Oh yeah, it is 2012.


…and I still don’t really have anything to say. I have had a number of draft posts that never saw the light of day. So, instead of finishing them, I will give you a sum up of what they were, and then delete them.

My Christmas post. For the past few years, I posted about some other holiday that either fell in the ‘Happy Holidays’ umbrella or were one of the holidays absorbed into the ‘Christmas Season’. This year, it was going to be a cross between pointing out the flaws in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and showing how the top 20 xmas songs that we have all grown to feel are part of the season are really owned by individuals or companies. If SOPA passes, The War on Christmas might actually shift back to what it used to be (people complaining about the commercialization of a treasured religious holiday) from what it has become (people complaining because they have a huge commercial holiday that others don’t want a part of). And no, SOPA doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas, but if it passes, the internet could turn into a very different (and scary) place.

My Writings post. I have barely touched my NaNoWriMo project since November. Not for lack of effort, mind you. I think it is a combination of things. Mostly, NaNo is such a hurried and compressed writing method that it is easy to get burnt out on the novel. By the time it is over, I don’t want to look at the story. Add to that, the fact that I know a couple of sections are crap that are just going to be deleted the moment I start back. I was in a rush for word count, and let a couple of scenes go on in the wrong direction despite knowing better. I have been writing here and there, just not on the novel. I have written a couple of shorts revolving around Anne, have fleshed out details for the Daylight story, and jotted ideas down for way later stuff.

Also in the Writings post. Unrelated to my fantasy stuff, I have started a writing exercise I am calling Hollis. There is no plot, but that is kind of the point. The goal is to pick it up at random and write a scene that follows the previous scene chronologically (be it minutes or weeks later), with little to no plan as what is going to happen. I have zero expectations for the project, but it has been fun to see where the characters go on their own when I refuse to let myself think about it.

The Fitless post. I had started this mid-December, decided it would make more sense to be at the end of the month, the forgot about it. The sum up: I missed my end year goal by 5 lbs, only losing 20 lbs. Still happy, but not as happy as I would have been. I was going to do the BMR and body fat % as well, but I want to wait until I hit 230 so I can see where I would have been.

Last one I am mentioning, The Goals post. Ignoring all the other things I would like to think will happen, I have two that are leaping out at me, and they should be pretty obvious: more writing, less weight. By end year, I would like to have the first two novels in my fantasy series complete and ready for editing. I also want to lose 40 lbs. I was 235 at the beginning of the year, I am shooting for 195 by the end. I do have other goals, and I might flesh them out some here soon.

So there are my ‘I started to posts’ posts. I guess my head just wasn’t there to finish them.

Fitless: Hanging in There


I figured I would do a Fitless update, since I haven’t touched on it recently. Honestly, there hasn’t been much to update. I haven’t gotten back into a rhythm in the last couple of months. Last month was NaNo, so I was focused on it as much as I could. The month before I had and recovered from my toenail removal, along with some work stuff, and recovery from over doing it a couple of times. I have been vacillating around 237. My goal (well, post surgery goal) was 229 by the end of the year. Eight-ish pounds seems like a lot in 27 days, but I am still hopeful.

I did get a new toy that might help, an xBox 360 Kinect. I have been wanting one for awhile now, and the $50 price drop for the holidays seemed like the time. It came with Gunstringer, Fruit Ninja Kinect, and Kinect Adventures, and I purchased Kinect Sports. I plan on getting Your Shape (which drew my interest in the Kinect long before I seriously thought about weight loss). They just released a new 2012 version, and I want to see if it is worth the extra money. If it isn’t much of an upgrade, I will save a few bucks by buying a used copy from one of the people who do upgrade to the new one. I am not sure how much any of this will help, but I more and more getting into the every little bit helps philosophy. And if that doesn’t pan out, I still have the Fuck it! It’s fun. philosophy to fall back on.

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NaNoWriMo Y5 D29: Cheesecake, Bitches!


I won! My last couple of hundred words are crap and will probably be deleted, but I won! Of course, my word count differs from OpenOffice to NaNo. I tried validating at an OO count of 50234 but NaNo said I only had 49238, a 996 word difference. After more writing, my OO count was 51195 but Nano had 50156, a difference of 1039. No, the numbers don’t add up, but I won, so who cares. :)

Now I am going to mindlessly surf the web or something until I am ready to pass out. Tomorrow, I can work on the novel some more and see if I can’t get my final word count even higher.

NaNoWriMo Y5 D28: Kinect is in the Mail


I am dangerously close to finishing NaNo this year. I am currently at 48183 words, and should have no problems reaching the 50k mark. Actually, given the fact that the word count function in Open Office and on the NaNo site tend to give different results (that usually hurt my score), I am shooting for 51k, but again, no problem. There are tons of story left to write. I currently have 13-14 chapters and a prologue. I do have gaps in my story. I hit a what comes next, so after a minimal amount of stress, I just skipped ahead. As such, it goes Prologue, 10-11 (or maybe 10.5) continuous chapters, a random floaty chapter, and two back to back chapters that belong near the end.

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NaNoWriMo Y5 D23: Winning Lottery Ticket


I should be writing right now. Well, I am writing, but I should be working on NaNo. I am about 600 words under par, but I wanted to get this post out instead. I have been playing with time and I like what I came up with.

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NaNoWriMo Y5 D18: Damn Cat


Sitting at just under 32k as I am about to pass out. I wrote a little over 1800 words tonight, but it was a struggle. Oddly, though, the struggle wasn’t with the content, it was with the use of a single character and how I personified her. Her name is Barbs (short of Barbsara), and she is basically sidekick to the big bad. I have always sort of viewed her as cool and calculating, yet still so crazy in her religious beliefs that she is willing to kill/rape/steal/lie/etc. But more importantly (at least to my current musings) is that she is capable.

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NaNoWriMo Y5 D16: The Sandman is Coming


Again with the day ahead nonsense…I stay up late. I really only wanted to note that am finally getting around to repurposing the 3 chapters from a previous book to this one. I did two of them tonight. The first one needed a lot of work to make it fit, while the second one really didn’t. I combined the first to into one chapter, though I am thinking of extending the beginning and end of the first part and making it stand alone. I am going to wait until I finish the third chapter (hopefully, tonight) and see. The third chapter is going to need so much work it won’t be recognizable, so I won’t know what I should do with chapter 2 until I done. Adding these chapters in does feel like I am slightly cheating in NaNoWriMo, but they took me from being a little over a day behind (assuming I didn’t write anything else tonight) to two days ahead, and this is where the chapters go. Now I pass out!

NaNoWriMo Y5 D14: Smells like mint


Technically, this is a day 13 update, but since it is after midnight, I went ahead and wrote D14. At one time, I had a commanding lead of over 5k words. Then I took a couple of days off and squandered almost my entire lead. I haven’t managed to drop under the expected word count marks for each day, but there were a number of days where I didn’t actually write anything. So my 5k lead is now closer to 500 word lead…if even that much.

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NaNoWriMo Y5 D6: It’s PJ Day


NaNoWriMo is progressing nicely. Today’s ‘goal’ is 10k, and I am currently sitting a little over 13k. I am hoping to hit 15k by midnight. I am only about a third of the way through my notes for this book, but I know once my notes run out things will start going much slower. The notes probably only cover the first third of the novel, so content won’t be a problem, but planning will be. I do have a chapter or two from my third NaNo attempt that I am going to repurpose and rewrite. Since I changed the book order around months ago, they didn’t make sense at all, but I think they will fit in here. Given the amount I am going to have to redo to fit in, I don’t feel bad about adding them in and counting them towards NaNo. I just have a couple of cool and/or cute moments that I would like to live somewhere, and this seems like the most logical place.

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Monday Night’s a Go Go!


It has taken me longer than normal to get into the NaNoWriMo drive. Normally, I am geared up a week or so ahead of time, but this year it seems like a slow burn. I was deciding pretty much up until today what I was going to write. Would I go with something new, or the more probably sequel to last year’s unfinished novel? The winner is most likely going to be the sequel instead of anything new. I have tons of ideas festering and boiling in my head, a couple of which might actually work this year, but I would want a little more prep time. So my “zombie”/Omega Man story and my pro choice/anti-abortion (Yes, I am both, sort of.) story will have to sit on the back burners for awhile longer.

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