WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER

GUESS WHAT?!

I won at NaNoWriMo, for the first time ever!!

That's right, these past 29 days, I wrote 50,000 words of a novel. 50,081 words, to be precise. And the amazing thing is, tonight as I uploaded my word count (which I would obsessively check every 10 minutes or so on the website) I was in the middle of a scene, and could have kept going!

I'm not going to lie -- it was difficult, and I'm tired of writing. But I also feel the fire in me, that I used to feel when I would routinely crank out several thousands of words in a single sitting. It's incredible what getting into a habit can do for your productivity!!

My story has a lot more to it! I still have to get the dead sister in league with the witch, and set her on her bounty-hunter plot line (that's my favorite story arc so far, I'm really pleased with it).

Hard at work

It wasn't until I gave up at writing a good story that I actually began to write and write productively. I concentrated on cranking out my word count, and for a long time, I struggled. You can see it in my bar graph.

Time, captured using math and pictures

I was six days late hitting the halfway mark. Then on day 25, I wrote over 6,000 words. That was the day when I gave up trying to advance plot, make it funny or poetic or rational or wise. I just let everything go. First, I made all the characters have sex, because sex is incredibly easy and satisfying to write. Then some people got into fights, because action is easy and satisfying to write. Then I chucked in a few more characters, killed off some people, ditched the talking fox, and introduced a witch. It was all free-flowing words from then on out, and the best part is, it was FUN. 

Fun is the most important part!!

I'm just pleased as punch to have won, after two years of failure.

Hopefully I will keep on writing. I'd like to keep going tomorrow, and see how many words I can write before I get tired of this story. Maybe I'll even end the story! Momentum triumphs!!

How have you been doing this November?
Did you participate in NaNoWriMo?

Things I Love Thursday - Excuses, excuses!

It's that time again! Oink oink!

Hey everybody!
I was thinking today that I've been remiss in posting content, and TiLT is becoming the only thing going on around here.

In a sense that is the case...

I'll change! BUT (you knew there was a "but", didn't you?) it IS really busy around here these days, and I feel like I'm drowning or at least struggling in a lot of areas, trying to keep up. I have to make choices and it's hard. BUT (again!) I'm going to keep doing my best to juggle everything.

Lately, I've been laughing a lot more often.

Haha!

♥ I love laughing! Sometimes I'll just be going along, and find something really funny in my thoughts, or just release some tension or stress by laughing really loudly and hard. I spend a lot of my driving hours singing, talking to myself, and laughing out loud. It's a big breath of fresh air for my thoughts!

♥ I love YA Fiction! Remember the books I talked about last time? I'm into the third book of The Immortals series now ♥

♥ I love my internship! It's been so so very interesting and the hours just fly by when I'm working with archival materials!

♥ I love how beautiful the snow is ♥ It took me a little while to get over my shock at the cold, and the constant screaming of "Noooooo!!!" but now when I wake up, the sun is reflecting off the white ground and making every room light up beautifully. 

♥ I love riding along for handbrake turns and donuts in snowy parking lots. Wheeee!!

♥ I love my exciting plans coming up -- going to a show, working doors at another show, dinner with fellow library students, Black Friday brunch (!!!!!), and.. well that's about it for the moment. 

Life is good, isn't it? 

Things I Love Thursday - Book Nostalgia

The other day, a coworker asked me to tell my favorite memory from the 90's.

I said I didn't have any.

(This was a lie).

I asked him his. He told me.

He asked about TV that was playing at the time, but I told him I didn't watch TV in the 90's, and have no frame of reference for most of the stuff that people my age were talking about.

(This was the truth).

I read books instead. Saying this, I remembered, very fondly, the books that I read in that time of my life.

Oh! So I must have had a good memory of the 90's.

No. I love those books, but the reason I was reading them was to distract from the fact that I was very, very unhappy.

(This was a partial truth).

The real story is this: The 90's were pretty damn good to me. I had a lot of anxieties, very few friends, and no understanding of the real nature of the bigger world. I read a lot, for fun. Always for fun.  I had a pretty good time. I had a good life. I was pretty happy. At the end of the 90's, my life changed, and I spent the early 2000's, until I graduated high school, with my head buried in a book. For a while, I buried my head in some guy's face, but the books were better. Always better.

I didn't bury the 90's because they were no happy memories. I choose not to remember them because they were good, and it's often painful to remember them. I talked about being unhappy as if it were a thing I got over, but actually, it's just been a part of my life that I've gone through for the last 15 years.

Sometimes I look back, and talk about my childhood with a smile on my face, because it truly makes me happy to think about. And sometimes I think about it quietly and get furious and wish I lived in a parallel universe where things weren't so damn broken.

Anyway, here is a very retro Things I Love Thursday Friday Saturday:

Oink Oink, Lovers!

Did you know I was gonna love books? Did you? Did you?

Oh my gosh you guys. Look at these books (just look at them!). These are my buddies. My besties. You can see Brian Jacques's Redwall series (the 9 good books, although I'm always on the fence about Outcast of Redwall), Patricia C Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and Tamora Pierce's The Song of the Lioness quartet (I also own The Immortals quartet, and the Protector of the Small quartet, because of course I do). You can also see Michael Crichton's The Lost World (same copy that I first read in the 6th grade, battered but holding on) and Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton's Elvenbane, which opened the floodgates for everything that Mercedes Lackey has ever written oh my god don't even get me started. 

♥ I love these books. Without reserve. These are, without a doubt, the books that informed and began the avalanche that is my current collection. 

♥ I love these authors. They all have extremely strong feminist themes in their books (Ok maybe Crichton not so much in his other stuff, but in The Lost World the ladies kick some ass and challenge some ideas about women and math and stuff) and that really inspired me as a kid. I'm re-reading The Immortals right now, and as soon as Alanna showed up and I remembered Oh yeah, Alanna married George and they both remained amazing individuals and I got a huge grin on my face because I love Alanna and I love that she became a knight and had piles of adventures and chose her own father figure and chose her own lovers and went and got the Dominion Jewel from the ancient gods themselves even though the Dragon forbade her from doing it, and everyone told her not to, she did it because she loved her country and her king, and how she got Jon to marry someone else because she knew what was best and Jon would have done the wrong thing for all the "right" reasons if she let him have his way. She was true to herself all the way to the end and she never stopped with just herself, she always made everyone else shape up and stop being idiots stuck in a limiting mindset. Oh my god I love Alanna so much I could explode.

♥ I love the characters. See above.

♥ Redwall feasts!! Brian Jacques wrote for blind kids, so his text is always super-dense with descriptive imagery, especially when he talked about food, and those damn mice and rabbits and squirrels and hedgehogs were always throwing super elaborate feasts for whatever reason. All I wanted to do when I was 13 was run away, join an abbey (whatever that meant), and cook pies and cheeses and salads and tarts until I died. Who wants to have a Redwall picnic with me?? Here is a page of reader-created recipes. I am going to put Meadowcream on EVERYTHING, hot damn. 

Slightly off-topic, but OK GO is coming to town and I'm about to walk out the door to go buy tickets and ♥ I LOVE THAT!! ♥