||||Sushi Writes About Things

Five days left to NaNoWriMo. Thankfully I’ve made some progress on my to-do list, having made one pot of soup. Some of it will be gone by the time Nano gets here; in fact, I ate a small bowl as an evening snack. But having some made now will let the soup get nice and tasty as well as letting me have a go-to hot meal that isn’t ramen or a frozen dinner during the first few days of NaNo. I still have more things to cook before NaNo starts so I can write instead of cook. There are newbies to pair with mentors, regular commitments to take care of, pep talks to write, meals to cook, kickoff parties to finish planning and attend, ML duties to attend to, forums to read (this can wait, but it would cause me considerable sadness), Wikiwrimo articles to edit and write (see forums), journal entries to write, events to add to the Atlanta regional calendar and map and aaaaah.

And more things keep coming up. I meant to get some of the writing done this afternoon in between giving NaNo stickers to a student hosting write-ins at my alma mater, but I decided to gatecrash the math department instead. This was fun; I met one of my NaNo newbies (weird coincidence, eh?) and talked to two of my professors. I had both of them in the spring, so they had no idea of my noveling craziness. No, that’s a lie. I had one of them for a fall class sophomore year. Forgot about that. But somehow he didn’t see the noveling crazy, maybe because the class was a bigger one. Some things are best left for after graduation, I guess.

A few of you may have heard me discuss this, but I’m one of those crazy fools going for the full 50,000 words on November first. Yes, it’s insane. Yes, it’s probably nearly impossible given my commitments on the first, which include a midnight party to celebrate the beginning of NaNo (that you’re invited to if you’re in Atlanta), a tutoring session, and a write-in that I am thankfully not hosting. Once you add in travel for all these things, eating, basic hygiene, and some sleep, reaching 50k on the first is looking to be almost impossible.

Then there’s the part about writing a mashup of two genres I’ve never written before, adventure and historical fiction. And I’ll be writing a significant chunk of this book in a day. Send help.

No excuses, though. Just more running around to finish everything I need to do before some somber hugs on Halloween and drowning myself in words. We 50k day folks have no idea what we’re getting into.

The problem with my to-do list at this point is that things are going on them faster than they’re going off.

I meant to get things done this evening. I really did. Then one of my friends and I went to an astronomy thing tonight, and that ate up most of the late evening where I was planning to do things. Whoops. Now all of those things get carried over to tomorrow. Whoops.

Nano starts in just over 166 hours. How on earth did this happen? Guess I’ll be doing all the things tomorrow. Time to get scrambling. Again.

I love to-do lists. They keep me organized, and I can cross things off when they’re done. Bonus points if I put every item on a Post-it note and hang them on my wall so I can take the Post-it down when that item is finished, rip the note up, and toss it.

So here’s this year’s Pre-NaNo to-do list.

* write pep talks
-three NOWD donor pep talks (contact donors to see when they’d like the pep talks)
-one Adopt a Day pep talk (by 2 Nov)
-two regional pep talks (by the end of Week One for one, the other is more flexible)

* catch up on journaling to this point
-I have two major events left, but these are major events. We’re talking weekend-long events here. This may take most of my spare time over the week.

* Cook food so I don’t have to cook as much during the first week or two of Nano
-I have four frozen dinners and five packs of ramen for November first and those nights when I really don’t feel like cooking, but I don’t want to eat these the entire month. Even though I’ll be away from my kitchen for about a third of the month (the Overachiever Invasion, Night of Writing Dangerously weekend, and Thanksgiving weekend), I still want to eat reasonably healthily, and cooking in advance and freezing meals is a good way to make sure I do so.

* Acquire the last few needed groceries before starting all this cooking.

* Various ML stuff.

* Three kickoff parties the upcoming weekend. For those in the Atlanta region, there’s one on Saturday evening followed by two on Sunday. See this thread for details and how to RSVP. (It’s so close!)

And then the noveling begins…

This is your last full week before NaNoWriMo starts. Sunday through Saturday. Yes, you get a Sunday and Monday as well, but sometimes a full week is what you need to scramble and get everything in your non-noveling life sorted out: what you’re writing about, what you need to do before Nano starts, all that grocery shopping and mass cooking and cleaning and laundry. Thankfully I still have a weekend and a half before Nano starts, but the last weekend will be eaten up by kickoff parties and general scrambling.

One big thing I need to do is catch up on my journaling before Nano starts. I just finished one notebook tonight and am starting another one tomorrow. I have a lot of catching up to do, including those two weekends I was gone for the whole weekend. That alone may take up half a notebook, but I want to be completely caught up in journaling by the time Nano starts so I can start clean.

Can I do it? I think so. It’ll take a little bit of writing every day, but I think I can handle this.

So let’s write. But let’s not write my hands off.

I’ve mentioned my co-ML Mattkinsi before. He’s very lickable as well as moist and delicious. He writes literary fiction with sad endings. Death, usually suicide, shows up a lot in his stories. So this year he turned his penchant for writing the same kind of story every year into a fundraiser: Make Matt Miserable. I paid attention to my conversations with Matt regarding this fundraiser and took notes while helping out others who wanted to make him miserable, all while saving my own dose of misery for the last minute.

And miserable I’m making him, for I just snatched up the main plot, which is making Matt go “Greeeeat”. The two remaining genres are the ones I’ve been rooting for him to write from the beginning (adventure and mystery). I know (or suspect) almost everything else that has been claimed so far, which influenced my decision on what to take. Luckily everything worked out in my favor.

Now to figure out a plot for Matt. Thank Baty my region’s hosting an online plotting party tomorrow, and guess who’s talking about plot? If you guessed the Matt himself you would be correct. Bwahahaha.

But he could get revenge. As you may know the top donor to my Night of Writing Dangerously fundraising page gets to choose the plot of one of my NaNo novels this year. He has suddenly taken a great interest in that. Uh-oh.

If you want to make my co-ML miserable, you have until Sunday at 5pm Eastern time. Tell him Sushi sent you.

The big news of the day: Libya’s ruler Moammar Gadhafi, is now dead. I must admit that Libya wasn’t on the front of my radar of things to track after awhile, but I definitely knew who Gadhafi was.

As with Osama bin Laden’s death, that people are celebrating his death disturbs me a little. I can understand why they do it, but celebrating the end of a human life, the end of one’s existence, always seemed excessive to me.

To everyone in Libya, best of luck to you. You have a long road ahead of you, but you can do it. You’ve already shown that you want a country free of Gadhafi’s rule. Now show that you want not just a country free of his rule, but a country free of Gadhafi-like rule.

I’ve started using Google Calendar for my appointments, probably because I now have a way to keep track of it instantly. I have a couple of repeating appointments in the system, along with reminders of when to get ready and leave. On occasion those appointments change, so I have to change the appointment for that one time, usually from my phone.

Apparently that doesn’t change the appointment in Google Calendar. One week my appointment was moved back by an hour, and I told Google Calendar that. I still got the reminder email an hour in advance in my inbox, but it came at the regular time.

I had forgotten all about this, as humans do, so I headed out anyway and found myself an hour early.

Oops.

Then I spent the next hour creating test appointments and trying to replicate that bug. No luck. So was it just a glitch, or is this a known bug? I don’t know, as I still haven’t replicated it. But I know that if I had used paper and pencil, this would only have happened if I had lost the paper.

Do you like cute boys? Do you like cats? Do you like the two together? I like both, and I like the two together. If you also like both together, then you might like cute boys with cats.

Or maybe you prefer cute girls with cats. Or cute boys with dogs. Or cute girls with dogs. It’s all good, mmkay?

It is the eighteenth in my time zone. NaNoWriMo starts in two weeks. Fourteen days. I feel ready, but I’m… not. I should be used to this by now since I’ve been doing this for ten years, but this is kind of new. Even in 2009 when I didn’t come up with a plot until a week before NaNo started I was still excited for NaNo to start. Now I’m running around trying to get everything done before the month begins, and yet I know it’ll get done. Somehow.

Fourteen days. The countdown begins.