0 Phailure After Phailure.

Somehow, I find myself roughly four-thousand words behind par for NaNo. I found this to be quite odd, so this morning I sat and talked it through (to myself, of course). (coughPhailcough)

"So, wait a second," I said. "How did this happen? Just Thursday evening I was sailing a good couple hundred words ahead of my daily goal."

"But, Row," I replied to myself, "you do know what happened, don't you?"

"No, do go on."

"Well, it began on Friday. You went out that evening--you and five others. Remember?"

"Oh, yes, that's right. We spent the night in town. So? I had intended to make up the loss on the weekend."

"Yes, but that's where the problem started, you see. You went out on Saturday as well, with your friend."

"Oh. I happen to recall that now. Then what happened on Sunday? Do enlighten me."

"You woke up at noon, wrote perhaps a thousand words, and then spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on homework and watching The Avengers."

"Ah, that's right. Shit movie, that was. Waste of a good hour."

"Two hours, actually."

"That's what I meant."

As you can imagine, this conversation disturbed me a little--both because I realized that I had not only had a conversation with myself but had also disagreed with myself, and because I was wasting even more time having the conversation with myself in the first place. So I spent an hour today catching up as quickly as I could. I wrote perhaps two thousand words, and have fallen at a mere 9,926, when today's goal is supposed to be 13,336.

Sigh.

Perhaps it's not the smartest idea to be spending my time writing this post (in fact, it's quite Phail), but I must admit that I'm rather discouraged. I'd hoped to at least be on par by the time this weekend rolls around, so that when I'm babysitting Saturday night, I can chug on ahead of the rest of the NaNoWriMo world. Meh.

In other news, my back and hips are absolutely killing me from that Phail Tumble I took over a fire hydrant Saturday evening. Now I'm bruised and ill. And my NaNo Phailure is hardly making things any better. If the writing gods have become angry with me, I shall appease them.

Tomorrow. (I thank the procrastination gods for allowing me to make that tough decision.)

0 Sick and Tired.

I'm a little sick today.

Well, perhaps "little" sick is a bit of an understatement.

This morning, I woke up with glass in my throat, cotton stuffed in my ears, and a mean little man banging on the inside of my head as though he's a visitor knocking at the door and simply won't go away just because I won't answer. That seems to fit my situation perfectly.

This is the third or fourth time I've been sick this year; and I'm never, never, never sick! I get allergy coughs every once in a while, and an occasional headache (easily cured by lots of tea and sleep), but I don't really suffer from all this. It's ridiculous. I don't know who to blame--my father, for bringing it home to the house from work, my brother for contracting it first, or myself for being a stupid insomniac and not sleeping for the past three days because I wanted to finish The Grapes of Wrath (which is an amazing book, by the way). Either way, I'm not happy about it. It's barely four days into NaNo, I'm falling behind a little on my word count, and I'm doubting that I'll have the energy to make up the lost words tonight.

Not to mention the fact that my characters have gone and changed on me! Without telling me! Rapunzel has become infinitely more bitchy than I first presumed, and Prince Charming is not only dopey but also intuitive, and he's Rapunzel's number one fan. So soon in the novel! This alteration of characteristics have led the plot in another direction. I'm not sure what to do, now, so I guess I'll just have to sit back and watch the unlikely heroine draw out the story for herself. After all, it is her novel.

0 Final Countdown.

NaNoWriMo begins tomorrow.

Being the incredibly obsessed dork I am, I'll be starting this evening at 12:00:01AM, sharp. I've got nothing written as far as plot goes, and my characters are merely an assortment of dialogue snippets. The following is my description of my NaNo novel at 1AM last night.

As of this very moment, this story is:

• An adapted compilation of fairy tales,
• Set in a never-ending forest,
• Containing nine confused and confusing characters,
• A variety of enemies who remain undefeated,
• And a young, impertinent Author that lies at the end of the rainbow.

Just for the record, I don't know where this idea came from, nor do I have a clue where the hell it's going.

This should be interesting.

And so it shall. I've successfully gathered an army (consisting of two or three friends and my brother) which whom to struggle for the next 30 days of my life.

50,000 words, people.

As fellow NaNo-er Lindsey encouraged this morning, "giddyup".

0 Crazy.

I'm not really sure what the relevance of this post is, but I read something lately that claimed that the majority of top-notch artists (whether it be poets, musicians, painters, or even authors) were (or are) rather crazy. I wasn't sure what to think at first, but then I started looking at exceptional artists in history (Sylvia Plath, Mozart, Van Gogh, and Edgar Allen Poe, to name a few). As many know, all of those aforementioned artists experienced some period(s) of insanity. I've been thinking quite a bit about this, so I'm going to give it an honorable mention on my blog. Excuse the irrelevancy of it to NaNoWriMo. (Although, I have been experiencing a bit of a dry spot as far as inspiration goes, so at least this is forcing me to write something; so, in a way, it's not really a waste of time.)

Long ago, when I was very little, I decided that what I think and what I write are in no way suitable topics for dinner conversation. Perhaps you've had something along the same lines happen to you before?

"What were you doing up there?

"Oh, I was just writing."

"About what?"

"I started a story about a girl having cancer. She dies at the end and it makes me kinda sad, 'cause I just started to like her. But she has to die anyway, of course."

(shaking head and walking away) "Not right. Strange cookie, you are. Straaange cookie."

It didn't take me long to figure out what I was and wasn't supposed to tell others. Perhaps this is why I haven't really spoken about my stories to other people--besides to my best friend, who is, coincidentally, nearly as mental as I am. But I haven't been talking to her quite as often either. And I've begun to notice that if I don't talk about things to people, I start talking to myself about them; and when that happens, the characters and plot lines begin to mix and haunt me in my dreams...and in reality.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, despite the fact that I'm not an "exceptional artist" or anything, I believe that I may be a little crazy. I think maybe all of us are, but writers, and other people who express themselves by means of creating things, have a special place in the figurative psychiatric clinic.

0 Imaginary Friends.

In my personal (unedumacated) opinion, I believe the making of a story's characters is the most difficult part of the story development. I can somewhat easily fill out a plot line--complete with structure, details, and thematic threads (of course, after I've dodged and filled in the gaping plot holes)--but one thing I find myself near incapable of doing is creating characters. Especially creating them on demand, like I need to for story plots. More specifically, like I need to do for NaNoWriMo.

It is a rare occasion indeed when I develop a character before the story timeline; more often the timeline comes first, and then after mulling over the ideas and central themes for a while, characters start popping up--both in my dreams and imaginative state, and also in the real world. I find that each of my characters is like an imaginary person whom you encounter, and either develop a friendship with, or entirely despise, etc. If I should happen to like them, I keep them as my friend and call them my own. (Hang on, you mean your self-creating, "pretend" friends don't visit you when you happen to be studying at the library? or ride a bike beside you? or converse with you on the topic of spiritual enlightenment? No? How odd.)

Anyway, getting more to the point of this ramble (for which I am guilty for not including more important information, and yet am strangely glad to have filled a post with meaningless material). I have been designing characters for my upcoming NaNo novel, Zel, and I've so far developed 9 characters. Eight of them are of my own invention (with the help of previously present fairy and folk tales which have lingered in memory for centuries) but my dear friend, Aileen, helped me develop the ninth character who simply put the icing on the cake.

Over the next week or so, I'll be working on linguistic and personality differences between the characters, so I can distinguish them automatically when I write.

In other news, the Blood Moon will be full this Friday night, and Samhain isn't even two weeks away, so I'll be quite busy preparing for that.

Despite this, I'll plod forward in my quest to--for once--be ready for NaNoWriMo this year!

0 Looking Back, Looking Ahead.

Welcome, I guess. In order to stay on track with NaNoWriMo this year (so that I'm not rushing to write thirty-five thousand words in six days, like last year), I've decided to dedicate an entire blog to this November's competition. With luck such as mine, I'll probably end up writing more words on this blog than in my novel, and then still get stuck with half of the 50k to write in virtually two days.

But hey. It was a good idea at the time.

Although it's still rather early in October, I figured it would make more sense to start the blog now, rather than November 1st, so I'm not distracted with the layout during the novel-writing month. That was an utter disaster last year.

I'll just change the font size. Oh no, the page got smaller. Wait, is that an advertisement in the middle of my post? Why the heck is my title so huge! Are those commas too big? I don't like the design. I'll change that, too. Wait, the background is tilted, like it's on crack or something. Holy CRAP, why is there a horse in my layout; it was supposed to be a SUNSET. OMG, I @#$%^&*#% NEED MORE COFFEE. -implosion-

Disastrous. Really.

Hopefully, I'll be able both to keep this posted (to get the juices flowing) and to write the novel (to make the lemonade) at the same time. Wish me luck.

P.S. If you're pondering the reason for the title...well, don't overexert yourself. It's just based on a sort of philosophy I have adopted: "Some people say I think outside the box. But as far as I'm concerned, there is no box." It suits me.