NotNaNo '24, final day

     Well.

    I've decided to stop writing for the day because I can't really come up with what to have the characters say next.

    This fic is so far so much talking that even by my standards it's mind-numbing to have them talk so much.  If I ever finish it, massive sections of it will have to be torn out and replaced with something that is less...well....boring.  The amount of infodumping is especially awful, but because I'm working with alternate history and alternate versions of the work it's a fanfic of, it's going to be very tricky to find a way to get that information out there without it just being an infodump.  But I guess I can worry about that if and when I finish the first draft.

    Anyway.  I wrote 2116 words today, all on that one fic, which is now up to 16,033 words.

    My total for the month is 57,696 words, which may be the smallest number I have ever written during November since I started doing NaNo in 2011.

    The final chart for my progress is:

    And the day by day chart is:

    ...which is just really alarming to look at.  At least, that's how it seems to me, anyway.

    Although maybe it's not too much worse than last year's:

    ....nope.  Nope.  This year's is much worse, no matter how you look at it.

    I don't know how much of it is due to the horror of real life events, and how much is because I didn't have a strong project to work on.  (A small amount of it is due to not-necessarily-horrible real life events intervening, but there's really only a few days like that.)

NotNaNo '24, day 23 - breaking silence

     I haven't wanted to face the permanence of a blog post for quite a while.  Still don't, really, but...

    Anyway, I have still been writing every day, though there were a few days that I didn't even reach 500 words.  One day I didn't even reach 100.

    I've accomplished little things, though?

    I started the month trying to be hopeful and upbeat, so I was working on a happy fic, an AU for MDZS in which Wei Wuxian was raised at Cloud Recesses and so got to spend most of his life with Lan Wangji, and it was a No War AU, so everything was happy and hopeful all the way through.  (Which actually made it sort of boring after a while because that removed the entire plot of the novel and most of the conflict, but...)  I finished it a while back, and it rounded out at 19,513 words.

    I was also working on a pre-existing My Time at Sandrock fic, but that's been sort of...meh.  I don't know if I'll ever finish it, because it's turning out a little too much like "here's the plot of the game" and not sufficiently "here's my own story about the game's characters and world."

    After finishing the WWX-raised-in-Gusu fic, I decided to do a canon compliant AU based on The Untamed's version of MDZS, one in which Wen Qing survived, having been held as a prisoner by the Jin Clan for the last sixteen years.  (And which also ends with Wei Wuxian confessing his love to Lan Wangji, who of course has loved him from the day they met, so happy romantic ending there.)  That one I finished a few days ago, and it came to 11,177 words total.

    So, after puttering around pointlessly on the Sandrock fic for a while, yesterday's words were actually all just brainstorming words for the new fic I started today, which took some working out, because it's a massive and complicated idea.  (No idea how long it will end up being, but the idea is still massive and complicated.)

    It's a crossover between a modern AU of MDZS and Velvet Goldmine, inspired by the anime Ya Boy Kongming, in which a dying Zhuge Liang is transported to modern-day Tokyo (and youthified in the process, thankfully) where he helps a young singer with her career.  As I was watching that show, I had wanted to find a way to do that with MDZS, making Lan Wangji the one to be transported to the modern world.

    I figured out a way, and it's a multi-fandom crossover event, in that there will be a lot of other bands who are cameos from other fandoms, but the Velvet Goldmine connection is major, because Wei Wuxian's band is trying to enter a contest that will net them a contract from the record label owned by the now-septuagenarian Curt Wild.  And Wei Wuxian lives in the Chinatown of a fictional city that is actually the setting of my first visual novel, A Song of Warriors...just because.  (That visual novel was itself heavily inspired by Velvet Goldmine, which is kinda meta in and of itself, but...)

    I bring this up because it's particularly mind-boggling in connection with what happened today.

    There's a tradition in my family of family visits on the weekends.  Used to be on Sundays only, but it gets moved around a lot these days, and so today my brother and I went to visit my parents even though it's Saturday.  We made the rash decision to eat out for lunch instead of getting take-out somewhere, and that was crazy because there were mobs of people everywhere.

    After we ate, we went back to my parents' house to watch some TV together, because for some reason that's what we do.  And what we watched was the first episode of the Hulu show Interior Chinatown.  Which is set in the Chinatown of a fictional city.

    After that, my brother wanted to watch the 1980s-styled opening credits for the Obi-wan Kenobi mini-series that someone had put on Youtube a while back.  And that starred Ewan McGregor.  Who played Curt Wild.  (And the present-day sequences of Velvet Goldmine took place in the 1980s.  As did my visual novel, in fact.)

    This level of coincidence is just too weird, you know?

    Kinda freaks me out.

    It's like proof that we don't live in the real world, we live in a Matrix-like fake world.  One that I suspect has a very nasty virus.

    Uh.

    Yeah.

    Anyway.

    Here's my current NotNaNo graphs.

Current total is 44,048 words.  The by-the-day chart, though...

    It just shouldn't look like that.

    At all.

NotNaNo '24, Day 4: title already not found

     Just a note at the start of the day that I added 422 words to the MDZS fic last night, bringing it up to 8,317 words.  So I won't forget and add that to today's total instead of yesterday's.  😅

    Overall, I think I'm working on too many projects here; they're starting to make things confusing.  I added another 1,114 words to the Sandrock fic before I reached the spot to insert the contest story into it, and from there I added another 754 words after that.  (At least on future days on that one there won't be stuff I wrote a previous day getting inserted into the middle of what I'm writing. 😅)

    Went back to the MDZS fic, and it's at 10,875 now, meaning I added 2,558 words to that one today.

    So....adding the two fics together...that's a total of 4,426 words today, if I am not a total freaking moron.

    And a total of 14,189 written in November to date.

    I decided to just go ahead and recycle the chart system I set up last year with the new data.  So here's today's graph:

    Oh crud.  I forgot to add in the 422 words to yesterday's total.  Okay, so that makes the overall total actually 14,611.  I'll fix the data on the graph before tomorrow...

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 3: Day 3 hates me

     I'm gonna put a read more tag on here straight away, on account of talking about very normal things that make some men squick out because men are just too fragile.

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 2: yup, it's day two all right

     Not much of a title, I know.

    Anyhow, I mean, it was both a good day and a bad day for writing?  (Though something started that really should no longer be a thing anymore at my age, which really, really, really, really, really, really sucks...!)

    I got through a fair chunk of words--over 4k--and through several scenes.  Including, appropriately enough, the scene wherein the ghosts of Wei Wuxian's parents are raised to identify him.  (Since he's still a small child and doesn't remember who his parents were.  Which is canonically the case:  by the time he was found in the streets of Yiling, all he remembered was that his name had a "Ying" in it.)  Which is, of course, appropriate because today is the Day of the Dead.

    On the other hand, I'm not sure if I need to put anything else in there to fill in the gap between him being eight years old and him being fifteen years old.  Since it's at fifteen that the story really picks up, what with that being when the rest of the cast comes to study at Cloud Recesses.

    I figure I'll worry about that later, though.

    Still haven't decided if I want to use something else to keep track of my progress, or even if I want to bother with a chart like I did last year.

    For right now...

    Words written as of yesterday:  2,700

    Words written today:  4,348

    Total words written in November to date:  7,048

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 1

     So...yeah, I could actually be doing this differently this year.  Someone in the writing channel of the game dev Discord server I'm in provided a link with a list of alternative writing challenge/tracking sites for November, and some of them looked pretty promising, but I didn't really feel like actually dealing with any of them today.

    I'm exhausted for a lot of reasons.

    First, the night before Halloween, a tornado warning ripped through here, and I was torn out of my sound sleep at about two in the morning by my phone blaring a tornado warning at me, and I didn't get back to sleep until about five in the morning.  (Ironically, despite being awake, I didn't hear the actual tornado sirens, because the TV show I had going to put myself back to sleep drowned them out.)  So yesterday I was operating on a sleepless night bookended by about two hours of sleep on either end.

    Needless to say, I was a total wreck yesterday.  And although I did get a good night's sleep last night, that wasn't really enough to make up for it, so I'm still not on top of my game today.  (Even worse, there's no leftover Halloween candy!  The local grocery store had already gotten rid of it all by this past Monday, and I of course went to my parents' house as usual so I wouldn't have to personally deal with trick-or-treaters, and they didn't buy enough so they actually ran out.  So I get no candy today! 😭)

    Then my brother and I went and tried to vote early.  It took us forever to find a parking place--literally the last one there--and then we went inside past the stupidly offensive signs (the anti-abortion people are desperate and making up the dumbest lies to encourage people to send us sliding down along the path towards The Handmaid's Tale)--and found that the line inside looked like it was at least an hour and a half long.  We were neither of us in any condition for that, so we just got the heck out of there.  Apparently the early voting will also be available over the weekend, so we're hoping that maybe it won't be too bad on Sunday morning, but...

    Anyway.

    Only by lunchtime did I manage to start writing for the day.  (Though I did actually write the first scene on my phone before lunch.  It's only a bit under 600 words, though.)

    It's a promising start for the fic.  (I decided to go with an AU where Wei Wuxian is raised among the Lan Clan.  Probably been done lots of times before, but...🤷  Probably most MDZS AU ideas have been done before in some capacity or another.  But it's not like any two fanfic authors would ever put exactly the same spin on the same idea, so I figure there's no point in worrying about it.)  I don't think it's shaping up to be very long, which is very good considering how long the last one ended up being!

    Anyway, I'll worry about how to properly keep track of my progress tomorrow.

    For the moment, I'll just use words/numbers on the screen:

    Goal for the month:  50,000 words

    Today's words:  2,700 words

    Total for the month:  2,700 words  (obviously!)

    And now I finally get to play My Time at Sandrock for the first time in about a month, because the 1.4 update is finally out on the PS5, so hopefully Fang will actually deliver his special line at the end of "The Goat," as that bug is allegedly fixed in 1.4.  (If he doesn't, then there wasn't a heck of a lot of point to me waiting all this time.  Though at least this way I'll get his romance mission from the new DLC before marriage instead of after.  Which is something, I guess.  Wish my Builder didn't have to be quite such a tiny little guy, though.  It's hard for Fang's mouth to reach his lips.  I shudder to think of the contortions they have to put the really tall love interests like Owen and Logan through!  (Though I'll definitely do a Logan playthrough eventually, so I guess I'll find out in due time...))

I feel like I should be worrying

 It's what, the 29th of October?

And I'm still not sure what I plan to do for NaNoWriMo.  (I mean, other than my usual "participate unofficially" thing.)

I could try writing prompts.

I could try one of the fanfic ideas from my massive file of them.  (Leaning towards the one where Wei Wuxian is raised by the Lan Clan, but not sure yet.  I could also try the other CQL-canon fic idea I had, but...dunno, that one feels sorta meh.)

I could try writing the idea I have for a (possibly hybrid) VN that would be loosely inspired by the story motifs and general atmosphere of danmei novels (but in an invented world that while inspired by ancient China would be distinctly not actually ancient China (you know, like Avatar:  The Last Airbender)) only it would be a romance between two women instead of two men.

Or...

...um...

I could try writing prompts.

Or I could try picking up that partially-written MDZS fan VN, but I don't know if that would work.  I mean, pretty much the whole reason I never finished it was that it just wasn't gelling with me.  (It would have helped if the artist who made the sprites available had released more characters. The ones I have to choose from I don't have much to say about, not without more characters being in the mix.)

Or I could try writing prompts.

Or, I mean, truthfully, I could just not bother, but...

...I've been doing NaNo (officially at first, then unofficially for the last...like five or six years?) since 2011.  Stopping now would feel pretty pitiful.  Or wrong.  Or empty.  Or something.

Gnh.

I just got nothing, you know?

And it bugs me that my phone has started thinking my common typos due to my big fat fingers and the teeny tiny phone keyboard are things I want to write.  😰  It's actually started "suggesting" things like "somethibg" because my fingers have a tendency to hit one letter over pretty frequently.  😭  (I should add a screencap showing that later. Can't do it now because they've changed how pictures are added and that prevents me from adding them on my phone. 😭)

NotNaNo '23, Day 30: Finally over with!

     Another November completed, another NotNaNoWriMo behind me.

    This one would have been a lot better if I hadn't started having heart palpitations again in the last four or so days of it.  😭  Still, I did at least manage to get through the "next few sequences" outline that I had guessed would take about 30-40k to write (I thought I said so in a post somewhere, but I'm not sure where...) and said outline's contents actually ended up taking 51k words.  Actually, maybe I said it would be 30-50k?  I don't know, I can't find where I said that (it may have been in one of my notes to myself somewhere and not in a post, as I just looked through a bunch of them and found nothing on that),  but either way...wait.  Wait.  No, I'm confused.  Did I say that about this section of outline or the earlier section of outline?  Or did I delete some steps from this section of the outline already?  Because--

    Ugh, you know what?  Never mind.  It doesn't matter.

    What does matter is that I said twice around the time that November started that the bit of outline I had would last me until December and it did!  Precisely!

    (Okay, I found where I gave numbers, and it was in the previous version of the outline that led up to this same point, where the final step on that outline started with "Aaaannnnnnnd I’m not sure how I’ll proceed from there, but this is actually quite a lot, probably another 20-40k, so I’ll worry about it later.  Much later." That outline turned into 110k. So apparently I have a very poor eye for judging how many words it's gonna take me to tell a story.)

    Anyway!

    So, I didn't break 100k this month, but I did finish the mini-outline I was working from (and now I need to write a new one before I can move forwards 😭) which was one of my goals for November, so I consider it a true win! 😆

    Final numbers!

    Total words in document: 343,792

    Words written today: 8,730

    Words written in November, total: 93,792

    Pretty version:

    Also, here's the words by day version for the whole month:

    In other news, this happened today:

    Thought that one was fun. 😋

    Also, I wanted to share this exchange I wrote today:

            Jiang Cheng’s face mottled crimson so dark it was almost purple, and he shoved Wei Wuxian’s hand away as if it was a poisonous snake.  “Don’t you have any shame, Wei Wuxian?!”

            “None to speak of.”  Wei Wuxian shook his head.  “But I do have principles, Jiang Cheng.  You know that.”

    I have fun with their brotherly relationship.  (Also with Wei Wuxian's utter lack of shame.)

    Anyway, with all this finally behind me, I will probably take a few days off from writing in order to unwind.  Also to focus on reading.  (I'm still not caught up in rereading Heaven Official's Blessing, even though the final volume is sitting there on the table, begging me to hurry up and read it! 😭)  I also haven't even started Persona 5 Tactica yet, and I already saw a Youtube thumbnail that teased me with something possibly awesome being in it, so I want to get to that in a hurry, too...(though I am trying not to get my hopes up too high, lest they be dashed yet again...)

NotNaNo '23, Day 29: Sometimes it feels like a curse

     I swear, my body hates me.  Most of my health problems come from my weight.  I'm aware of this.  (I say "most" because my asthma definitely does not.  Nor my poor eyesight.)  But every time I try to lose weight, somehow I do it wrong and make everything worse.

    As I said, sometimes it feels like a curse.

    Y'see, as I've mentioned already, I've been dieting for the past couple weeks, trying to reduce my overall appetite so that once that's accomplished I can eat more-or-less normally but still lose weight.  (If that makes any sense.)  I evidently went so overboard that today the world was spinning so badly when I was in the bath that I had to get out without even washing my hair (I did at least wash my body, so that's something) out of fear that I might pass out and drown or something.  I've been a bit dizzy for most of the day, but after having a goodly meal with lots of protein (though really, the meal bars have a lot of protein, too!) and some potassium (from a baked potato) I've been a little better.  But now I have no idea what I should be doing about my diet.

    Well, other than consulting a doctor.  I mean, realistically, that's what I should have done in the first place, but it seems like the latest weight loss craze among doctors is "oh, if you want to lose weight then you should let us cut you open and staple your stomach shut!" which is just not happening.  Gross.  It's like, can you please just give me an appetite suppressant and call it a day?  I do not want to have staples in my stomach.  Ick.

    *cough*

    Anyway.

    Despite the dizziness fit, I was actually able to get a good amount of writing done today.  It was only one scene, but it was a long one.  (And I got to have a moment where Wei Wuxian's vanity shows itself, which is always fun.  Actually, I'm not sure "vanity" is the right word?  It's more like pride in the fact that everyone else finds him attractive?  It's not really something I can easily sum up...)

    And I had to adjust the numbers represented on my chart again, so now the top line on it represents 100k words, which I am super not going to reach tomorrow, and that is totally fine.  Um.  Okay, actually...I kinda would like to reach it, but that is not going to happen, and I am striving to be okay with that because I do not want to induce further stress and send my heart off into tizzy land again.

    *ahem*

    So.

    Numbers.

    Total words in document:  335,062

    Yesterday I wrote:  2,942 words

    Today I wrote:  4,117 words

    Total words written in November to date:  85,062

    Pretty version:

NotNaNo '23, Day 27: Oh, No, Not Again!

     So...my heart palpitations have come back.  With a vengeance.  The last few days, really, but they really kicked into overdrive last night, and didn't let up this morning, though by now (midafternoon), they've calmed down again.

    I'm hoping that it's just because of the "hurry up and get it done" atmosphere that's been pervading my life for the last week or so.  The constant frustration that I'm not progressing through my outline quickly enough.  The drive to finish rereading the first seven volumes of Heaven Official's Blessing before the final volume comes out tomorrow.  (Spoiler:  not gonna make it.  I'm almost done with volume four.  No way I can read volumes five through seven in the next twenty-four hours.  Volume five, sure, but not more than that.  It really pisses me off that my own stupidity is gonna delay me getting to find out how the story ends.  Still glad I'm rereading, though; I'm noticing a ton of details and hints that I had no clue about the first time, since now that I know where the story is going, I understand the characters' actions differently.)

    There's been other factors, too.  There's the frustration of having my schedule (particularly my writing schedule) interrupted for Thanksgiving and various other things surrounding it.  The rush to try to remember all the sites I wanted to shop at during the post-Thanksgiving sales.  (I do not shop in person anywhere other than a grocery store between Thanksgiving and New Year's.  Just too many people out there.  I can't handle it.  Also, I have a terminal allergy to Christmas music, especially the ghastly variety played by retail establishments.)  The frustration that the final volume of Heaven Official's Blessing was delayed a week and so now I'll have to go to Barnes & Noble on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving instead of the Tuesday before it.

    And, worst of all, my body's sensitivity to various things fluctuates sometimes, and about a week ago, maybe a week and a half, my body entered into a very strong sensitive to touching itself phase.  Which sounds dirty, but it's not.  You see, I have a very massive weight problem.  Like, at least one doctor has described my condition as "morbidly obese."  Which seems inherently rude, but whatever.  Point is, when I sit, it's very hard to keep my stomach from touching my legs.  Sometimes this is only mildly annoying, and sometimes--as for the past week or so--it is so mind-bogglingly uncomfortable that I have to find something to shove between them and try to use a standing desk set-up to write despite that standing in place too long makes my back hurt.  Having my arms touch my stomach or my breasts is also almost impossible to avoid, and goes beyond uncomfortable into a bit painful, as the skin on my left arm goes beyond sensitive into the "life-threateningly maddening" category, and right now my arm touching my stomach or breasts makes the cloth on my shirt feel like it's sandpaper of a particularly rough and viciously cruel variety.  Which makes no sense, but nothing about my body ever does.  Anyway, because of that, I have been on an extremely tight diet, trying to shrink my stomach (not the belly, but the actual organ) so that I'll have less appetite, so that losing weight will be a little less difficult.  (Right around Thanksgiving is the absolute worst time for this, but it's not like my body asked my permission!)

    There's various other little things as well, but those are the main ones.

    Basically, I'm stressed out all over the place, and there's not a huge amount to be done about it except to tell myself to stop stressing out.  Not always an effective tactic, to say the least.

    Anyway.  NotNaNoWriMo time.

    Total words in document:  328,003

    Words written yesterday:  2,450

    Words written today:  1,581

    Words written in November to date:  78,003

NotNaNo '23, Day 25: Too Tired

     So life stuff happened and I lost the last hour of the morning and the entire afternoon.

    Thus I only finished writing just now, at almost 11:00 at night.

    I am very tired now.

    G'night.

    Total words in document:  323,972

    Words written today: 3,766

    Words written in November to date:  73,972

NotNaNo '23, Day 24: Chugging Along

     So, I may have missed my post yesterday, but I didn't miss my writing yesterday.  (Also, wtf is going on?  That's the third time one of the keys on my keyboard was interpreted wrongly while trying to write a post.  Doesn't mess with any other program, just this browser.  So weird...)

    Anyway, I actually got a lot of writing done yesterday, largely I suspect because in between lunch and dinner, I spent most of the afternoon at my brother's house, because he wanted us to have dinner together, because my parents served chicken (having missed the deadline to reserve a chunk of turkey breast in advance) and it didn't seem like Thanksgiving unless we had turkey.  I was kinda "whatever" about it, but went along with it anyway.  (Which absolutely murdered my diet.  I was probably set back a week by having two full meals instead of mealbars.)

    So, yesterday's total was a really good 5,414 words.  Today's was not so great.  (Possibly because I was home alone and kept getting distracted by seeing if various sites I like to shop at were having a good Black Friday sale.  Also partially because I actually needed to buy some clothes on said Black Friday sales.  Though who knows if I ended up buying the right size...)

    At this point, I know for a fact that there is no way that before November is over I'll get through the chunk of outline I prepared at the end of last month.  Which is a pity, because I really would have liked to do so.  (Not that it would have brought me to the end of the work by a longshot.  I feel like this thing is eternal at this point...)  So my goal is kinda to get through at least two points off the outline a day, but I know I'll fail to do that tomorrow, because tomorrow's is not very fully outlined and intended to be multiple scenes instead of just one, like the other points on the outline are.  But...well, I'm just going to do what I can, I guess.

    Total words in work:  320,206

    Words written today:  2,971

    Words written in November to date:  70,206

    Pretty version:

    Tomorrow, I'll have to adjust the top bar of the chart again...

NotNaNo '23, Day 22: repetitive title strikes again

     It's like a repeat of yesterday, only without the shopping as an excuse.  (Admittedly, in one of my "I can't keep going" breaks, I did some online window shopping, but that's not the same thing at all.)

    My word count is slightly better than yesterday, and I did get slightly more done in the story, but not by a huge margin.  Yesterday I only wrote one scene, today I did about a scene and a half.

    Pretty pitiful, all told.

    I've probably been spending too much of my brain power on writing and stuff lately.  Probably need to take a break and do something else.  (Finally learning how to use Blender, maybe.)

    But I can't do that in November, can I?!  (Though that being said, I may just blow off NaNo for one day next week so I can spend it just reading...)

    Besides, I can't take too much of a break while I'm still in the middle of writing this behemoth, so...

    *sigh*

    Anyway.

    Total words in document:  311,821

    Words written today:  1,864

    Words written in November to date:  61,821

    Ugh.  My numbers are so crap.  I used to be so much faster than this.

    

NotNaNo '23, Day 21: another mediocre day

     Once again, I feel like I have not accomplished all I wanted to today.

    Partially, that's the real world intervening in my writing schedule:  I needed a new coat and some new jeans and maybe some new shirts, and if I wanted to be able to get them in person (and thus be able to try them on) then I needed to today, because as of Friday all malls will be too crazed and I will refuse to set foot in them until January.  (Tragically, also the case for many stand-alone stores as well, and yet I have no choice but to go to Barnes and Noble a week from today, because that's when the final volume of Heaven Official's Blessing comes out.  (Lol, I just went to their website to doublecheck that, and both the regular and special edition versions of the final volume are already listed as Bestsellers.  😁))  Took way too long and I was left so tired that I didn't even want to head to the other side of the mall (not even by car!) to go to Lush to get the shampoo and conditioner I need. 😩  That, at least, I can safely order online since it's not like one needs to "try on" soaps and stuff 🤣  But at least I got a coat and a pair of jeans and like half a top.  (It needs something else under it, ya see, so it's only "half" by itself.)  And evidently now Black Friday is a week long? 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, all that took up way too much of my day, plus I was rather exhausted when I got home, so I didn't really get through as much writing as I wanted to.  And the number of things left on my outline is crazy...especially since the outline doesn't carry the story anywhere near its ending...

    Oh crap!  I forgot to update the outline with those new details I thought of earlier!

    Ack, gotta go do that.

    Bye!

    Total words in document:  309,957

    Words written today:  1,394

    Words written in November to date:  59,957

    (Ooh, hey, the November part of the total has a partial palindrome! 😝)

    Pretty version:

NotNaNo '23, Day 20: starting to get problematic

     Wow.  Yesterday was...a thing.

    So, for reasons, I could not sleep the previous night.  Like, at all.  I got maybe four hours, probably closer to two.  (Certainly, I didn't get four contiguous hours, at any rate.)

    I was, therefore, a complete wreck yesterday, tired through and through, to the point that I had a big, caffeinated soda with my lunch (normally, I only allow myself caffeine once a day, in case it had anything to do with where my heart palpitations came from), and I was still barely conscious for the rest of the day.

    Now, I did actually manage to get some writing done--to the tune of 989 words, so better than the day before--but I did not have the strength to do anything like, y'know, posting to the blog about it.

    Today was...better?  I guess?  Certainly, I wrote a lot more words, and got past the scene I was on, but...I feel like I lost the majority of the day.  (Admittedly, I did lose a huge chunk of it to going to lunch with my parents and then finally getting to see Barbie (which only makes what I'm writing feel like even more of a waste of time, because I'm writing shallow escapism, instead of trying to find a way to write something meaningful and powerful and funny and emotional and) but that's hardly the entire day, and I should have been able to write plenty in the morning before I left, yet I didn't.)

    Doesn't help that last night I slept on my neck wrong and now it hurts like crazy, but I don't think that had anything to do with my lack of words today or how uneasily they came.  (Hmm...I don't think that's the right word there...like..."uneasily" is not actually the opposite of "easily" even though it should be...)

    Anyway, I want to get this done before having dinner and it's already almost 6:30, so...

    Total words in work:  308,563

    Words written today:  1,841

    Words written in November to date:  58,563

    Pretty version:

    Also, since it's been another ten days, here's the words by the day version:

    ...and both the troughs and peaks are now lower than they were.  Ugh.

NotNaNo '23, Day 18: ugh

     Today was not a day for writing.  (Not writing my project, anyway.  I wrote over 1500 words of plot summary for another idea I had.)

    Today was evidently a day for wondering "what the heck is it that I'm doing with my life?"

    I found myself wondering at what point I made a wrong turn to end up the way I am.

    If I had never gotten into anime and manga, had never gotten into collecting toys and dolls, I would have so much more money than I do.  If I had never trained myself to be as utterly slovenly as I am, I would have a better life.  (Not buying as much crap would help on that front, of course.)

    Pretty much all of that can be...well, maybe not all of it comes from my time in college.  Mostly anime came after that, and manga entirely did, though that was an offshoot of getting into anime.  But I feel like everything that happened in college led me in that direction.  So once again I'm left with the inescapable conclusion that if I had gone to a different college, then maybe my life would not be such utter garbage.

    I applied to seven colleges when I was a senior in high school.

    I got into all of them.

    One of them was just a hair short of being an Ivy League school.  (Pretty much the only reason it's not is that it's in Chicago instead of New England.)  But you know which one I decided to attend?

    The one my advisor at the time considered my "safety" school.

    It had the worst academics, and it cost the most.  I went there because they flatteringly offered me a miniscule scholarship, and it had a pretty campus.

    Worst.

    Decision.

    Of.

    My.

    Life.

    I didn't even enjoy it there.  I was miserable almost the entire time, and because I had so little luck being accepted by the other students, I withdrew into myself even more than I had in high school.

    I mean, maybe it wouldn't have been any better at the other school.  Impossible to know, unless someone develops a way to look at parallel universes or something.  But it was just so...ugh, I wish my parents had tried harder to talk me out of it.

    Obviously, as soon as I started having thoughts like that, there was very little chance of me actually managing to write anything.  It's kind of a small miracle I wrote any words at all, really.

    Though I only wrote 487 of them.  Making a total of 55,733 words in November.

    

NotNaNo '23, Day 17: No real title again today

     Not a lot to say about today's writing.  I did get a lot accomplished--last night in the bath I figured out how to get over the story block I had last night (I always seem to get a lot of story ideas in the bath for some reason), and so I finished both that scene and the next one--but I also got distracted by trying to look up some stuff.

    The problem with writing fanfiction rather than regular fiction is you have to stop and check on things in the original work.  Case in point, the brothers I was talking about the other day.  They're half-brothers, yeah?  So, I was wondering what we knew about their mothers; specifically, for a conversation I was writing, I wanted to know if one of their mothers was a concubine, or a mistress, or what.  (After all, it could be that the elder's mother died in childbirth and the father remarried.)  So I went to their wiki pages and looked at the page text and when that didn't say anything I looked at the comments, just in case anyone had asked and gotten any interesting replies.  The comments on the younger brother's page were a lot of arguing over the morality of his actions and whether or not he was a better person than Jin Guangyao.  (Anyone who says JGY is a better person is wrong.  NHS is morally grey, but by the end of the story JGY is practically evil.  There are many places he could have stopped at just being morally grey, but he didn't; he decided to embrace the worse side of his actions and magnified it repeatedly for no reason but the pursuit of power/reputation.)  The comments on the elder brother's page, however, were as follows:  one comment about how he comes off pretty badly due to his refusal to see things in shades of gray, and every other comment there was thirsting over him.  Like, so much thirst.  I was just not expecting that.  I mean, yeah, the actor on the drama is hot, but so's half the cast, so...I dunno.  I don't get allosexuals, is what I suppose I'm trying to say. 🤣

    Anyway!

    Today's numbers!

    Total words in work:  305,246

    Words written today:  a very respectable 5,112

    Words written in November to date:  55,246

    Pretty version:

NotNaNo '23, Day 16: Success, sort of?

     Well, to start with, this happened:

    Only I didn't get much further than that.  Because the next scene required the group that's out hunting down a murderer to encounter a trap he's laid for them.  A trap which they must either not recognize as being a trap, or not realize was left by him.

    I have zero clue what that trap needs to be.  Like, at all.  It is a total mystery to me.

    The fact that I have reached the point where the first of these traps needs to take place (there will be many more, of an escalating nature) without coming up with the nature of the traps is, of course, deeply worrying.  But hopefully I'll think of something by tomorrow morning...

    Anyway.  Numbers:

    Words currently in work:  300,134

    Words written today:  1,460

    Words written in November to date:  50,134

    I had to adjust the scale of my chart a bit.  I'm not sure I like the number I picked to be the new top row.  It feels off, somehow.

    

NotNaNo '23, Day 15: A Weird Fandom Thought

    All right, so I have some strange fandom stuff I want to say, but it will involve heavy spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi...and also for Hamlet, in case anyone happens to stumble across this blog after having arrived from another planet and/or the distant past and therefore doesn't know the plot of Hamlet.  (If any such aliens/reverse-isekai-protags are reading this, give it a read!  Widely regarded as one of the greatest works in Western literature, and also very short, as it's a play and therefore can be performed in about...well, I think the runtime on the movie of the entire play was something like three and a half hours?)

    Anyway, my point is just that I'm going to put my NotNaNo update at the start of the post today instead of the end.  Because spoilers.

    So, in terms of my writing today, it was actually pretty disappointing.  I really wanted to hit 50k today.  It's the 15th, the halfway mark, so I have no excuse not to have written that much already!  But somehow I never seem to manage it quickly in NotNaNo, unlike real NaNo.  🤷🏻‍♀️  But I've been having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position for writing for the past few days (that was one of the contributing factors to my low total the last two days), so I've had to be working at a makeshift standing desk and it's pain-inducing for my back, plus the table shifts sometimes and I have to catch it before my laptop can fall, and generally I have more trouble forcing myself to write in this position, but sitting just wasn't going to happen, so combined with a really unpleasant next scene, it was just a "yeah, no" situation.

    Total words in the work:  298,674

    Words written today:  3,660

    Words written in November to date:  48,674

    Pretty version:

    Anyway, now, the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I decided to put after my word count because it gets into MDZS fandom stuff and involves heavy spoilers.

    I think I've figured out a way to do the "read more" line like I used to be able to do on Wordpress, so I'll put that below here...

NotNaNo '23, Day 14: As predicted, almost

     Well, it was a better writing day today than yesterday.  That's something.

    Not a lot, but something.

    It definitely would have been a better day if I hadn't gone out to lunch as well as going to the bookstore to get the new (and I think final?) volume of Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card, but...not a lot to do about that after the fact.  (Would also definitely have been a much better day all around if I had gone out to lunch somewhere else, because the lunch I had did not sit well with me, and...well, I don't want to say what happened because of that.  But suffice to say that I lost some potential writing time due to that.)

    Also not helpful was the fact that I wrote precisely 200 words that ended up in strikethrough before the day was over because I had allowed the conversation to turn in a direction that was totally stupid and useless because the characters were not saying anything the reader didn't already know, and not revealing anything about their personalities in so doing.  Thankfully, I noticed before I had written any more than that, so I was able to correct, but...ugh.  The fact that something like that can happen (and that something similar happened yesterday is frustrating, to say the least.)

    I also ended up needing to add more to my outline and refine/retool some of what was already there, a task that took a bit over 1,000 words, so that if I had been able to spend that time on actual writing instead of outlining, I might have added 3k to my work instead of 2k.  Again, ugh seems like the best way to sum that up.

    On the other hand, near the end of my writing day, at the end of a sentence, as I was trying to figure out what the next line was, I glanced down at the status bar at the bottom of the window and saw 

    which is pretty cool, because  normally I have to force my palindromes a bit.  (Deleting spaces to reduce the word count by a tiny bit, usually...)  On top of that, this palindrome's page count even tied into the word count.  😆

    Anyway, anything else I had to say has been washed out of my brain by lots of random little crap, so...

    Number time!

    Today I wrote 2,454 words...

    ....making for 295,014 words in the work total...

    ...and 45,014 in November to date.

    Which seems not bad, yeah?  Especially since we're not quite at the halfway mark for the month! 😁

    Pretty version: