picked a handful of violets in my name

Have accumulated 132 plays of songs from the new MSI album. Today. And that's not counting the time I listened to the whole thing on their myspace.

Surprisingly good music for writing a three-essay take-home final. IDEK.

Speaking of which, take-home final is nearly done. I have to write a paragraph about Jews in Vienna, and a conclusion for that essay (compare attitudes toward Jews in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest), and then I'm done.

So my tomorrow will be waking up, finishing that essay, taking a shower, attempting to find erasers for Dad's pencil, going to UHCS and making an appointment with either my usual prescriber or the one she recommended because she doesn't work over the summer, going to the library and printing out my exam, and dropping it off.

Also, go tell me what to write! You can ask me for more info if you want. Because when I get home tomorrow, I'll be able to work on it! Aiming to have something postable by June.

Originally published at The Love Letter Sessions. You can comment here or there.

I recently lost an outline and the first 5000 words of a story that was threatening to be 50000. Epic fail, my computer.

They were a damn good five thousand words, too. But oh well. I’ve started again, and I’m rapidly closing in on the previous word count. For some reason, things I write in notebooks are less polished than things I write on computers, even after I’ve broken myself of the habit of compulsively editing unfinished work.

I’m also almost three thousand words (and five+ new characters) into another story, and trying to figure out how to write drabbles and deleted scenes without interrupting either of the other stories (they’re in separate notebooks to keep them from interrupting each other, but I feel like hauling three to school every day would be ridiculous). Maybe those are safe to write on a computer. To be honest, I’ll probably wind up composing them right in my html editor, complete with tags; it’s just too annoying to switch between documents and make sure I’ve correctly handled each case of special formatting.

I’ve been sleeping a lot over spring break, and keeping a weird schedule. End result: I could have had five hours of sleep last night - if I could have fallen asleep. Instead, I spent about five hours snuggled under my blankets, writing random snippets in my head and plotting out where I want the new story to go (not that I expect the characters to obey, but whatever).

Summary for the month of March so far (9 days): wrote 15387 words, lost 4751 words to gremlins, have reached 4337 words on the rewrite of the story that got eaten by gremlins, got 2701 words into a prequel for that story, and wrote 3598 words of miscellaneous (mainly false starts and outlines).

Originally published at Auriel. You can comment here or there.

So, I have this program. It's meant for novelists. It has a nifty auto-save feature that has saved my ass a couple of times.

Not this time. I should have known something was up when it didn't prompt me to save my project under a specific name. I've tried to open the backup and all I get is an error message and absolutely no data.

Eight hundred words of outline and five thousand words (of the first part of a five part story) have vanished into the ether.


The only good news is, when I rewrite this, maybe my characters will behave themselves and not decide they're going to have sex in the first chapter. And I do have a very sparse version of that outline in a notebook, that I can consult. And since all of this was written on March 2, 3, and 4, I mostly remember it.

My next attempt to write will be taking place in a notebook, thank you very much.


ETA: In an hour and a half, wrote almost a thousand words of outline just for the part of the story my computer ate. \o/ Will finish rewriting outline when I wake up.

I am now almost 6000 words into this story. It's still flowing relatively easily, it's still all in the right order, and there's still quite a bit more to come.

I would do a victory dance, but I'm too tired. Night all.

I find myself feeling a bit sad and wistful at random. IDK. Maybe it's seasonal.

It fucks my writing mojo all to hell, and yet somehow I have written a little today. A page and a half in a wide-ruled composition book, but it's more than I manage some days. Even better, I know where I want it to go. It's not just a cute scene, there's a story. I'm stopped in the middle of something, and I'll be able to pick it up again, and keep it going.

I have some new ideas about structure, but I want to get the story down before I try anything fancy.

Back to it, then.


ETA: Wrote another four pages, for a grand total of five and a half. Also, I need to make a playlist for this thing. Because it's all very good to put all 3500 songs in my iTunes on shuffle, but skipping through shit that's just completely wrong for the story takes way too much time and messes with my flow.

Tomorrow, between classes, I might be able to finish enough of this thing to start the structural experiment I mentioned above. Fingers crossed.

I managed to complete NaNoWriMo in November, so I need to set a new challenge for myself.

The prompts at We Are Cities are intended for bandslash, but they’re good enough that I want to use them anyway. There are over 100 prompts already posted, and more to come.

So, the resolution: whenever I feel stuck, whenever I can’t think of anything to write about, I’ll reach for one of those prompts.

My other New Year’s resolution is to have assigned last names to the characters who don’t have them yet, and to assign everyone a birthdate. Age is just a number, and the stories span years.

Originally published at Auriel. You can comment here or there.

So the writing continues at a furious pace. I wrote 3000 words on my computer today, plus fuck knows how many in my journal (about four 8 1/2 x 11 pages, in teeny tiny print).

Expect small storybits to be posted soonish.

things that will have a negative impact on storybit posting
* 10-15 page paper this weekend
* Italian final
* final project and mini-papers for "food class"
* potentially my creative writing portfolio, I don't know how much revision my professor's going to demand
* take-home final for gender&society

things that will actually have a positive impact on storybit posting
* all of the above actually isn't that much and most of it will be done within the next week
* working exam week (there's a rush at the beginning of each shift with people coming in to take their exams, and then it's dead for the next four hours)

Also, when I attempted NaNo in 2004, I created a number of characters who were later abandoned. One of them was a drummer named Patrick. I don't remember a thing about him; I just made him up so another character would have someone to crush on. I'm going to bring him back, both because it amuses me and because I do actually need at least one more character who can play.

1232 / 50000 words. 2% done!

So, yeah, guess what I'm doing with the rest of my day. I committed to 300 words per day for mini_nanowrimo, so I've at least accomplished that, but I'm really shooting for more like 2-3k today.

(I'm not doing NaNo the way it's supposed to be done, tbh. I'm not starting something new, nor am I focusing on a single story. I just want 50000 words of creative-type stuff out of me by the end of the month. A few dozen of those 1232 words are lyrics, for example, and poetry would also count.)

Now to finish the story for the creative writing class of suck, probably just a couple more scenes left. I'll post it when I'm done.

While I'm working on that, please name an art student, the lead guitarist and drummer for a band (both guys, although I could probably rework the drummer as a chick), and the female principal of a posh girls' school. All of them pop up in the story, and it would be nice for Trish to refer to her band members by their names, and I'm fucking sick of typing "the principal."

No progress on Warped Omens since yesterday - I'm not turning that in for class so it's on the back burner until Tuesday. Sorry, guys.

***

“You’re older than Piper. Still younger than I’d hoped, though.”

Al: less freaked out about being five years older than Sam than he ought to be (also, world's cuddliest gangster)
Sam: amused and flattered (also, thinks Al looks cute in his friends' bands' merch)

Word count: 2961
Pages: 11/~15
Plot: Next up: Nicolas throws a party, Sam's parents are Not Pleased, and some kind of resolution.
Chances I'll beat the supposed minimum of 15 pages: 92.6%

***

Also, I now have a MacBook winging its way to me. ^-^ Mom may want my iBook, or I might wind up selling it, she hasn't made up her mind yet.

***

Happy birthday to dexwebster!

More for the Auriel Skippy's list:

13. I will not write band boys into Auriel in any context.

14. No, not even as unnamed background characters.

15. And certain not as things like a major character's roommate or coworker.

16. I am also not allowed to graft bits of their appearances or personalities or life stories onto otherwise original characters, because that way lies madness and eventual violation of 14 and 15.