Not-NaNo Final Day!

 Uh...well...yup.

It's the last day of November.

Not sure what else I can say.

I did at least get a little writing done today.  Some of it was actually pretty good, in fact.  The cousins have arrived at the port in Troy now (one major flaw here is that I have zero idea what kind of port and/or docks various cities had in the Late Bronze Age, and I've just kind of flubbed around on the assumption that there was something kinda/sorta like what was present in the historic era in Greece, which may well be completely wrong), and I had some fun with the port official who greeted them and tried to intimidate them with his officialness...until Eurysakes (who is this enormous guy in full armor and carrying a shield as big as he is) let him know that he was the son of the #2 Greek champion from the war.  Then the official got kind of pale and frightened and yet was still trying to yap intimidatingly.

Then after he went away, the captain of the boat (who had fought in the war, as I feel like maybe I mentioned at some point before?) helped identify some of the foreign visitors they were seeing on the shore, and when he spotted some Ethiopians he changed the subject to tell them about the former king of Ethiopia, Memnon, who was the most beautiful man who fought in the Trojan War, and how there were whispers (when no one important could hear them) that Achilles had actually killed him out of jealousy because he'd never met a man better-looking than himself before.  I was also able to mention what most accounts don't, that Memnon had a brother, who was now ruling Ethiopia in his place.

So that was kind of fun.

I probably would have gotten a lot more done, but then I heard someone messing around on my porch, and it was someone from the water company, I saw as they drove off again, and I was suddenly afraid that I was behind on my payments and they were going to shut off my water (even though I had paid my previous bill on time), so I had to turn off my good laptop and turn on my internet laptop to check and see that no, I was had no payments due at this time, so whatever the heck that guy was doing, it wasn't about that.  (I still kind of want to know what it was, but...I have no idea who the heck I could ask!)  In any case, then I started looking at Cyber Monday sales, and there went most of my day.  (*sigh*)

I was going to turn in the first ten pages of my proofreading work, only when I went back to have a look at them to make sure there weren't any errors in my own text, I noticed some spots where I missed the original author using the wrong tense, so I have to go back and fix that before I can turn in the work.  (And I can't do that on this computer, because it would put the wrong name on the comments, as I am doing my proofing work under my pen name not my real name, and I can't find a way to make the modern Word change what name it uses on the comments.  Which sounds like a dumb reason, but...)

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Anyway, my total time in November spent working on my various writing projects turned out to be 45:18:10.98.  Which is not the least bit cool, but...hey, at least now I can close the timer app on my phone without worrying it'll erase my hour count! ;)

I wanted to calculate my rough number of words (though they can't be totally accurate since there was a lot of coding and stuff), but due to the panic over the guy from the water company, that didn't happen.  I'll calculate that by IWSG on Wednesday. ;)  (I'm pretty sure The Walls of Troy got up to about 23k, and then the glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? was over 17k, pre-coding, so that's like 40k, so I actually got pretty close to hitting the official NaNo mark even though I was going for time rather than words.  That's something, right?)

Not-NaNo Day 29: Oh boy...

 *cough*

Wow.  I skipped from day 25 to day 29.

Admittedly, due to the holiday, I ended up not writing at all on the 26th, and I'm not so sure I wrote on the 27th, either.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I didn't?  No, wait, I must have?

Ugh.  Something's just gone wrong with me on this.

(Although, let's be honest, I miss the nice keep-track-of-it-for-you angle of the official NaNo site.  Y'know, before they butchered it.)

I just haven't been able to do much the last few days.

Part of it was the holiday, part of it was panic over my basement door (the new guy who came to look at it promised to send an estimate on Tuesday...you know, after four nights of below freezing temperatures), and part of it was general problems that are plaguing me in everything (mostly to do with my weight issues, ultimately), and part of it was distraction by having gotten addicted to a particularly time-sucking video game, but there's definitely something else going wrong, too.

I think maybe part of it is because this rewrite puts me in a weird place, and not because I'm trying to change a novel into interactive fiction.  The problem is that some scenes I am keeping all but unchanged, other scenes I'm keeping with modifications, and other scenes are being entirely discarded for new ones.  Just when I'll get into the groove of writing something new, I end up having to change to merely modify a different scene, or copy another whole-cloth.  It's very disruptive to my rhythm.

But I think it's also because I'm starting to really need to work again.

And I don't mean "work on my novel" work.  I mean, I need a job again.

Which is a problem, considering that my old job (which it was implied I might be allowed to resume when the museum's finances allow them to start hiring people again) will at this rate not be available again until sometime late in 2022...maybe.

And with my minimal employment history, I'm not really qualified for...well, for anything really, but particularly not for anything unrelated to my previous career.  Because yeah, my MA is not in historic preservation or anything closely related to it, but I do have the experience of five years employment in a position that eventually grew the title curator/registrar (without its functions significantly changing, meaning I was doing that job all along, just without the name), plus five further years before that as a volunteer doing basically the same thing.  That experience might be enough to get another museum to hire me (if they don't mind my broken social skills), but with the pandemic, no museums are open, and therefore cannot possibly be hiring right now.  So getting a job outside the house is currently off the table.

And yet a job outside the house is, I think, exactly what I need right now.  In general, and in order to help me focus on my writing.

It's a problem, one without any solution I can see.  (Without any solution that does not involve magic and/or time travel, anyway.  Or benevolent aliens.  Or rifts to other dimensions.  Basically, anything sci-fi or fantasy.)

Ack.  This went sideways into crazytown.

Sorry.

Anyway, on Friday I did manage to get about two hours writing done.  And then yesterday I managed about five minutes. :(  I mean, I did spend longer than than that reading over what I'd done to remind myself of where I was and what was going on, etc, but I'm not counting that time.

Thankfully, I had long since decided (though I'm not sure I ever officially said so on the blog) to reduce my hour count goal from 60 to 45, so I'm still good as long as I can manage to get some writing done today or tomorrow.

Which will probably be tomorrow, because I've set today aside to check my email, which can take all day if it's been too long since I last checked it (I think it's only been about a week this time, so hopefully it won't be too bad, esp. since the election is over...though I do keep getting email about sending financial support to the two Senate run-off elections in Georgia...), plus I am determined to actually get some proofreading done today, because the last three days I've opened the file, looked at the next paragraph and just kind of noped out of there for the day.  Which is not cool.  Not cool and not professional.  (And it's not like the paragraph was any worse than some of the ones I'd already done.  In fact, it wasn't as bad.  I've just been incredibly tired lately, and that makes me unwilling to face challenges like working or cleaning my house.  (Oh god, does my house need cleaning!  I need a magic wand and/or a robotic maid...)

Not-NaNo Day 25: Behind in my posts

 I'm behind in my posts about my Not-NaNo, but not in my actual writing.  I just haven't been posting because...honestly, because I didn't feel like booting up this computer just to write a blog post.  (That was at least one advantage to staying with Wordpress, in that it had an app and I could just write the post on my phone, but there doesn't seem to be an official app for Blogger.)

Anyway, I've been continuing to work on the rewrite of The Walls of Troy, though I have only found one very minor place to add any interactivity to it.  (Then again, the interactivity in The Cousins was also very minor, so maybe that's all right.)

I'm posting first thing in the morning not because I've already done today's writing (lol, haven't even thought about it yet) but because I had to boot up this computer in order to look up a phone number for someone who would actually fix my basement door before all my pipes freeze, unlike the handyman who's been promising to fix it for two months now, and responded to my text yesterday with a rather dismissive promise to do something that wouldn't even remotely solve the problem, because evidently he'd forgotten what the problem actually was.  Ugh.  So now I'm waiting for an actual company to call me back about fixing it, and hopefully I won't have to turn off my water on Friday before the temperature can drop below freezing.  (Hopefully.)

I'm trying to think if I had anything to say about the way the rewrite is progressing, but I think I said most of it last time, really.  Because although I had gotten to Eurysakes' first appearance, I still had to write their entire first conversation with him, plus several conversations (practically a negotiation, really) with the captain of his ship, an older man who had fought with their fathers in the Trojan War, and followed Teukros into exile after the war ended.

Ooh, that brings up an interesting point, though.  See, I'm writing this novel from a perspective of intimate familiarity with the myth and its various tangential myths, but most people who will  be reading the novel/game are coming from a point lacking in that familiarity.  So, when I mention Teukros going into exile after the war, I know the whole story behind that, but most other people do not, and it's really hard to know when to insert the explanation into the novel.  Some of what needs to be explained (not just about Teukros, but about various portions of the larger Trojan War myth) can be explained in the work, because the girls wouldn't know the deep dark secrets of various royal families, but other things are going to be common knowledge.

Take Teukros, for example.  At the time when this novel is taking place, he is the founder and king of the city of Salamis on the island of Cyprus, and he's the half-brother of Aias of Salamis.  That much is common knowledge in-universe, and the girls cannot possibly feign ignorance of it.  Given his name, they must at least suspect that his mother was Trojan (Teukros was the name of one of the three legendary figures at the origin of the city, the others being Tros and Ilos), but they probably don't realize that his mother was Hesione, one of King Priam's sisters.  Which is important because that means the current king of Troy, the son of Alexander, is actually a cousin of Teukros, which makes it rather awful that he's been refusing to have any official dealings with him, I only just now realized.  (Thankfully, that wouldn't be something that any of Teukros' people would bring up, but the king will sure as heck bring it up, which he had not done in the original version!)  I can't have the girls feign ignorance about who Teukros is or the fact that he's the ruler of Cyprian Salamis, because you know that there would be chatter about him in a royal palace on Lesbos, so they would have heard all about him.  Or at least, that much about him.  (Realistically, at least one of them should probably have heard the rumor that his mother was a sister of King Priam's.  Ariadne, after all, had been singing to entertain at royal feasts for several years, and that's the sort of thing that might come up around the royal dinner table.)

But there's the matter of his exile.  That they don't know about, because it pertains to the death of his brother, which I've already established they don't know about.  What happened, for those who might happen to read this who don't know the Trojan War very well, is that Aias and Odysseus both claimed the armor of Achilles after Achilles finally died.  After much debate and argument on the subject, the armor was awarded to Odysseus, despite that he wasn't as good a warrior and despite that in most post-Homeric versions, Aias and Achilles were first cousins.  This situation was intolerable to Aias, and he kind of snapped, and decided he was going to go kill Odysseus, take the armor, kill Agamemnon and a few others who also made the decision, and then go home.  Athene didn't want anything happening to her boy, so she cast a veil of madness over Aias, and he slaughtered the herds instead of his comrades.  About dawn, her veil was lifted and he saw what he had done, and was horrified by his own actions, throwing himself on his sword as the only way to preserve what little honor he had left.  Sophocles' play on the subject is really brilliant, and I absolutely recommend it.  (Especially since it's a rare example of a version of Odysseus on the Athenian stage who is not the epitome of evil.  He actually shows remorse for having unintentionally caused Aias to do this, and he convinces Agamemnon to allow Aias to be buried.)  As this was all quite scandalous and distressing, the assumption in my take on the immediately post-Trojan War Greek world is that most of Aias' fellow princes did not want to spread the tale, and thus it is still relatively unknown, so the girls know he died about the same time as Achilles, but they don't know how.  (The problem with that is that it's actually important to the plot of the second novel, so I can't put it in the actual text, but I'm not sure if it's important for the readers not to know, so I'm not sure if I should put it in the glossary or not.  Not like my not putting it in the glossary will do jack-all, considering things like Wikipedia and Google exist.)

Anyway, when Teukros returned to Salamis at the end of the war with his brother's concubine and the son that concubine had borne him, and with the tale of his brother's ignominious end, his father Telamon was outraged at Teukros' failure to prevent the tragedy, and banished him.  (Here's where my version diverges from the real myth:  I misunderstood the single sentence that was the entire summary of a lost tragedy (I think also by Sophocles) about Teukros and his nephew following the death of Telamon, and for some reason thought it meant that Telamon had rejected his grandson as well as his son.  So in my version, Telamon wouldn't allow the concubine and her son into Salamis, either, though in the real myth he did.  (Though Plutarch also mentions another son of Aias, without saying where he came from, so I make it that Aias had a pregnant wife when he left for the war, so Eurysakes has an older brother, and that's why Telamon felt he didn't need his legitimate son's illegitimate son.))  In his banishment, Teukros ends up in Cyprus, where he marries the daughter of a local king, and sets up his own kingdom, which he names after his erstwhile homeland, Salamis.  The fact that he named his new home after his old one the girls know, but why he did so instead of just going home, they don't.  And I can't count on my readers knowing that, either.  Admittedly, that's one of the reasons I was liking the idea of going with this as a text-based game (or rather, a lightly interactive piece of fiction), because then I get to have a glossary to explain all this stuff, but...the question is always how much to try to put into the main text (since one cannot count on people looking for this stuff in the glossary) and how much not to bother with.

Though my more immediate concern is how much I want to try to salvage of the original version, and how much I want to just write from scratch.  My first task today (now that I have an appointment with someone to look at the door) is to go over the first version of the novel and see what needs to be kept, what I would like to keep, and what needs to be just tossed right out, and then make up a bit of a plan for the order of events.  I mean, I know I need, for example, the fight against the brigands which in the original version was how they first gained access to the palace, because they were being rewarded for having done so, but I need to keep it because it gave them their first chance to have a major fight scene together as a trio (actually, it's their first major fight scene at all period), and because it let them meet several people who had key knowledge that was going to be important to them later.  But now I need a reason for them to go out and hunt down these bandits, and I can't just have the king ask them to do so, because that's really rude behavior for a host.  And I know I need the scenes in the various temples within Troy itself, but do I also need the scenes in Thymbria, where they meet Chryseis, her husband and her daughter?  I feel like the only major callback to that entire sequence later on is the fact that when they stay the night there, Atalanta has a dream in which Apollo comes to speak to her (and no, she's not just dreaming that Apollo is speaking to her; he actually has entered her dream to speak to her) and that gets referenced a lot in the later books, but Chryseis and her family not so much.  (Obviously, I can remove or rewrite any later references when I get to those books, but I want to see if there's any important character development potential there, that kind of thing.)

I think I just had an idea of how to get them out there to deal with the bandits, but I'm not sure how well it will work out.  I don't know how any of this is going to work.  I have to walk a very dangerous line dealing with Korythos, since he has some secrets which are probably going to be pretty freakin' obvious to the reader no matter how I handle them (one of them being blatant,  because no matter how much I only speak of the instigator of the war as Prince Alexander, everyone already knows him by the name Paris, but I can't reverse those, since Alexander is the name that is historically one that was part of the Trojan royal family), and I feel like if I try too hard to obscure some of those secrets, I'll just be insulting the reader's intelligence.

That's a worry for later, though.  Right now I want to jot down my ideas before I forget them.

Laters! :p

Not-NaNo Day 22: The More Things Change...

 So, I got in a good amount of writing today on The Walls of Troy.  All the way up to the appearance of the third member of the core cast, in fact.  But it's funny how changes have a way of snowballing.

When I changed the very brief pre-escape and escape sequence from the original draft of the novel into a 22,000 word text game, I changed a lot about the nature of how they got aboard a ship off of Lesbos.  Combining that with a better understanding of the geography and sailing times and suddenly I had the girls deposited in a half-rebuilt city that had been burned down during the war (by one of their fathers!) on the same day they had left the island, as opposed to dumped randomly on the Trojan shore several days later.

Add to that a better grip on just how guest-friendship and pre-monetary trade and travel worked, and a new wrinkle to the history of Troy following the war, and suddenly instead of meeting Eurysakes, son of Aias of Salamis, all alone at the grave of Achilles, where he had been deposited by his own ship, they meet the crew of his ship first, because his excuse to come to Troy at all was as an official visit on behalf of his uncle, founder and king of Cyprian Salamis.  So now instead of them walking to Troy from the site of the Greek camp, they're going to be sailing there in a Cypriote ship.  And instead of only meeting the new king after stopping some marauding bandits, they're going to be at a formal feast before setting out to fight the bandits.

There are going to be so many changed dynamics to this that it's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around it!  But the new version is going to be vastly improved over the old one, and that's what's important. :)

Unfortunately, I only got about an hour and a half written, because I exacerbated this injury I've been putting up with all freaking year. :(  Last year on New Year's Eve, I twisted my ankle really badly.  This is nothing new for me; I've had weak ankles for years.  This time was worse than usual, though, and I ended up on the floor in a lot of pain, much worse than usual.  I probably griped about it on my old blog a lot, but the short version is that when it wasn't even a little better after several days, I went to the urgent care center, they x-rayed it and did the usual sprained ankle stuff, only then they also said that I should see a specialist, because a chip had come off the bone.  That explained a lot to me, because I knew it had felt different at the time and ever since.  So I duly went to see a specialist, who laughed off the whole thing as "that's why I tell people not to go to urgent care centers, because they get all worked up over nothing."  It was totally routine and normal, he claimed, before giving me a sheet full of the usual exercises to do to strengthen the muscles.

Most of which I couldn't do because they hurt too much.

And here I am, close to a year later, and that oh-so-normal bone chip hasn't gone anywhere.

 Well, no, that's not technically true.  It's moved around inside my ankle.  It's done that a lot.  But it hasn't disintegrated and it hasn't reattached to the rest of the bone. And if this was normal and routine, one of those things would have happened.

Uh, yeah, so, anyway, point is, sometimes I do something a tiny bit wrong and the chip slips further than usual and it hurts like crazy.  And today when that happened, I had to stop writing because that would have made it worse.  :(  So, that sucked.  But there's not much I can do about it now.  It's pretty clear that bone chip is never going to go away on its own; the only thing I can hope for is to have it removed surgically, and I am not having any medical procedures done that aren't strictly necessary, not in the middle of a pandemic.  That's a really good way to risk getting contaminated.  So I'm just going to have to live with a lot of pain for another year or so.  Which sucks, but what else can I do?

But at least I have my writing to sustain me!  (Also my video games.  But that doesn't sound as good.)

Not-NaNo Day 21: Slight Progress

 So, the good news is that I finished the first section of that game I'm proofreading, and can send it back to the person whose game it is.  And I got about an hour of work done on The Walls of Troy.  (Though so far I haven't found any more places to put in any interactivity, which may become a slight problem.  Well, okay, no, technically I don't have to add in any interactivity:  it can just remain a book.  But I feel like the people who started following me on itch.io after The Cousins went up probably want to see the rest as a game, not a novel... (I am, btw, totally squeeing inside that people actually want to read the rest of the story!))

Anyway, the bad(?) news is that I got like zero hours of sleep last night.

About, I dunno, eleven o'clock last night, when I should have been winding down and getting my brain ready to shut off for the day, I heard this noise from outside.  It was like the noise when a bird decides to perch on the screen of my new window (seriously, they do that), only much, much, much more so.  Also longer and moving.

Best I can figure, there was something trying to jump from the tree to my roof (probably a raccoon, but we also have opossums in this area) and didn't quite make the jump, and ended up trying to grab hold of the screen to keep from completely falling straight down to the ground.  (I meant to go outside and check for damage to the screen today, but...well, it was cold and raining all day and I really didn't feel like getting out of my pajamas.  Because I am the queen of lazy slobs.)

Of course, when I heard that noise, I ran over and turned on the light just inside that window, to scare whatever it was away, without even pausing my game.  (Yes, yes, I was playing video games at eleven o'clock at night.  As I said, queen of lazy slobs.)

And then I left the light on.

All night.

I don't sleep very well with the lights on.  (I should probably get a sleep mask, but I don't think I'd sleep very well with one of those on my face, either.)

So while I did drift in and out of sleep (I know because in order to keep myself from thinking stuff that will keep me awake, I have to have some show I know really well streaming all night long, so any time I'm awake I can just focus on it until my brain gives up and lets me sleep), I didn't get more than maybe two hours at a time, and probably not even that much.

Which is why I actually thought I wasn't going to get anything accomplished today at all.  In fact, as soon as I got up and turned the light off this morning, I kind of contemplated trying to go right back to sleep.  If I hadn't had that proofreading job hanging over my head, I probably would have gone straight back to bed, in fact.

And when I finished with Animal Crossing and proofreading, it was almost lunch time, and my initial attempt to work on either The Walls of Troy or Love Allergy proved entirely fruitless, so I was completely ready to write the day off as one in which I got no work done on my own projects.

Then I decided to take a bath mid-afternoon (because by that time I was awake enough that I was pretty sure I wouldn't fall asleep in the tub) and while I was in the tub, I found myself thinking about how to handle the next stage of the story in The Walls of Troy, since the way they took ship from Methymna in the original book and the way they do in the new game version are completely incompatible with each other.  I not only came up with a pretty good way of handling it, I came up with new fake names for them to travel under while they're claiming to be boys.  (Though their pretense at being boys is complicated by the fact that they basically have to claim to be eunuchs, because boys whose voices haven't broken yet wouldn't be allowed out by themselves.  At least, not if Mycenaeans had the same policies in that regards as the Greeks of the historic period.)

So, end result, I actually got some pretty good stuff written today--well, okay, maybe "pretty good" is an exaggeration, but it's at least decent, and way better than the original version was--and made sufficient progress on the proofreading, despite no sleep.  I'm pretty chuffed about the end results, but I'm not going to be avoiding sleep in the future on the assumption that it improves my work results! :P

Not-NaNo Day 20: I'm not sure if it's "Already Day 20?!" or "Only Day 20?!"

 To quote myself, yesterday:

Still, I'm hoping to get through about ten pages today, which I can then send back to them tomorrow.  This may be highly naïve of me. 

O.M.G.

That was so far beyond naïve.  Like, words cannot describe how far beyond. 

Last night, in an hour and a half, I got through two pages.

This morning, in two hours, I hit my stride a bit better (or perhaps was just more prepared going in) and I got through three pages.  Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, but it was at least some improvement.

I mean, I knew going in that the text was written in English by someone whose native language was not English.  And I've played badly translated visual novels before.  So I knew the kinds of things I was going to be seeing.

But I hadn't realized just how long it takes to leave correcting notes on every single one of those problems!  Especially the ones where it's not completely clear what word they actually wanted to use.  Those are real time drains.

Still, it's good experience, and I'm getting to really improve the final product of this person's game, so that's a great thing.

It is, however, going to have a serious impact on my own writing projects.  It's hard to get really into my own writing after going through that.

I did get about an hour done today, though.  Most of it, surprisingly, on the opening of Love Allergy after all.  Because guess what?  It turns out that my roughly fifteen-year-old, internet-free, writing-only laptop is so old that it can't play my TWINE game. :P  (Which I thought surely it would be able to, since it's an .html thing.)  Anyway, because of that, I had to set it aside until I could boot up this laptop and copy-paste the text into a new Word document to transfer over to the other computer.  And so I ended up working on Love Allergy after all.

I'm not at all sure if I'm taking it in the right direction.  I feel like I may have made the heroine a bit too much like myself.  And a twenty-year-old college junior should not be as jaded and cynical as a forty-five-year-old misanthrope like myself, whose misanthropy has only been heightened by seeing just how vile some people are behaving in the midst of a freaking global pandemic.  (Which isn't to say that there haven't been a lot of examples of people pulling together to help each other.  There have been a lot of those, but most of them were at the start of the pandemic, and now it seems like there are more and more anti-mask idiots out there who insist that it's all some kind of sick conspiracy, despite how many hundreds of thousands have died.  Seriously, what has to be wrong with a person that they could believe anyone would lie about something like that?)

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be able to get back to work on The Walls of Troy, so Love Allergy will probably be set aside.  (Probably.  At this point, I know better than to make any firm statements about anything.)

Not-NaNo Day19: Oops

 Soooo, yeah, it's not that I forgot to post my time yesterday.

It's that I didn't actually spend any time working on any of my writing projects yesterday.

I did try to!  I booted up the computer, looked over my notes on the cast and plot of Love Allergy...and completely felt nothing.  No impetus to write.  No sense of who the characters were or what I wanted from telling the story.  Not even a good idea for precisely how to begin the text, even though I know the situation and participants of the first scene.

Basically, I'm suddenly questioning whether I'll really write it.  I had envisioned it as a big "screw you" to the asexual-denying otome game I saw on the Switch store, but...that's kind of...petty.  Which isn't to say I haven't written things for petty reasons before, but generally there I had a sense of who I was writing about, etc.  So maybe it's still gonna happen, but maybe it's not.

Instead, I just took yesterday off.

This morning, I did spend some time working on the full rewrite/game-adaptation of the novel that I'm tentatively retitling The Walls of Troy.  Got through the prologue, but then I had to stop because the final version of the next part wasn't on my good (which is to say roughly fifteen-year-old) laptop, and my battery was dying anyway.

So, I've copied the final version off this computer onto a flashdrive, and will get back to work on that soon, but...I probably need to start out doing actual work first.

Y'see, I've finally gotten a proofreading job!  Yay!

Unfortunately, it's an unpaid proofreading job, but I look at as "something I can put on my CV to prove that a) I'm not just lazing around my house playing video games and b) actual professional experience as a proofreader, which puts me one step closer to getting paid proofreading gigs."

So, before I get back to my writing (not-NaNo notwithstanding) I need to put in some hours working on the actual work I've promised to someone else.  (Fortunately, they don't need it until December, and there's only about 80 pages, so I have time.  Still, I'm hoping to get through about ten pages today, which I can then send back to them tomorrow.  This may be highly naïve of me.  We'll just have to see how things progress.

Anyway, speaking of not-NaNo, I only got in about an hour and a half today, and I was about half an hour ahead the day before, so I'm basically caught up to where I should have been yesterday.  (Unless I decide to cut my desired hour count from 60 to 45 or 30.  In which case I'd be fine and dandy for reaching 45, and already past it for 30.)  I should be able to catch up, as long as the proofreading doesn't take too long, and/or I don't spend too much time playing video games.  *cough*