I’m hovering somewhere around 13,700 words as of today. Mathematically, every six days this month, we NaNo’ers should have completed another 10,000 words. So, by the end of the day today (the twelfth of November), I should be at 20,000 words.
Ha.
My goal is to get to 15,000 before going to bed tonight. My reward will be ice cream. Even if it’s at midnight.
While people like Dave Winer are really liking the new blog commenting platform Disqus, it isn’t agreeing with me. Why? Observe.
Sorry, but if I can’t track conversations with co.mments, then it’s useless to me.
Part of the reason these people like Disqus so much is because it makes it easier for them – the blog admins – to manage. What about a system that’s easier for their readers?
I should really be writing, I suppose. I wrote a measly 400 words Monday, and by Tuesday I was well over 3,000 words behind where I should have been. So in a flurry of writing, I got through another 1,200 words yesterday, so that I was within arm’s reach of the day six goal of 10,000 words. But not nearly close enough.
So, today, what do I do when I should be writing more of the novel? I draw. Lately I’ve been fascinated with the cutesy cartoon characterizations that Katie Cook draws. You can see more of her work on her frequently updated Livejournal. She does awesome drawings of Star Wars, Harry Potter, superheroes, and other geek media stuff. I love the style, and I’ve been meaning to try my hand at it to see what I could come up with.
I thought, if she’s doing geek movies and television, why don’t I attempt video games? And after reading Penny Arcade’s Monday comic, I thought that Assassin’s Creed would be a perfect place to start. So below is something that I whipped together over my lunch break today.
Yeah, I should stick to writing.
So, I’ve been gradually removing the games from my wish list lately as review scores come out and my anticipation for certain titles wane as real gameplay stories begin trickling in. After checking out the tracklist for Guitar Hero 3, I no longer have an interest in that game. Battalion Wars 2 is getting a lukewarm reception. Fire Emblem, I’m told, is a direct sequel to the GameCube version in both story and graphics. Pretty much all I have left to look forward to is picking up Zack & Wiki and Super Mario Galaxy, which are evidently both game of the year contenders.
Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your perspective), 2008 is shaping up to be a stellar year for the Wii. Here’s a rundown of the things I’m looking forward to next year:
And by the time we get to about mid-2008, this list will likely double in size. And this is just the Wii list. If I end up getting a DS for Christmas (as I likely will), I’ll have to start seriously looking at that library, as well.
And then, around this time next year, I’ll lament about how most of these games suck, and I’ll be looking forward to all the great stuff coming out in 2009.
Why am I a gamer again? Ugh.
I was able to bust through into Chapter 3 on Sunday, ripping through 1,800+ words in a single day. This was despite the fact that I had to take a lengthy break in the middle of the day to get all of our leaves cleaned up. My father helped me out, so a shout out of thanks go to him, of course. I’ll be repaying the favor by helping him setup his digital camera so he can download the roughly 3,000 photos he’s taken since they got the darned thing, and never bothered to figure out how to get them off.
I think I ended up picking up more leaves than I wrote words, but I’m okay with that. According to my progress sheet, I met 111% of my daily total (which is 1,667 words per day), and 97% of my cumulative daily total (which yesterday was 6,668 total words). I’m making pretty good progress, and the novel is coming together in ways I had never intended, which is awesome. I’m now 13% of the way towards 50,000 words. Now I just have to hope that my momentum continues past the fourth day.
How is everyone else making out?
Thanks to the Google Operating System blog, I now understand why my Gmail Notifier Firefox plugin stopped working suddenly this past week. Evidently, my Gmail account received an update recently. I wasn’t aware of this, but the update includes IMAP support, which is slick. I wouldn’t mind using Thunderbird for email, but I really prefer to just use the Gmail website since I like that interface more than any other email client I’ve ever used.
So, mystery solved. Hopefully the add-on developer can get a fix together for the new Gmail. Until then, I guess I can just manually check my email. Ugh.
She’s keeping me on task, that’s for sure. I was going to deal with only having about 700 words written for the day. And she talked me into continuing on, trudging mercilessly through another 600 words for a total today of 1,365.
Man, this is tough going. And it’s only day two! I can’t imagine how this is going to feel by day fifteen.
The worst part about this is that I can really only get any writing done late at night, when my brain has turned to mush. So I have very little motivation to get any writing done when I’m tired and not thinking clearly.
I guess that’s why the wife is keeping me focused! She knows I want to do this, and she’s going to keep me going through the whole thing.
There will be time to rest (and edit!) in December. For now … WE WRITE!
Wow. I started off with about 742 words half-heartedly punched out over my lunch break today. I guess my brain just wasn’t in it at the time. But just now, in about a half hour, I threw out another 1,200 words. The second section of chapter one just came running out of nowhere. It was fantastic. So now, I’m sitting at a really nice 1,937 for day one, and I’m probably not even done. I’ve got a few chores to do before I call it a night, and I just might take a crack at section three before I crawl into bed.
Maybe I can overtake 3,000 on my first day! Hey, it’s a goal!
I got my first batch of writing in today. I managed to hack together 742 words over my lunch break. It’s pretty awful, but then, it’s not necessarily supposed to be good. It’s just supposed to be.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to write when you’re staring at a blank page. Even when you have absolutely every detail of the story mapped out ahead of time. Outlines and prose are truly two very separate things.
Let’s hope I can get another thousand words strung together this evening and keep up a 1,600 word a day average.
Yikes.
By the way, check out my profile page (WARNING: the NaNoWriMo servers are running very slowly at the moment) to see a quick excerpt from the novel. It’s actually the very first part of the story you read.
Wow. I never saw this coming. It was one thing when Scott Kurtz announced that he and Kris Straub’s business-oriented “How to Make Webcomics” book was going to be written by all four of the webcomics horsemen, but now Brad Guigar and Dave Kellet have left Blank Label and joined Kris and Scott at Halfpixel (that was a lot of sequential links – I apologize for that). I wonder if Scott will also convince them to move to Dallas, Texas.
This is actually great news. These guys are truly four of the most successful webcomic cartoonists out there, and for all of them to combine their efforts and make a thriving business means only good things for us consumers of entertainment goods. I was expecting great things to come from the Scott / Kris partnership, and now I fully expect nothing but sheer awesomeness to come pouring out of the Scott / Kris / Dave / Brad partnership. Beyond just Webcomics Weekly.
I hereby declare this news to be full of win.