone towards the novel, damnit.)

Massive re-writes will be happening when this is done, I think. I’m tempted to do them now, but I think the idea is to just get everything down first, then clean it up, so I’m going to stick with that plan of action. The whole asteroid-mining thing needed some scientific consistency. I almost scrapped the concept entirely, but I think they’ll still be doing it, just on the same asteroid for months at a time rather than flitting from one to the next. There are simply a) not enough asteroids for that to continue all that long as a career, and b) not asteroids close enough to one another. The time period is still akin to the gold rush, the scale has just been cut back some.

Of course, none of this helps me find a plot. Lesbian Space Vampires may or may not make an appearance. That was Travis’s contribution to my novel, but I mutated it into Lesbian Space Ninjas, as I’d already mentioned the vampire thing, and I didn’t want to have to wait to tie them in.

In an hour, I’ll be in a movie theater about to watch the finishing sequel to the Matrix. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Critics have panned it, but it could be good anyway, who knows? I’ve invited my friend Alex, who told me yesterday that he’s going to do the nanowrimo thing with me!!! Yes! A partner in crime. And he’s leaning towards space opera, which is simmilar to my genre.

Ok, so the second installment is live. I feel like I’ll never do it. Every word was forced. My entire entry. I even started different places, completely new characters, and I don’t know that any of it was good. If this were just a short story, I would force myself to stick with one narrative, but that was getting agonizing. I’m not sure if I can do it. Maybe I’m not cut out for it. I didn’t think it’d be this hard. I hope I can make something interesting happen. Maybe I should just break from the plausible entirely. I think I’d have more fun that way. I do so admire people who’ve done it well…

It’s like I’m trying to write hard SF so far, and I’m not even sure that’s my favorite genre. I’m a much bigger fan of the surreal sci-fi (Noon and Rucker are my favorites), and the humorous pseudo-real (I’m thinking Douglas Adams now). I should really read more for inspiration, but I don’t have time. I think I spent at least 3 hours last night, and tonight it was more like 4 (with some sleeping thrown into the middle of them, so that may not be entirely fair, but STILL).

I am talentless and worthless in ways I didn’t even imagine before starting this exercise. I must endure… no matter the cost to my time or patience. This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic. Wish me luck; I need your encouragement.