Category: Life

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Managed ~1600 words and passed the 25% mark in Nano. Which is probably silly to play up, since it’s so close to the 20% mark that I hit yesterday. Still, from 1/5 to 1/4. Next milestone at 1/3. Unfortunately to be on track I ought to hit it by the end of the day tomorrow, and I’ve got ~3500 to go. On the plus side, I’ve got a no-plans weekend to do some catching up. (Oddly enough, the progress gauge seems to think I’m ahead 17 words. I’m not sure how it came up with a goal of 13,105 words based on 9 or 10 days, when the ultimate goal is 50,000 in 30.)

Word Count: 13,122

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Writing 1666 words a day is hard. Writing 1800-2500 or more because you’ve fallen behind is harder. Throw in work, traffic, voting, food, and other plans, and it gets really hard.

The last time I got a good night’s sleep was Saturday. I missed my chance to write Sunday morning, and a trip to see a movie turned into an all-day event, so I didn’t get started until evening. I think I was up until 1:30. Monday evening was a marathon session, and I think I finished around midnight. Tuesday I didn’t get a chance to start until 11pm, and I was determined to get at least a few paragraphs down, which turned into a couple of pages. 12:30? 1:00?

It’s taking its toll.

Today I skipped my weekly trip to the comic store during lunch hour, because I knew I wouldn’t have time to read anything tonight. We were contemplating grabbing coffee on the way home, but eventually decided to skip the Flashback Feature showing of Dr. Strangelove and just put it on Netflix. Even though we were home, we still taped Lost as both of us went into writing mode.

I broke 10,000 words today, the 20% mark. And I added some more characters, which will help me figure out what’s actually going on in the middle of the story. I figured out where it’s going Sunday night, but how it gets there is still pretty nebulous. I managed to do some good character bits today that actually set up a scene I’d already written better than what I had before.

I’m not quite on track, but I’m getting there. I think I’ll take a cue from Girl Genius and describe it as Doom Level: Middling. Goal identified, but still determining course. Almost caught up with word count. Major sleep debt, but finally getting to bed before midnight.

Crap, I need to figure out what’s going on with the villain. So far I don’t know any more than the main characters do, and they don’t know much.

Word Count: 11471

Current Mood: 🙁exhausted

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California is an interesting state. We just re-elected Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger 55% to 39%, but also re-elected Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein 60% to 35%. All but one of the remaining state offices went to Democrats (some by larger margins than others).

The Governator is talking about a mandate. Politicians always do that when they win. 55% is a bit shaky, but with ~15 percentage points between him and Angelides, he’s at least more justified in claiming it than a certain Republican winner two years ago who only had a three-point lead.

Meanwhile Congress has returned to its natural state—namely, with at least one house controlled by the party not holding the Presidency—as the Democrats have taken back the House for the first time in 12 years. There’s an analysis in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that the Republicans’ mistake was in focusing too heavily on their base over the last few years and alienating the center.

Schwarzenegger is actually a good example of this. He’s a Republican, but a moderate one. During the 2003 recall election, the Republican party actually ran a second candidate, Tom McClintock, because Arnold wasn’t Republican enough. Admittedly you can chalk some of it up to name recognition and charisma, but the moderate Schwarzenegger not only won the recall handily, he had no problem holding onto the office this year when California voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, practically guaranteed to be the next speaker of the House, promised “to lead the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history” [note: originally linked to Forbes] and run things in a more bipartisan way than the Republicans have for the past 12 years. I’m jaded enough to say I’ll believe it when I see it, but encouraged enough that I think there’s at least a chance they will.

The real shocker, though, is Donald Rumsfeld stepping down as Secretary of Defense. I think it’s long overdue—this administration has generally rewarded loyalty over competence, and I’ll agree with many that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been mismanaged. Here’s hoping Robert Gates, if confirmed, does a better job.

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Note to self: Stick with morning voting next time.

“Oh, it’s only a midterm election! How crowded could it be?” (Yes, that was me.)

Feh.

Katie and I arrived at the polling place at 6:30 PM. The people who got in line behind us decided to leave, have dinner, and come back. Of the two of us, she voted first. I walked out of the voting booth at 7:58 PM.

It wasn’t as bad as the last time we voted in the evening, which was either the 2003 recall election or the 2004 presidential election. That time we were still in line at 8:00, and they made the cut-off anyone who was in line by 8 PM. IIRC the local Starbucks had actually sent over free coffee for people waiting in line.

But it was a far cry from last November, when we arrived and only one person was in line ahead of us.

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Friday night: mad dash through Nanowrimo. Still nebulous, not much in the way of direction. Still behind a day.

Sunday night: Mad writing until way too late in the morning… and forgot to update my word count until after midnight, so it looks like I skipped two days. Grrr.

Work today, then most of the evening madly typing, with a break for Heroes. As of when I started this entry, I’m officially 126 words ahead of goal. Of course by the time I finish, it’ll be after midnight, so I’ll be 1500 words behind…

Edit: Realized that the numbers didn’t add up, and the progress gauge above doesn’t measure what I thought it did. I thought it measured your word count against the count you should reach by the end of the day to be on track to 50,000 at the end of the month. It actually measures the count you should have reached by the beginning of the day. So I hadn’t actually caught up, and I’m still ~1200 words behind. And I don’t think I’ll have time to write ~2900 words today.

Word count: 8922

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I’ve decided to break nearly a decade of writer’s block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I’ve written quite a bit — 250 posts on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I’ve finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.

Part of the problem is just getting started. I’ll have an idea but decide it’s not worth writing about, or I won’t have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.

I still didn’t have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I’d just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it’ll be total crap, maybe it’ll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I’m still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it’s set, the main character’s background. I have no idea where it’s going. But it’s two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That’s always been my Achilles heel with writing — I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)

Word count: 1150

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After a great deal of painstaking research[1], I have uncovered the true[2] origins of the “nucular” pronunciation of the word nuclear.

Nukular turns out to be an abbreviation of “Nuke-you-la’r,” a traditional Texan leave-taking[3]. The phrase is a contraction of “Nuke you later,” and refers to the intense heat of a Texas barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.

The word appears to have become conflated with nuclear due to their similarity, much as many people confuse affect and effect, or use infer when they obviously mean imply[4].

Nukular in its original sense has fallen out of use except in some rural parts of Texas, and most speakers are no longer aware of the saying.

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  1. In other words, 30 seconds of making stuff up.
  2. No, not really.
  3. Or greeting. It’s kind of like aloha in Hawaiian: it can be used for both hello and goodbye.
  4. This isn’t hand grenades, after all.

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