Another day...

      So, yeah.  My run of bad luck continues.  I dropped my glass water bottle (which I use to mix my caffeinated Crystal Light packets because it has lines on it to show me how much water I need) in the sink and broke it.  This led to a ten(ish) minute long crying jag about how the universe has it in for me.  So...yeah.  Paranoia is now setting in, I've had so many little things go wrong lately.

      And I tried a new setup today with the USB keyboard, which worked pretty well...except that it really hurt my back. Like, a lot.

       As I said, another day of petty bad luck.

     Yesterday's writing total was 88,308.

     Today's writing total is 92,060.

      So, today (despite back pain) I wrote 3,752 words.  This got me through the final battle, so all that's left is a couple scenes of aftermath and the short scenes of lore that will be sprinkled between chapters.  With luck, that will have me finishing the book on Tuesday, letting me move on to the script for my next game to continue my NaNo rebel wordcount...which will have the added benefit of being written on the computer that *doesn't* have a broken keyboard!

Post Title Not Found

     Well, today was at least a lot better than the last two days.

    I spent all morning backing up my laptop before risking connecting that USB keyboard to it, which is honestly neither good nor bad.  (Though I really should back it up more often.  *cough*)

    Then I went out to lunch and the local anime store with my brother, so that was actually really good.  I mean, lunch was sort of mediocre at best, but going to the anime store is always fun, and they had gotten in a bunch of new stuff, and I spent much too much money. 😅  Though it was a lot less because they were having a sale on everything in the store 'cause it's their anniversary, and also because they had sold a bunch of the stuff I've had with them on consignment for, like, probably close to ten years at this point, so that money came off my total, too, so it wasn't so bad as it might have been.  (Way less than my brother's total, at least!)

    Upon getting back home, I finally hooked up that USB keyboard to see if it works.  And it does.  Of course, it's slightly different in size from a laptop's keyboard, which is weird and for some reason was hurting my pinky finger (like I was keeping it curled up high for some reason without meaning to and that was making it hurt?), and the method to write on a loose keyboard and on a laptop are totally different, and the loose keyboard methods don't really work in any of my usual setups, so that sucks.  I'm going to have to get a proper standing desk, I guess.  Though I have zero clue as to where the heck I would put such a thing.  😓

    I even got through one of the "slated for total rewrite" scenes today; in the earlier drafts, there was a minor villain(?) character who has so little "screen" time that when she shows up during the final battle and is able to literally merge herself with wood (if you've seen Vampire Hunter D:  Bloodlust, one of the enemies in that has that ability, which is what I was shamelessly ripping off, lol) it's like "where the f%^ did that come from?!"  So, in the previous draft I had put in a scene in her POV to show off her ability and let you know what she's thinking...which totally took any mystery or suspense out of how she was going to behave when she showed up to the final battle.  For this new version, therefore, I took the core elements of that scene (having Cheiron actually show up, since a large chunk of the book takes place on and/or at the foot of Mount Pelion, where he famously lives, and clarifying some stuff about some new divine backstory I invented for the novel), and wrote a new scene in Cheiron's POV so that the villain(?)'s behavior would still be uncertain, but her ability to merge with wood is fully revealed before it becomes a plot point. :D  The scene still isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination (I mean, nothing I write is, but I could probably do a lot better, is what I mean), but it's a huge improvement over what I did with the previous draft.

    Anyway, on to the numbers.

    Yesterday's total word count was 86,302.

    Today's total word count is 88,308.

    So, I wrote 2,006 words today.  Which is pretty bad, but given the whole "trying to adapt to a totally new method of writing," I didn't want to push it by trying to do the next scene.  (Even though the next scene is very short.)  Also I wanted to get all my computer stuff done by dinner time, because after dinner I need to go do an enormous grocery run, because I need to stock my fridge, freezer and pantry with enough food that I won't need to go to another grocery store until about a week from Monday, because next week is Thanksgiving, which means grocery stores will be insane from now until...well, actually, pretty much until Christmas, really, but they'll be especially bad between now and Thanksgiving itself.  (Admittedly, the holiday does mean I won't need as much food to get by, since Thursday's lunch will be at my parents' place, and I guarantee that even though they try not to get more than the four of us are going to eat, there will definitely still be leftovers, so that'll probably provide me with another meal or two.  Still, more than a week is a lot of food...)

It's been another "interesting" day...

     So, I dealt with yesterday's (metaphorical) cell phone meltdown by finding a cheap, no-contract, no-credit-check provider and after probably not nearly enough thought, decided to sign on with them.  (I had fewer options because most of them seemed to use the same satellite network that my previous provider used, meaning that they too would want to force me into getting a new phone, as I was told that it was actually the satellite network that made the arbitrary decision to no longer support the iPhone 6S.)

    But I just have to say to the company that refused me service because of my credit rating:  subjecting your customers to the whims of the draconian credit reporting companies is directly in opposition to the progressive mindset you claim to represent, Credo.  (Also, is anyone surprised that of the three of their employees I talked to on the phone about this, the two women were very helpful and understanding, and the man was purposefully obtuse and idiotically kept talking about "once you've upgraded your phone" as if that was the problem, not the fact that credit reporting services actually punish you for not having credit cards even if you're paying all your utility bills (including phones) on time?  Despite that I repeatedly explained that not wanting to replace my phone was the entire freaking reason I was looking for a new service provider in the first place?!  He just could not--or would not--get it through his thick skull that what he was expecting me to want to do was the exact opposite of my stated intention.)

    However, the cell phone thing is hopefully now more-or-less solved, since the new place is sending me the new SIM card by 2-day express, so I should be switched over several days before the current company can charge me for another month of service.  (Assuming I can manage to switch the SIM cards, 'cause that little thing on the side of the phone did not look easy to open...)

    But that was not the extent of my crappy day!

    I ended up doing a lot more writing than usual, because I took my laptop with me when I went to my brother's place to do my laundry (long story there, but basically my washer is broken and also my basement kind of scares me), and as the drier was taking freaking forever to get my laundry dry (is it the cold weather?), after a while we got tired of watching stuff, and I went back to writing.

    I've been having trouble for a while now with some of the keys not acknowledging it when I pressed them.  The "h" and "n" keys especially, but also "y" and the left arrow key lately.  So while I was writing again in the later part of the afternoon, I started getting really tried of it, and tried to lift up the key a bit to see if I could see what was blocking it and maybe get it out.  Because I thought maybe it was a crumb or something.

    It was dust.

    Like, massive dust bunnies.

    Inside my laptop's keyboard.

    I've had this laptop for...I don't even know how long.  At least fifteen years, probably.  I know I already had it when I went to Peru in 2008 (not that I took it with me, lol!), and I think I'd had it a few years already at that point.  It is precious to me, and I've written a lot of novels on it.  (Also a lot of drafts of the same novels.)

    And evidently, this dust has just been building up slowly over all that time, and is now reaching critical mass.

    My plan was to finish the scene I was working on, save, turn off, wait until I got home, back up everything, and then try to carefully pry off the keys and remove all that dust with tweezers, or maybe a tiny vacuum if I could find one.  (I remember getting one at one point, but it had very weak suction, and I don't remember where it went anyway.)  But it was getting so that I couldn't finish the scene.  I had put "h" in the clipboard and was copy-pasting it when I needed it, but I didn't want to waste time repeatedly changing the clipboard from "h" to "n", as that seemed like it would have taken even longer than repeatedly pressing/mashing on/holding down the mostly not-working keys.  (The fact that they sometimes still worked (and even overworked) only makes this whole experience more frustrating.)  So I tried pulling the "n" up to get the dust out (I'd already pulled an astonishing amount out from under the "h" key, not that it had helped much) and you can guess what happened:  I messed up the mechanism that held it in place.  :<

    I had to just save the file as it was--not merely in the middle of a scene, but in the middle of a sentence!--and shut down the computer.  (The fact that the battery was almost depleted wasn't helping anything, needless to say.)  My brother had a spare USB keyboard, so I borrowed that, and tomorrow I'll back up the laptop and try out the USB keyboard.  If it doesn't work, I'll have to finish writing my NaNo novel on this computer.  Which sucks, because I don't like this one as much.  (Although the fact that I haven't worn the text off half the keys might actually make things a little easier.  It's hard to just go back and add a period, comma or missing m/n when all four of those keys have nothing written on them anymore...)  Even if the USB keyboard works, I'm not sure what kind of writing setup I'll have to use, since most of my usual ones won't work that way.  There was a folding standing/sitting desk I saw on sale at Michael's (of all the weird places for it) which I may look back into, because my current standing desk situation is just a folding desk tray on top of a regular table, so there's no special place to hold up the separate keyboard, you know?

    So, yeah, basically, I've had two garbage days in a row.  😭

    ...ugh, and I just slipped and fell on the way to answering the front door, and I think I actually managed to hurt myself in the process.  Definitely a garbage day.  😭

    Yeah, I definitely hurt my wrist, and possibly my knee and my back, but definitely the wrist.  Because what better to hurt in the middle of NaNoWriMo, right?  Ugh...

    Anyway.

    Yesterday's total word count was 78,368.

    Today's total word count is 86,302.

    So, today I wrote 7,934 words.  Which is pretty darn good, actually.  (Would have been more like 8,100 words if I'd managed to get through that scene.  The fact that I was so close to the end of it just made the whole experience even more frustrating, of course.)

Ugh.

     So, my day has sucked.

    I had to unfreeze my credit with one of the credit reporting monstrosities so I could try to get a new cell phone carrier because my old one is sadistic and evil and wants to force me to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for a new phone, and what happens?  

    They say my credit score is too low.

    For a non-contract, $35-a-month phone service.

    $35 a month.

    You can't eat on that little.  But they think I can't cover it because I have a low credit score.

    Seriously?  Because I'm not beholden to some credit card company and spending umpty zillion dollars on credit, they won't let me have a freaking cell phone?!

    Because yeah, I don't have any credit cards.

    Not one.

    Because back when I was in college, I did have one.  And I spent money I didn't have.  And I learned my lesson.  (After telling my parents about it and getting them to pay back said money, a luxury that most people sadly don't have.  So, yes, I realize that much of this rant is deeply based on my situation within white privilege, which is not cool on any level.  There shouldn't even be such a thing as white privilege, but unfortunately there is.)  Because I didn't want that to happen to me again, I decided never again to have  a credit card.  As long as I'm spending with my debit card, I can't spend money I don't have.  And if someone gets hold of my card?  Well, they can't spend money I don't have, either.  Yes, it puts a slight risk on me that they could spend all the money in my bank account and maybe they'd get away with it on their end, but so long as I could prove the theft (which would not be hard given how limited my range of usual purchases is) the bank would reimburse me at least some of it, if not all of it.

    But that doesn't repair my credit history.

    So now the only way I can get out of the hellhole cell phone service I already have--the one where the guy in the store knew the age of my phone was the problem, but insisted on first transferring me to a more expensive service plan (with a service charge for the "privilege"!), then on having access to my Apple id and password, then on updating my IOS, despite that there is no *$#%^ing way that my IOS was causing his computer to reject my phone for a new SIM card, before finally just laughing and saying that yep, I was gonna need an expensive new phone, just like he'd known from the start--is if I either find another shifty, shady company that will try to force me into overpriced new hardware at the drop of a hat, or if I get someone else to go in with me on the phone line so the company will run their credit score instead of mine.

    I cannot express how much this pisses me off.

    It makes me really glad that I'm currently playing a post-apocalyptic video game, because suddenly I'm not so sorry that the world is about to end.  Because it's people like this who are the reason the world is burning.

    ...and now I'm crying.

    &$%^.

    Right, so, anyway, I don't really care right now, but I need to record this for my own sanity and because I'm not officially participating in NaNo, so where else am I gonna put my NaNoWriMo daily word counts?

    Yesterday's total word count was 74,927.

    Today's total word count is 78,368.

    Which means today I wrote 3,441 words, thankfully before the cell phone company dropped that particular bomb on me.

Plugging along on NaNo 2021

     Today I actually stopped to ask myself the question "will I finish the novel at the rate I'm going?"

    And unfortunately the answer was "well, maybe, but only barely."

    Because I'd gotten down to the habit of only doing one scene per day, in order to maximize my time with Shin Megami Tensei V.  Because priorities.

    But with the number of scenes I have left in the main novel--plus the "bedtime stories" that are to be woven in between some of the chapters as some background on the villains--I was only just barely going to finish on time, and that's only if I do all the "bedtime stories" in one day, despite being half a dozen scenes long.  (Though they're all very short scenes; the file with the "bedtime stories" in it is only about 5k words.)

    So, given that it was looking a bit tight, I decided to push on through and do two scenes this morning instead of just one.  Which barely shows in my word count, because the second one was actually really short scene.  😓  Of course, as I was going through it I found myself thinking "wait, is there a way I could make some of this info-dump of Ariadne's thoughts a bit more active?"  To which the answer is "probably," but that would require so much more rewriting than I have time for right now.  *sigh*  (Or rather it would require me to sit down and rethink how I want to handle the narrative process, and probably to rewrite everything up to this point in order to accommodate the new process.)

    Which may mean that even this isn't going to be the final(ish) draft and there will have to be another one before it can be deemed suitable for public consumption.  Or it may be that I'll leave all that further rewriting for another day--or another medium--and just move on.

    Because I may have found a way to get this done as a visual/kinetic novel after all, but I'll have to wait and see how (if) the graphical format I have in mind is received by an audience.

    Anyway!  Yesterday's total word count was 70,317.

    Today's total word count is 74,927...

    So that means I wrote 4,610 words today, which is honestly even worse than I thought.  :(

I need to figure out more interesting post titles

     Because "NaNo Rebel 2021, Day ??" is just super-boring.

    Even if yeah, that's actually all that's in the post.

    (And no, I don't have any news about yesterday's cell phone "drama," if anyone is actually reading these.  (Numbers say "no" on that, lol.)  I started the process, but it requires a credit check, and I know I froze my credit with two of the three major credit reporting companies, but I could only find info about one of the three in my long-term email storage (as it were), so I just sort of took a gamble that the one they use (yes, they did tell me which one that was) was the one that my credit is not frozen with.  Also the larger gamble that my credit is good enough for them to risk(?) supplying me with a $35 a month no-contract cell phone service.  Because yeah, that's really a giant amount of money...)

    Aaaaaanyway!

    Yesterday's total word count in my double-rebel NaNoWriMo project (not using their horribly mutilated site and doing a re-write instead of a brand new novel!) was 66,388.

    Today's total word count is 70,317.

    So today I wrote 3,929 words...but if my Switch starts having hysterics over me spending too long playing Shin Megami Tensei V, I might go back and do some more writing later tonight, because the next scene is one of the ones that was newly introduced for the previous draft, in the new subplot involving Queen Deidameia of Scyros wanting to have a say in what happens to the armor that was stolen from the grave of her son Pyrrhos (AKA Neoptolemos), and I had a lot of fun with that new subplot.  :D

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 15

     Today is going to be a very ugly day, because instead of getting to play my new video game all day, I have to spend it on the phone with one or more cell phone companies to find out if I can switch to their service, because the provider I have right now is changing its network in January and won't allow me to keep my phone because it's "too old."  I am not replacing my phone because of an arbitrary decision by the jerks running the company, particularly not when the creep in the in person store forced me to change my service plan to a more expensive one (which also came with a $5 service fee for doing it in person!) because he insisted that was the real reason the computer wasn't agreeing to register a new sim chip to my phone, and then he forced me to update my IOS, which took forever and introduced all kinds of horrible new features that I hate, and after all that, he's just like "oh, yeah, you're just gonna hafta upgrade your phone, like I thought, but hey, you've got a few months to do it" like that was all just fine and dandy!

    ARGH!!!!!

    *Ahem*

    Anyway, I got my writing done first thing, so at least there's that.  And I got through two scenes today, because the second one was my absolute favorite in this book, and one of my favorites in the whole series:  the flashback to Eurysakes' childhood, when he witnesses his parents having a tender moment and hears his father reflect that he actually has beaten Achilles at something, because no son that Briseis could ever bear would ever match up to Eurysakes.  It also has this moment that I'm particularly proud of that's sort of a backwards call-back (call-forwards?) to the Iliad:  in one of the most famous passages of the Iliad, Astyanax is frightened by the sight of his father in his helmet, and Hector has to take it off to show his infant son that "no, it's okay, it's just daddy", so in this scene I'm showing how very different life in the war camp is for the children borne by the enslaved concubines, in that Eurysakes (who is admittedly about three, rather than an infant, but still) is totally cool with seeing his father in his armor, and tries to wear it after his father takes it off, even though it's enormous on him.  I just really love that moment and its unspoken comparison of the different situation for the children in the camp and the pampered royal babies in the city.  It's also the first scene in Eurysakes' POV, so from this point forward he's opened up as a POV character, which helps to both widen the narrative and give a very different narrative voice than that of the two girls who are more like sisters than cousins in most respects, and don't vary as much in their narrative voice as I'd really like (though I'm constantly making adjustments to make the tone and language different in their POV sequences).

    So, getting down to brass tacks, yesterday's total word count was 62,006.

    Today's total word count is 66,388.

    So today I wrote 4,382 words, plus a few hundred more because I also jotted down some story notes for the game I'm going to work on next.