On the other hand, sometimes the end of the day comes really fast, and you’re not ready for it. Or you sat down to write and got distracted by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or something, and then you realize that you are actually really tired and don’t have anything prepared to say, but you’ve got to say SOMEthing because it’s almost midnight, and didn’t you say something about trying to post every day? Oh wait, yes you did.

I realize I skipped last night. It was almost midnight, I was brushing my teeth and admiring the new and interesting shade of purple that the bags under my eyes have taken on, when it struck me I hadn’t posted. I did a really quick, almost throw-away post the previous night when the SAME THING happened, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same thing last night. Ahhh… blogging about the frequency of your posting and blogging about how you have nothing to blog about. I’m pretty sure I broke two fundamental blogging laws, there. [1. Make that three - blogging about how you broke the blogging rules. Go big or go home! ]

Anyways… tomorrow will be the first day that I can watch the World Cup live and not live through everyone else’s Twitter updates. Slovenia/Algeria would be interesting to watch, but I’m aiming for Bosnia/Ghana, and Germany/Australia later in the day. (Originally, I’d planned to post about my soccer experience in my youth, but then, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and something else got in the way.)

When I was young, I had long hair – like, crazy long. Until I was ten, I never had my hair cut (except my bangs [1. The history of me and my bangs is a whole other blog post. ]) so it was pretty long. I couldn’t wear it any other way than in braids because it would get tangled easily or caught in everything. It could only be washed once a week in the bath tub or the laundry tub, and then it took forever to dry let alone brush. By the time I hit ten, I’d had it with having long hair that was increasingly burdensome, so I decided to have it cut off. Somewhere, my mom has a picture of my the night before the deed with my hair down; no word of a lie, it is past my butt and gaining ground on my knees. And then I got it cut short – like, crazy short. Like, the next day I walked into my classroom and no one recognized me at first.

For the next few years, I kept it reasonably short, until high school, when I started growing it out [2. Holy crap was my grade nine picture awful. It was finally long enough to have cut one length, but my bangs were too short, and I had glasses that took up most of my face, and I'm grinning like an idiot. It was not pretty. ]. Throughout high school and most of university, it varied in length between jaw-length and shoulder-length, with a brief period of it being elbow-length in my first year or two of university. After grad school, I had it chopped off, and kept it shortish for a long time.

In the past few years I’ve been keeping it longer for no good reason. Not too long, mind you – I liked wearing it down, but long enough to pull back into a ponytail if need be. This past week, that all changed when I went to my hairdresser down south for a trim.

Hairdresser: How much do you want off?
Me: Oh, shorter than it is now.
H: Short or REALLY short?
M: (thinks about it) REALLY short.
H: (cackles evilly)

So, now it’s really short – there’s not enough to pull into a ponytail, even a little one, but it’s long enough to tuck behind my ears.

The hardest part of it? Having bangs again – I haven’t had those since I was sixteen, and they’re constantly in my eyes or coming untucked. But I’ll get used to them, right?

I had started a post on the weekend about how I spent the last ten years, following the keen examples of both Dr. Beth and Sarah. However, in retrospect, I’ve had a mostly dull past ten years, with the exception of 2000 and 2009.

2000: I was a semester into grad school, and loving it. Not so much with the stomach cramps and weird bouts of internal pain, which would eventually be diagnosed as gall stones, necessitating the removal of my gall bladder in May. I spent my summer working in the Department of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie³ I traveled to Edmonton and Jasper, and got to see the tall ships in Halifax. I attended an epic Halloween party and a truly epic St. Patrick’s Day party. I was the person in charge of the Orientation Week activities, and managed to pull off a 99% on an assignment. ⁴ Unfortunately, I got bronchitis in October, which lasted until the end of December.

2009: I was one of the planners for my section at a major conference in Toronto. I traveled to exotic Washington, DC for another one. I bought a new car, and realized that the cracking paint in my office? Was actually evidence that my roof was leaking and would need to be redone. I picked up yet another hobby, complete with expensive toys: spinning (as in “wheel” and turning straw into gold.)⁵ My adorable niece was born, bring the total niece/nephew count to 2. I started an exercise habit and actually stuck with it.

This year, I haven’t really made any resolutions, except maybe to stick with the ones I made last year. Maybe actually finish a few of them.⁶ I do have a few ideas for things to do this year, and once I get them fleshed out, I’ll pass them along.

1. Oh, that’s a lie and you know it, too.
2. If you really want to start a heated debate in Markstay-Warren, ask a resident if they think the name should have been Warren-Markstay.
3. It’s a fancy way of saying “the study of how studies are conducted.”
4. My partner and I did a library orientation lesson plan for Starfleet Academy. Verily, we were the nerdiest of the nerds.
5. That’s still a few years away, though.
6. #1 and #8, I’m looking at you two.

Some NaNo stats of mine for your pleasure:

• This was my sixth year participating, so this gives me a 50% success rate so far.
• I skipped 2007 because I couldn’t think of anything to write. October that year had been hell, and I wasn’t prepared.
• 5 of the 6 stories have been sci-fi [2] and the 6th story was a romantic dramady [3].
• Two of the wins have been with sci-fi and one with the rom-dram. You’d think that I’d stick with the rom-dram since I have a 100% success rate with that genre, as compared to a 40% success rate with sci-fi.
• Over the course of November, I had four days where I wrote 5,000 words or more, meaning that I wrote 40% of the story in four days. If I could only harness that awesome writing power, I could have been done in slightly over a week. [4]

A lot of writers say that sometimes the characters you are writing will sometimes stand up and wrestle control of the story away from you, and it sounds like a lot of malarkey, but there’s a grain of truth to it. For instance, all the way through my story outline, I had two characters named John and Paul. Halfway through the notes, Paul stopped feeling like a “Paul” and decided to become a Jamie. Okay, fine – it’s early enough to change. But then when I started actually writing the story, John stopped acting like a John and started calling himself Liam. And one of the other characters, who was supposed to be a airhead named Bijou, had a great moment near the beginning which made me decide that she wasn’t an airhead and “Bijou” was actually a silly name for her, so she started being called by her nickname, Beez.

And then there was the story. It’s the same story I started working on all the way back in 2003, and it’s carried me all this way without running out of ideas. There’s this space ship, and there’s this crew on this space ship, and they do stuff, and then there’s a conspiracy going on. Last time I wrote about them, in 2006 [5], I wrote the end of the story without actually figuring out what the conspiracy was, so this year I worked on the middle part where more people start finding out about the conspiracy and trying to figure out what’s going on. However, this year I did it from the perspective of a different crew on a different ship which I had mentioned in passing last time – not that I didn’t like the characters, I just wanted a different group of people to do things this time around.

And next year? I had this one character in this year’s story who was absolutely not what I thought he was going to be, so I’m thinking I might have him set out by himself to see what he’ll do with his own story.

[1] There’s a mouthwash for that. You might want to look into it.
[2] They’ve been part of the same story.
[3] Calling it “fiction” seems so pedestrian.
[4] Somewhere, my boss is hollering “if you could have harnessed that awesome writing power, you would have finished those post-project reports months ago!” To which I reply: “pthththtbbbbbb!”
[5] I wrote the rom-dram in 2008.