Keelan Rosa

It’s NaNoWriMo 2011! (and has been for a week i am slow to blog when i am busy novelling okay)
and seriously
i’m going to edit this one
honest
even though i didn’t edit the last seven
this time
for real

(Actually i think i have finally figured out a writing groove which works for me. So i may very well have something capable of being edited once this is all done. As opposed to all the other rubbish-bits of the past seven years.)

Completely unrelated: i finally got ‘round to reading The Shining, even though i don’t like Stephen King’s writing style, mainly because i do like horror and it’s a Horror Classic and thus must be read eventually.
It actually has a really good plot (much better than Cujo at any rate) but i still don’t like King’s writing style.
Reminds me of the moment in my Lit of Evil class when Collins made sure to tell us he’d heard King reads Elements of Style at least once a year, yet we never read any King stories in Lit of Evil. I strongly suspect it’s because his plots are catchy and his grammar is perfect but his writing is otherwise meh.
Also how the hell did Grady not accidentally… do the same thing Jack accidentally did. /am trying to avoid spoilers/ It seems in the process of hatchet-murdering he’d have forgotten the same thing Jack forgot with similar results.

Went to Celtfest, found a bodhrán sale, bought bodhrán.

It is huge.

At least in comparison to my old one. Which is why i got the new one: i don’t have room to move my hand enough for proper tonal changes with a seven-inch drum.

Now i need to find a place to keep it…

Also i ate a ridiculous amount of haggis yesterday. Favourite food ever and i only ever seem to find it at Celtfests. Last time they were out of haggis, i got haggis-pastry instead, but now i have had straight haggis and it is the awesome.

i’m reading a book on marketing and it has exercises along the lines of converting customers.

right now my long-term conversion part of the exercise is as follows:

• dude
• what
• i don’t even know what i’ll be doing long-term

…yeah. I have discovered i am Not Good at working on the same project for too long. Somewhere around the three-month mark i reach a point where i’d rather throw the whole thing out and start over than work on it for one more day.

This is great if i have a cool project i can finish in three months, because i spend those three months (…or at least the first two…) being very excited about it and working on it constantly. It’s not so great for, say, novels, which i can write in under three months but which take so long to edit i eventually reach a state of THIS NOVEL IS RUBBISH, I SHALL START OVER. That’s, um. That’s not really a good way to finish anything.

Seriously considering figuring out a wild writing schedule which will allow me to outline, write, edit, and publish in three months. Really i need to at the very least get in the habit of editing-while-writing. I never do that during NaNoWriMo because it slows me down too much but if i’m taking three months to write a novel, i can write slower. And if i edit-while-writing the first draft may actually be decent enough to avoid the massive chunks of desperate speed-writing which make editing a horrid nightmare.

bah.

• I’ve completely let my Starfleet club membership slack, so i’ll have to restart that if i have any hope of doing any Starfleet Academy stuff. Oops.
• My current moving plans require paying off my student loans first. My current student loan budget plan looks to actually finish up six months after my 1001 days are up. Also i don’t think i’ll be moving to Philly. Maybe Chicago.
• I may not be going on an oversea volunteer trip either. Because a) money all going to student loans and b) an awful lot of those are glorified poverty-porn. So it now depends on whether i can find one where i would be really helping instead of just making myself feel good.
• I kind of killed my webcomic.
• I am practicing my bodhrán! Every day. Yay!
• Screw singing lessons, i just want to get to a good level with my speaking voice right now.
• I don’t even want an artist rep any more.
• I’m planning on getting rid of most of my dead-tree books, because i have literally reached the point where i can’t find most of them because there are too many other books burying them. (I have also come to the conclusion most of the people who complain that e-readers aren’t REAL books and REAL books are BETTER don’t actually read much. I ran out of shelf space over a year ago and started stacking stuff on the floor. Extra hard drive space handles more books in less physical space. w00t.) Anyway. So. Motivation for bookcrossing.
• Screw the Irenari cosplay, too. I have a totally different OC to cosplay. Who i still need to design anyway, but whatever.

THERE. big massive 101 update.
I think i made my last 101 list in too much of a hurry, i didn’t plan anything out and as such there’s no way i can even afford to do all of it (even without student loanstuff) and quite a bit of it i don’t actually want to do and am not going to do simply to check it off a list. I’ve been working on my next 101 list, though, and already have over 101 items, so when i actually switch over to it next year i’ll be narrowing it down to stuff i honestly want to do instead of flinging things on at random like my last one.