What is this, Horseville? 'Cause I'm surrounded by naysayers. Wordplay!

I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping up with NaNo for a whole week. I missed a few evenings due to work/play/laziness but made up for it and was back on track last night.

The key is to just not do anything else. Even when I really do not want to write, I sit down and make myself do it. The idea that I'll just have to make the word count up later is a great motivator. I truly wish I'd taken the time to sketch out an outline before I started, because I only have a very vague idea of what my plot actually is. I know I could go ahead and do that now, but then that's writing without any of it counting towards my total words and I can't have that.

My main issue at this point in the main character. Her characterization is all over the place and it's is practically killing me to not go back and edit. I have an idea of what I want her to be in my head: easily annoyed but also quite flighty. And on paper she's just coming off as a snob, not simply disinterested. I want her to be funny, but with an edge and it's totally not working. I'm frustrated and as a result getting more invested in secondary characters... which isn't helpful.

It's not helping that I'm also reading Catching Fire which, while it's not as good as The Hunger Games I still love it. It's making me very anxious about my own writing.

ETA: Forgot to mention my knitting debacle! So, I'm not a knitter. I prefer crocheting (not that I do that much of it), but recently I picked up a pattern for a knit hat. It's a very loose beret and I thought it was adorable. It was marked as "easy" so I thought: SCORE. I'd only attempted knitting once before, but the double needle thing was tricky for me. So, I had to reacquaint myself with casting off and the stitches (thanks youtube!) and was on my way.

The first issue came when my cats got into the yarn. I woke up Saturday morning to the entire ball of yarn unwound and knotted throughout my entire living and dining room area. We're talking around multiple table legs on multiple tables. They couldn't have done this with the cheap yarn I picked up for practice, no, it had to be the fancy stuff. UGH. CATS.

Then I totally failed on stockinette stitch. I read that it was one row of knit and one row of purl. Okay, I thought, simple enough. So I was doing that and... it did not look right. I thought maybe I got my stitches turned around or something, so I kept going, but it didn't look anything like the picture. Then I realized that you're supposed to turn the piece when you do the purl side, only I was working on circular needles, so how the hell was I supposed to do that? Then I searched youtube and realized when you're working in the round you just keep using the knit stitch. You don't have to worry about purl stitching at all. Awesome. I'd just wasted hours and had to rip everything out.

This hat better be AMAZING when I'm done.

ETA THE SECOND: Who out there has an ebook reader? I'm starting to think I'd... really really like one. I've poopoo-ed (NO idea how to spell that) reading on the computer for so long, because I love actually holding a book in my hands. But the idea of carrying around a whole library also really appeals to me. I've browsed around a bit, but I'm wondering if anyone on my flist has a preference. I'm leaning towards the Nook over the Kindle because I'd be able to put library books on the Nook. You have to strip the DRM off of them in order to put them on the Kindle, which sounds like kind of an (illegal) hassle. THOUGHTS, PLEASE.

Guys? I am so. old. It's not often that I over indulge in the alcohol department these days, but this weekend was an exception. One of my sorority sisters got married and while I had an awesome time, I'm still paying for it. It was great to catch up girls I haven't seen in nearly five years. Everyone is great, off being lawyers and psychologists and mothers and other wonderful things. We're all very grown up and respectable ...and then the music starts and we're all back in college.

The only downside was the six hour car trip back home. Hungover. I had zero patience for fools.

OH! And then I watched The Walking Dead last night, loved it, AND THEN TURNED IT OFF BEFORE IT WAS OVER. I had no idea it was an hour and a half episode. It got to be 11 and I thought I missed the ending credits so I turned the tv off. WTH, me? So now I gotta go find it so I can finish the episode.

Colts play the Texans tonight and I am very concerned. I'm not even going to talk about it beyond hoping that we'll have enough players left after all the injuries and drunken canal-swimming shenanigans that occurred in the past couple of weeks.

ALSO: NaNo. LET'S DO THIS.

I'm amazed at how much I'm enjoying Playful Kiss, especially considering I really had no desire to check it out in the beginning. But now I'm super invested. One complaint:

What was going on with the editing in episode 11? I never thought of PK as a drama that would make me question reality.

Also: I need for all the jdramas I'm watching to hurry up and get their subs by the end of the month. I will not be distracted from NaNo, dammit!

ETA: Female Character Flowchart - I figure most everyone has already seen this, but I thought I'd link it just in case. Funny how it seems pretty much every female character is a stereotype/trope/poorly written. Hilarious, really. It reminds me of an essay I read about the term "Mary-Sue" and how we need to stop using it. I wish I could find the link, because I'm really not going to be any good at giving the topic justice. Basically, it just serves to undermine female authors.

ETA Dos: Apparently I can't find the link because it's been locked, which is sad because I think everyone should read it. But darkeyedwolf found a snippet of it over at Fanlore. Here's a short quote that I think represents the argument well:

Writing "Mary Sues" is empowering. Writing them being awesome is empowering. Calling Mary Sue, and contributing to an environment such as the above, which encourages the denigration of female awesomeness in fiction, which encourages the bullying and harassment of participants in female awesome, is participating in that culture.

Calling "Mary Sue" in this environment is shaming women for empowering themselves.

Current NaNo word count:

21294 / 50000 words. 43% done!

So I made some awesome progress on my NaNo novel, and now I'm stuck. I kind of hate my story. I know that you're just supposed to keep writing, but I'm lost. I never really had a full plot figured out in my head, just a few scenes floating around. Those are written now and I feel kind of screwed.

I think part of my problem is the tone of the story. It's very serious. I don't really do serious. I've written a few things that can be classified as straight-up drama, but I feel far more comfortable in the world of comedy. When I started this, I think I fancied myself capable of keeping on my serious hat for the extent of it. That's not possible. I enjoy reading and watching drama, but I just don't think I have the chops to write a legitimate dramatic novel.

There can be dramatic moments, but I'm much more comfortable with characters cracking wise. That may mean I'm limited as a writer, but I do like to think I can do comedy fairly well. I think I just need to work on finding that happy balance where there is enough drama to make the story matter, but not enough that I just feel stuck in the mud.

All my characters have the capacity to be in a story with a different tone. There are just some plot elements that need to be modified. That's not going to happen now. You never ERASE when it comes to NaNo. I'll just have to bust myself out of this funk.

It would also help if I had a plot. =_=

Autumn is my favorite season. Too bad it only lasts for about three weeks. It's raining pretty hard today, which makes me sad. While I love summer thunderstorms, rain in October just means the pretty leaves get knocked off the trees. And I have a yard this year, so I have to rake.

I signed up for NaNo again this year (my username is D. Coyle if anyone wants to buddy me, I'm not sure if anyone else is participating). I made a good dent in the word count last year, but got disillusioned pretty early on. There were plenty of things to distract me. I hope to rap up Karei Naru Spy and Return of Iljimae this weekend so I won't have any desire to sneak peeks at them instead of writing. The only other two dramas I'm watching are You're Beautiful and Smile, You. That's roughly four hours a week I'll give to drama watching. I may put a pause on my normal tv viewing. I haven't been that enamored of Glee recently, so I'm not that concerned. I can always play catch up with FlashForward and Vampire Diaries in December when nothing is on tv anyway.

OH! I watched the pilot for the new USA show White Collar and it was pretty entertaining. I'm not ready to write it off as fantastic yet, because it was a little uneven, but it has the capacity to be a solid hour of entertainment. At some point I need to sit down and watch all the episodes of Psych. Sometimes I'll randomly watch it if I see it on, but that's it. Anyway, if you like Psych you should probably check out White Collar. Plus, it has Matthew Bomer who is so incredibly pretty (I'm such a sucker for blue eyes and dark hair) and dresses like a Rat Packer.

So, I kept ignoring the emails from Geocities about how they were shutting down. I kept saying I'd get around to moving my stuff (I hosted my lj css file over there) but I never did. So now I have some default layout up while I shop around for something I like. So many layout are so ugly...