I hereby present an amusing and mildly interesting article-of-sorts that Neil Gaiman himself describes as, “a funny polemic, and a fine warning against laziness in plotting.”
He then adds, “Not sure it’s of much use beyond that, nor that it was meant to be.” I got a few good laughs out of it, though. It’s a lucky thing for us all that Stephen Donaldson got much, much better once he got all those atrocious Covenant books out of his system.
The Well-Tempered Plot Device
Thanks to fellow NaNo “ObPippin” for pointing me towards The Lord of the Peeps. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like.
The Lord of the Peeps
In between fiddling with That Damned Laptop and my NaNo project pages and Quatro, The Undead PC… I have managed to churn out 5,000 words or so over the course of three days. This means that I’m actually on track, oddly enough.
The laptop trouble turned out to be entirely the fault of Mandrake 9.0, the KDE portion of which is hopelessly befouled. I installed it onto one of my desktop PCs at home and had even worse performance than I did on the laptop! Desperate to get a Linux-based writing utensil working, I installed (sigh) RedHat 8.0. It’s working, but I’m not as happy as I would have been with a good Mandrake rig. Oh well. Once November ends I can blow it straight to hell and try something else.
A fair portion of my weekend was spent at Java Vivace in NW Portland hanging out with fellow WriMos. An impromptu kick-off party was held Saturday afternoon, while yesterday was our “more regular” semi-impromptu meeting. I got there early yesterday and managed to get most of the day’s quota done between bites of omelette and sips of cocoa.
As an aside, is it just me or do coffee shops have the world’s worst hot chocolate? Bland, lifeless cocoa is the bane of my existence. One of the banes, anyway. It doesn’t get better with whipped cream, I can assure you. Someone, please, point me towards a place that serves really tasty and sweet hot chocolate.
To sum up, not only am I solidly on track but I have a working progress chart, backup copies of my work on almost half a dozen computers, and a new group of friends to chat with both online and in person. And I’m sure we’ll stay in touch for at least a couple of weeks after November has passed…
Well, I won’t be able to “write anywhere” in November like I’d planned. My *cough* wonderful *cough* Dell Inspiron 3800 seems to have given up the proverbial ghost. Oh, it can boot and run programs… very, very slowly. Don’t ask it to read from the CD-ROM drive. Don’t expect it to talk to any other machine over the network. Hmm, doesn’t that render the laptop completely useless? Why yes, it does.
Plan B is to chase everyone out of the computer room during Writing Time so I can use the big happy Internet-enabled machine to write and upload. I was hoping not to have to alienate my family during NaNoWriMo, but you can’t win ’em all.
With just a bit more than three hours to go, having to change the entire game plan does not a happy duckling make.
I apologize for the dearth of updates this week. Every spare productive moment has gone into my NaNo project. I have a bit of character sketching typed up and posted now, as well as a nice chunk of background data. I’ll probably be linking in some of the other Portland NaNos next, followed by the actual structure of the story postings. (I’m still undecided on “full story” versus “excerpts” posting. Comments are encouraged.)
Just a bit more than a day left before I become a full-on writing powerhouse. Hoo boy.
I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome some new Blogs of Note. Intellectual Orgy has already been mentioned but Mari can stand the encouragement. The People’s Republic of Seabrook provides a witty slice of Lone Star State life in addition to some keen sociopolitical commentary and has become a daily fave of mine. Rounding out the roster is I’ll Say She Is!, another well-written slice of life journal. The Chuck-A-Palooza antics alone are worth the visit.
Let’s put it this way: Unless you want to read my novel (or about the progress of my novel) there won’t be much of interest on this site during November. Dig into these Blogs of Note, dear readers. I wouldn’t steer you wrong.
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