It Came From Outer Space…

Or should I say that I reached my goal?
As of an hour or so ago my wordcount is at 25212, which means I beat the goal I set of 25000.
I wanted to make sure I did a good stretch of writing today because I work tomorrow from 7 a.m to 3 p.m. so I doubt I’ll get much done tomorrow, if anything at all. I ended at the end of a chapter, and am hoping to work on the story some more at a later date. There’s a lot of work that has to be done on it. A lot of things that I thought would work while planning really don’t work as I’m trying to write things out; and certain elements or rather character perspectives were a lot harder to write from than I thought.

Still I’ve written the most this month since I did this time last year, and that’s saying a lot. A friend of mine has put together a community on LJ for “Nanoing all year round” Nanowrimo_ayr and I just requested to join in the hopes that I can keep going with motivation of fellow writers all year rather than just in November and get some writing done on other stories that I’ve been trying to get to work over the years. I think the first one I might tackle is “The Ledger” which is about a group of D&D players who get to experience what is a lot of players dreams fighting monsters in real life but, of course, it’s nothing like the game and a lot more dangerous.

I keep thinking maybe if I use spring plungers I can suck the ideas out of my brain and redeposit them on paper. I can’t come up with words for that but I can write blog posts. I could cut and paste all of those into my NaNo document, but that’s cheating just as surely as writing “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty —” would be to fill a few pages.

There are lots of cheats on the NaNo forum for ways to pad word count. Ones I remember and have used are just to describe everything in infinite detail, it makes me feel like Tolkein. However, others I’ve seen and not used are to have your cast members start singing “100 Bottles of Beer on the wall” or have them have to explain things over and over again to a character with amnesia, or have someone with a really thick accent who several people can’t understand them and either keeps having to repeat himself or has to keep being translated.

I’ve just broken 24K words, and am stuck, which annoys me because I have less than a thousand to go and I meet my personalized goal. I took a break just now to clean up the kitchen a little hoping that things would come to me a little more, but so far they haven’t so I’m going through and looking at different blogs so I’ll see if something will come to me while I’m writing other things.

I hope those of you out there still working on NaNo aren’t experiencing this sort of writer’s block, and I have to give a shout out to Dethas, Hero and Jackdaw on my NaNo buddy list who have already won! Congratulations!

I’ve been watching a lot of the show ‘Criminal Minds’ lately. I saw a few episodes of the second season and it intrigued me the way that it works. The more I watch I can see the formulaic parts of the show, but the dynamic between the main members of the BAU and their intelligence and dedication impresses me to see more, especially because they’re shown as fallible, people have been shot, there have been screw-ups and some have resigned, and the core tries to pick up and carry on, rather than just moving on they’re shown struggling and coming to terms with every case, and how deeply it not only affects them but their families given they’re having to deal every day with the dregs of humanity and people doing extremely depraved things, especially as they try primarily to catch serial killers.

It also shows a lot of very accurate procedures, when children go missing they put up amber alerts and have certain protocols to go through, they’ve used school alert systems and police, and also I like the fact that despite the fact that they’re a branch of the FBI unlike many cop shows where there’s such rivalry and horrendous portrayals of the local law enforcement if the show is from the FBI’s perspective and vice versa, the people from the BAU always teach the local LEOs with respect, and in one recent episode one of the BAU members actually called her superior to task for being disrespectful to a LEO.

I may be a bit biased on that one being married to law enforcement, but it’s nice to see them being accurate. I do also have a soft spot for Garcia, the technical analyst. She’s a Geek Goddess the way I would love to be.

Nanowrimo, I mean. There are two days to go and I’ve got to 23075 word count. There’s no way I can write 12K per day for the next two days and get to 50000. I’d probably have an easier time losing 5lbs on a quick weight loss diet than that.

However, when I started out I said I wasn’t going to push myself to win, and while I did have a few days of freaking out I’ve come to terms with the fact that what I’ve written is great, if I can get to 25K that will be awesome, because that’s the most I’ve written all year, in fact it’s the most I’ve written since last years NaNo when I did actually win, so that’s awesome. A friend of mine is planning random WriMos for the rest of the year because it’s her first year doing NaNo and I’m hoping to participate because I’d love to keep writing throughout the year, even if I do a few hundred words per day that will be brilliant because I may actually finish some of the stories that I’ve been working on for years.

So, I suppose despite not winning Nano I’m still winning overall because things are coming to me and the cogs are turning, and they’re not going to seize up just because November is over.

I’ve had so little sleep over the past few days I’m sure I’ll be needing industrial strength wrinkle cream soon.

Today when hubbie got up at nine he sent me back to bed to rest and I didn’t see the light of day until almost one. I still feel drained, but I’ve at least been able to do the dishes and get something to eat.

However, I’ve not written anything for a few days, especially not on NaNoWriMo. I need to see if I can write some more, but it’s been difficult to focus with the lack of sleep affecting my creativity.

Warning: a rare warning on this one because it contains coarse language. I found this as I was going through an archive of a now closed blog. It was originally written in October of 2008.

You Did Not but You Did

You did not bear me,
But you wore me down.
You did not break me,
But I’m fractured all the same.
You did not kill me,
Yet you buried me with lies.
You did not fuck me,
But you screwed me over.

That’s all I’ve been able to manage today; but then my lack of brain usefulness was my own fault for trying to use NyQuil as a sleeping pill last night. I was hungover all day. It was about as productive as eating nothing but cookies is for fast weight loss.

I got to sleep, sure…but the medicine wanted me to sleep for the entire day and so I was groggy, foggy, irritable and narcoleptic. Not great for achieving anything. I’m lucky I managed to get groceries, but then that was helped with a Dew infusion. I’m definitely off the caffeine though. It took me several hours to drink the Dew. I used to down an entire bottle in a few minutes, and be back for more. So, that’s a good thing. My body’s detoxing from that…however, the creativity hasn’t been up to much, nor has the functioning.

Hopefully now I’ve managed to restock on my sleeping medication things can be back to normal tomorrow. Though if I have any hope of catching up on NaNo I need to write almost 8K tomorrow at least…heheh. Maybe I should just shoot for writing a bit more than 40 words…8K is an insurmountable obstacle that will just alienate me from the start.

I’m stalled with NaNoWriMo once again. The past few days I’ve not been feeling so great, and haven’t been up to much in the way of writing, and so other than a few hundred words that I wrote last night I’ve been around 14000 for the past few days, current goals indicate that it’s supposed to be around 28K by now, so I’m halfway behind again and I’m not sure what I’d be doing as far as catch up because I seem to have lost the thread of where I was going somewhere along the line.

I’m trying to skip ahead a little in the hopes of picking things up, perhaps I can talk about one of Kelsey’s alters being interested in carolina designs, something, anything to actually get the words going again. I think part of my problem is that I already know that I’m going to be scrapping half of what’s been written or at least moving it to later in the story to try and salvage it, because the way things are being written right now there’s nothing much in the way of actual action going on compared to what I was hoping for when I originally decided on the plot, some times that’s not a bad thing, but in this case I feel as though things are dragging a lot in certain ways, where I’ve been writing pages about things that aren’t entirely relevant just to keep writing.

So, today I haven’t written anything, at least for NaNo. Breaking my own pledge from this morning. I just haven’t been able to focus or come up with where things should go. I tried distracting myself, looking up how to burn fat in different ways, working on our Etsy shop, taking photographs, taking my son on a walk, doing the dishes, reading up on different things for a game I’m supposed to be participating in, but nothing.

I have 55 minutes if I’m going to keep my “write at least something a day” rule; because I’m hoping not to get into that spiral where it goes several days without writing anything and makes it all the harder to actually connect with the story the longer it stretches out…but I’m not sure. I’m in brain-mush at the moment which makes it even harder.

I’m having some issues picking up where I left off yesterday, if you see the last portion I wrote you may understand why.

So she lay still and tried not to say anything, because that was playing along with the game and then the game would be over because she had been good and played along, and Maddie, Maddie was really good at the game now, she wasn’t saying anything at all. She was just staring straight ahead, like Snow White when she ate the apple, so Maddie, Maddie would get to go home first, she knew that, but maybe if she kept just as quiet they would both get to go home.
Maddie was the one here trapped here. She could never leave.
It didn’t matter how cold it got, or how much it rained, or if the ground shook. She was still here. She liked to paint, pictures could be distracting, and she wanted to sing, but that would be too much noise and that would make him angry. When he was angry that was going to be bad. He would know if she was telling, or if she was bad. He would know and then she would be in trouble from him and from her family. So she knew that she wasn’t going to be talking about it, maybe she just shouldn’t talk at all, that would make things a lot safer.
But that would make her family angry. Her mother didn’t like when she didn’t say anything, it made her angry and it made her cry and Mom and Dad would fight with each other then and shout about her, and Des would be unhappy too.
Des was always unhappy. She could see him sitting in his room. He didn’t play football or soccer any more. He stayed inside and tried to get her to play Snakes & Ladders with him or Ludo.
Dad would drive her to a special lady who kept telling her that she would listen whenever she wanted to talk, and that was something to not tell Mom either, wasn’t it? Mom would get mad about that. She thought the lady was a waste of time.
Still he had to be there. He was watching, always watching. It wasn’t going to matter where she went. Sometimes she saw him looking through her window, so she would sleep in her closet, curled up in blankets underneath her clothes, everyone would always think to look under the bed, so that wasn’t a safe place to go.
So, she would sleep in the closet, it was warm and snug, and one day he would stop watching and it might be safe to talk again.

I decided that should be the end of the chapter, and I need to decide where to pick up for the next chapter — but that’s tricky. I need a Garmin GPS to navigate my way out of this one. I’ve been trying not to keep pressure on myself…because I know that doesn’t help getting out of a writer’s block but it’s hard with my perfectionist nature to not get hung up on these things.