measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Milestone hitting Yesterday afternoon, I finally started feeling okay about my [nanowrimo] [novel]. I broke 10,000 words while sipping a cup of chai at Border's Bookstore at the Cambridgeside Galleria. Now, even if I don't finish, I feel better. I made it to 10,000 words. That means I at least got it started and moving. It's not rotting with a half-page of type somewhere, like so many of the fanfiction stories I've tried. I have sworn, however, that next year I'm going to stick to fantasy writing-- a bit more flexibility, I think. Less reason to make it completely realistic. I can fly some dragons through plotholes if I need to. 10,000 is an interesting number, I'm discovering, for NaNo. It's when you hit those five digit numbers. It's a bit of a feat-- I can't think of many of my standard college term papers that hit 10,000 words. My thesis did. That was approximately 30,000. But otherwise, everything was probably in the 2,000-5,000 word range. In effect, this is already one of the longest pieces of writing I've ever done. Scary. Between tonight, tomorrow morning, and Sunday, my minimum word count goal is 15,000. I'd like to hit 20,000 if I can. Sunday is being blocked off almost entirely to do novel writing. I'm going to go over to the Border's cafe closer to our apartment (in Braintree) and just plunk down. [erich] might come along just to enjoy the experience of laptopping at the coffee shop-- he's restarted his game of Warcraft III on the "hard" skill setting, after completing it once already on normal. So we might very well be the geeky duo at the coffee shop all afternoon on Sunday. Should be fun. :) I'm so relieved I hit that 10,000 mark, though. If I hadn't, I would have been feeling really shitty about myself. A journalism major who can't crank out a story? Eeesh. It was one of a few things that made this November 7th much easier to handle. I set a record-- no tears until exactly 11:02 a.m. when I received a very kind, heartfelt email from LGM. And the tears were happy ones-- ones that were of a closure type of nature more than anything. We talked briefly on the phone, and then a bit longer over AIM last night. Things are okay. And we've survived, even if this one day is a rough one every year. Erich also helped make the day a lot brighter-- when I arrived to pick him up after work, he had a bouquet of lillies in one hand, and some Lindt chocolates in the other (I was amused at the irony that I'd been at the dentist worried about a cavity less than four hours earlier). He's so good to me. In a situation where he very easily could have been ticked off with me and the difficult meanderings about my past relationships, he just gives me love and understanding. I couldn't ask for anything better. [bar] [ade] is spending the night tonight at our place. Originally the purpose was to help me get through some of the penpalling crap I have stacked in boxes, but I don't know how much of it we'll actually do. I have no money to send anything right now, so it'll probably wait. I want to see how much of it I can actually organize on my own, but I'd put it off until December because of the novel anyway. We're going up to Nashua for a long overdue game tomorrow. It feels like ages since we've been at a game. If we miss one, it's nearly a month until we play again-- and since moving, we haven't had a lot of free weekends. Tanya's bastard sword is going to get rusty if I don't get her swinging again soon! Plus, I need to start thinking about what type of character I'm going to play for the new Kingdoms of Kalamar game JT's starting up early next year. I skimmed through the book a bit last night and this morning, but I probably won't REALLY look at it until Thanksgiving. I'll plan things over that weekend, and hopefully come up with a pretty solid character. Off to lunch and then back to work... 11:21 a.m. - 8 November 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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