Another Milestone

I've got over 200k right now. Yay!

What Bentochan has been doing the last three days

1. Not working on her novel much.
2. Working like a slave in a salt mine on Black Friday.
3. Learning that she cannot do a YO or a k2tog by herself.
4. Making chocolate cloud cake.
5. Drinking coffee out of the Vampire Knight EGL teacup Allison gave her. (LOVE IT!!)
6. Climbing shelves farther than corporate would like.
7. Aching.
8. Cutting her hair.
9. Looking at the girl on the Aeropostale winter ad and feeling like a house.
10. Getting up before god intended.

When Backing Up Goes Wrong

Not in the Jean-in-a-car sense, but in the USB-and-novel sense.

Last night I went to Aryeh and Gina's house to play Rock Band, and after a bit it was time for Aryeh to watch Heroes and Chuck, so I asked if I could use their desktop to work on my novel for a bit, since I'm still behind. It went pretty well.

Two hours later and their copy of OpenOffice is giving me an off the wall word count (all the programs give different wordcounts, isn't that funny?) so I just save the novel to my flash drive, play some more Rock Band and head home.

Check the wordcount, did pretty good, save the file again, get some kind of save message about "am i sure i want to save over a larger file?" because Word and OpenOffice documents are vastly different in size, with Word being smaller, and I click yes. Do it again to my other back up, and I'm off to bed.

Get up this morning and those pages I wrote last night are gone. I check the wordcount and I'm down by 2k or so. Woe and misery prevail for about twenty minutes until I figure out what went wrong/check all my back up copies/give up all purpose to live. Apparently the computer went with the larger file rather than the more recent version in the save, which is pretty infuriating, especially since I wrote over both of my backups. And I didn't email it to myself from their house because their internet was being a bit pokey and my novel is over a megabyte.

I should have waited that out, or brought my laptop to work off of. That's the lesson here. Or instead of using two backups I should have used three, but that leads to the slippery slope of when is enough flash drives and backups enough.

In the middle of contemplating if I could drown in my cup of coffee I called Kevin to demand a pep talk. Which he was happy enough to give even though he was at work. I love Kevin. GREATEST BEST FRIEND EVER! It was a pretty good pep talk too. Made me laugh. And feel a lot better about having a set back, even if I'm nervously eying where I'm supposed to be on my word count calendar. Still behind. And after the saving fiasco even behinder.

EPIC WRITING POWER

The file for my novel is now over a megabyte. I feel so awesome about that. YES!!!!!!!

The Desk Drawer Into the Past Part 2

The actual art is by various friends of mine in High School. Hannah Lees (check the credits on the last Hulk movie), John Fuller (where are you?), Me (the drawings barely recognizable as art) (the picture of the foxes (OMG YES I CAN DO NICE ART!!)) (the watercolors).

The Desk Drawer Into the Past Part 1

Hopefully I'm not going to embarrass myself too badly here. I'm apparently getting new furniture and I have to clean out my desk, which I haven't really used in years. It's sort of in a bad position- to pull down the table bit you'd got to shift a bed post. So... I haven't been in it much for years, and wasn't one for using a desk much when I was a child, at least for letter writing, that sort of stuff. But, it has six drawers above the table, and six below that are actually drawer sized... I loved those drawers. So many little nooks and crannies for things...

Things which I haven't seen in years, and are amazing/confusing me as I find them. It's fascinating especially in the anthropology/historian sense, since these are things I thought were important enough to save once upon a time. In event of a Pompeii-like incident here's a desk someone might find a thousand years in the future and puzzle over.

Things and Stuff

The last few days have been more busy and annoying than anything else. Filling out job applications has to be one of the most tedious activities ever. But hey, money.

I've got a big knitting project I really want to get started on, but I need one more yarn for it, and I don't think I'm going to give in and splurge on that until I've got money coming in.

Because of all the paperwork I've been playing with I haven't sat down and written much on my novel this week, which is really... agrivating... some days. The first few days of the event it was hack hack hack and thousands of words seemed to appear like magic and now I'm lucky if I get to sit down and open the document. There was supposed to be a write in today at the Sandy Plains Daily Grind but I don't see anyone else here (why are there so many teenagers? don't they have school? and the men in suits- go to work!) and it's been sort of hit or miss on me actually getting anything done. I'm closing on being half way to the word count, though. I just wish the novel was more done.

The new Twilight commercials look awesome. Just like the Quantum of Solace ones. I swear I saw one for Transporter 3 but it was all flashy stuff and noise- I figure as long as something blows up that movie will be alright. In Italy they were showing previews for something called Babylon AD with Vin Diesel, but I'm not seeing anything about it here.

Lego has some new Pirate sets out. They look incredibly, fantastically like the ones my friend Michael used to have when we were in elementary school. No big single wall pieces like I've seen in some of their more recent sets (like Harry Potter- especially the Hogwarts set) which make them so flimsy and pointless to build. And apparently we're going back to the good old days of an animal in every set. So far I've seen fish, a kraken (*cough cough* octopus *cough*), a monkey, OMG A MERMAID, a shark... See them all here.

Day 9

There's nothing quite as awesome as writing a novel with your new favorite coffee mug brim full of hot chocolate and marshmallows.

Home.

Yay.

I have dogs I can cuddle now. And my own bed.

*sigh*

Another Way to Die

1. Just heard the new James Bond theme.

2. The muscles above my knee are like, mini-cramping or something and pulling on the tendons all the wrong ways. Feels like its gnawing on me.

Day Two

Last night I crashed so hard. I was so tired after my marathon typing session... It was a bit silly how tired that can make you some days, since you spend the entire day sitting in a chair and then you get up and you just feel like every bit of energy went into what you were writing and there's nothing left to keep you concious.

I slept, I woke up late, wandered into the kitchen where there's almost nothing left to eat since I stopped buying groceries last week so I'm not wasting anything. All I've got left at this point is the last of some spaghetti sauce and some noodles so I had that for breakfast, and some cookies for lunch, before heading out to look for real food and finding all the shops are closed for Sunday.

That's going to be one thing I won't miss when I come home.

At least there's going to be a big, healthy, three course dinner in about two hours.

I haven't been able to get into the Nano site today- the servers are taking a beating- so I haven't updated my word count yet but I'm a bit slower today. There's still time later to make up for it though... The faster I plow through the novel the closer I get to that event horizon of not exactly knowing what comes next.

Day One

And I'm at 5,194 words already! Yay!