More internet frustrations

LJ won't allow me to add "rocking like a rocking thing" to my interests. How screwed up is that?

*whistles cheerfully* (brief mention of NaNoWriMo)

Today is going to be a good day. I have decreed it so.

It doesn't matter that I had to deal with two crises that had nothing to do with me this morning. It doesn't matter that I'm up to my ears in filing. It doesn't matter that I'm behind for the NaNoWriMo wordcount challenge for tonight.

Today is going to be a good day.

1- The crises are over. I got to think "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine," even though I couldn't say it aloud, and I still had to deal with them. It's over, and things are back to normal.

2- Another manager went to bat for me. She told off the CAM for making her crisis my crisis, when it's not my job or my responsibility. In fact, she told her so in no uncertain terms, and loudly. It was gratifying.

3- The filing is getting under control. The pile is smaller and no longer threatening to topple over and smother a hapless passer-by.

4- I will make up my wordcount at lunch and in the two hours before the meeting tonight. I did it last week, I can do it this week.


Today is going to be a good day. It will only be a bad day if I let it be a bad day. I am teh Captain of the Carpet Ship, and what I say goes.

Therefore, using my Great Powers For Awesome, I will turn this into a good day.

Ph34r me.

I almost forgot!

This is a shameless plug.

There is a serial out there, being written by a friend of mine, t!. It's called Baker's 12 (Pronounced "twelve").

I will not even attempt to describe said serial properly, because it would probably break my brain to do so.

Suffice it to say that it is awesome. It has time travel (lots of it), bank robberies, people falling off cliffs ("You see a cliff, I see a steep gradient..."), torture, more time travel, questions the meaning of personal identity, and basically takes the world and holds it upside-down, dribbles with it for a while, bounces it around, shakes it up, then puts it down and steps back to see what happens.

I think that covers about 10% of the serial. I can't really tell you what it's about. I'm not sure t! knows himself the full extent of the work he's produced.

What you should do, though, is go read it today. Standard threats of domiciliary arson apply if you don't.

In order to preserve people's sanity, he's reposting each instalment one day at a time in his LJ: baronscartop. He started yesterday, so you have plenty of time to catch up. New episodes will occur in March.

Bright and shiny ideas (NaNoWriMo and sundry)

Part of me wants to stay up right now and write write write. Thanks once again to ai731 and her Wednesday Word Count Challenge, I have overcome the stupid writing block that plagued me on Monday and Tuesday. It wasn't words that were lacking, it was how to make the plot go forward. So, instead, I went backward and gave the serial killer his own chapter. Before, he'd had a thousand-odd words to himself in a section of a chapter. Today he got his very own chapter, and I allowed him to rant for more than 2,000 words.

So now, I have momentum, even though I'm tired. If I keep writing now, I will be tired like a tired thing tomorrow, and then I'm seeing the new Harry Potter film, and then I'll get home late and it'll all be bad. I am still debating whether or not to keep writing. I am way ahead of where I thought I would be on this day, but I want to get a lot more writing done before Sunday, since I won't be home all day that day. I have a knitting date with looking4wings. Woo!


The "problem" with being surrounded by creative people, is that they stimulate my desire to create stuff. Not just writing, although that's the main way in which I express my creative side, but crafty stuff, too. So I've had an idea (well, someone suggested it) for a knitting project, and another idea for a quilt, and... wait for it... another idea for a novel.

( Yes, a novel. )

This brings me to another shiny new idea. Since I'll be writing a novel, it will need a notebook. Now, up until recently I haven't paid that much attention to my notebooks. They're just spiral-bound things of about 100 pages, because 100 pages fills up at a reasonable rate, which means I get a lot of writing done, but I also get to have a brand-new notebook at reasonable intervals.

Then my friend owldaughter mentioned a really neat thing in her blog that she does when she starts a new book project. Namely, she designs and creates a special collage notebook cover for the new project. She thinks about the characters and the themes and the general feel of the book (all depending on whether it's fiction or non-fiction, or course), picks out images and so forth, and goes about creating the notebook cover. She wrote about it in this entry, in case you're interested in reading it in her own words.

Seeing that, I thought: "Hey, that's a fantastic idea!" And now I'm trying to think up exactly what my new notebook will look like for this novel project. In other words, there's a lot more to be excited about than just the writing of the novel.

In other words, starting in December I will have a minimum of four projects on the go, and that number may go up to six, depending on whether or not some projects stretch out longer than I anticipate. This is exciting, but also vaguely disturbing. When am I going to find time for all of this?

Cross-posted to secret_history.