November 22nd, 2009 by Rebecca
An update, of sorts…
A few weeks ago, I announced my intention of participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. What I hadn’t mentioned were all the misgivings I had about starting something that I wasn’t certain I could fully commit to. See, I was going to be in Ottawa for a full weekend for Dave’s Movie Marathon (which was a blast, as usual), plus I knew I would be going home for a few days to see my new niece (she’s adorable!). While I knew I would do what I could to work on the story while I was away, I knew it was going to be difficult, there would be major distractions, and I would fall way behind. But hey, I’m no stranger to that having done this a few times before.
What I was not counting on at all was getting sick. And no, it wasn’t H1N1, but it was almost as bad: a cold that kept coming and going for almost two weeks, starting the day after the movie marathon and lasting until this past Thursday. One day, I’d feel fine and the next I’d be out cold. On top of that, I was stressed out about work, so I never really let myself take the time to get better and I’d keep relapsing from something which I should have recovered from in a few days.
At no point in there did I get much chance to work on my story. Over the course of two weeks, I wrote less than 2000 words, which is, as you can guess, not good. I needed a marathon writing session to get me over the hump.
Fortunately, this weekend was free from work obligations, and I vowed to write at least 10,000 words or I was going to pronounce this attempt DOtS [1]. I’ll spare you the suspense and come right out and tell you that I did manage to make my goal, and the finishing line is well within my cramped, writerly grasp now.
In other stuff: I haven’t been to the gym in almost three weeks, what with the travel and the sick. Last week while I was home sick [2], I was watching a program where people were running, and it made me sad. Suffice to say, I’m going to make it in at least twice this week, but I’m not going to overdo it.
In other other stuff: Crazy Off-Key Singing Guy Who Walks With Purpose, a fixture of my neighborhood but who has been missing for the past year, is back. I’m not sure that I can honestly say I missed him.
[1] Dead on the screen. As opposed to the printed page.
[2] I sucked it up for a day and a half and stayed home sick. It was what I should have done from the very beginning.
November 7th, 2009 by Rebecca
I’m at Dave’s place, and we’re spending the next 24 hours watching movies. If anyone is interested in the goings on, Jorge is does a stellar job of blogging it all.
I expect there will be fun, frivolity, and, if things go all to hell, shenanigans.
November 1st, 2009 by Rebecca
The other day as I was moving my RSS feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader [1], I checked to see when was the last time I posted. Much to my shock, it had been back in August, and it was about an incident that had happened in July. All this time, I had been thinking that the last time I had posted was in September – like that wouldn’t still be a bad thing, although not as bad as it having been in August [2]. Really, not much has happened since then, and I’m sadly aware that there have been many random things I could have written about, but I didn’t. Alas – you’re all the poorer for not having experienced the wit and wisdom and bon mots that sometimes float around in my head that should be written down somewhere for posterity’s sake.
Moving forward! A wrap-up, if you will:
1. I have had to give up on the running for now. Around the end of August, I started getting awful pain in my left calf and knee which would leave me in pain for days and make the whole prospect of being active unattractive. My workouts would get shorter and fewer and farther between, which defeats the purpose. It didn’t help that the new treadmills at the gym didn’t have the same “give” that the old ones had [3]. Finally I made the switch to just using the elliptical machine and started using the arc trainer and haven’t had any pain problems since then. Better still, I’ve been able to increase my endurance on both machines. Yay for exercise!
2. You may have noticed that I haven’t done many “what I’ve been reading” -type updates lately [4]. Back in October, I thought about sitting down and doing just that, but couldn’t find the notebook I usually use to keep track of my reading. This did not bode well. Not only have I not made any notes in it since February, I hardly remember what I’ve read between then and now.
Since then I’ve finished two books, The Dragon’s Eye by Stephen King which was tense and slightly creepy and really good, and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. It was okay, but it cheesed me off slightly – why does it seem like almost all books that are considered critical successes contain copious amounts of personal tragedy? Just once, I’d like to read a book about something happy that does really, really well and isn’t considered chicklit. Grrr… it’s a rant for another day, though.
3. Around August, someone asked if I was considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. For a while, I really wanted to but wasn’t committed to the idea of starting something I wasn’t sure I would be able to put a good effort into. My blogging has dropped right off the last few months, which makes me sad because I enjoyed having this as a creative outlet. Plus, the more often you write the easier it is to do, and because I wasn’t blogging that often I wasn’t sure I would be able to do the 1770 words EVERY DAY for the month of November. I decided that instead commit to writting a 50,000 word novel, I would start smaller and do a short post every day – way more manageable, right?
Oh no. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had left the story from my 2006 attempt unfinished, and that there was a whole middle part I’d skipped over, and it bugged me that I didn’t really know what happened to get the cast from point A to point 3.14159 [5]. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking up a story. Fast forward two more months and, yep, I reactivated my NaNo account. Today’s word count: 1954. That’s all of today’s words and almost 200 words for tomorrow. Woo!
That’s it for now. I will put an effort into posting more often, even if it’s something silly and trivial, like “today I saw a dead squirrel in the road, and I hope it was the one that ate the ONE TOMATO I got on my tomato plant this summer.”
[1] Bloglines, you have messed up my feeds for the last time! Good riddance!
[2] And since I hadn’t actually opened WP, I didn’t realize I had comments waiting for approval – sorry Sarah and Julie!
[3] Plus, they vibrate when you run and that just exacerbated the whole problem.
[4] Well, I haven’t done much updating period.
[5] This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the post (but isn’t that the beauty of footnotes?) – my favourite cheer goes something like this:
Cosine, secant
Tangent, sine
3.14159
Gooooooo nerds!