I’ve done up to Week 5 in Pace and Kyeli’s 52 Weeks to Awesome course. Week 5 being ‘Introduction to Introspection’ – basically getting inside your own head and figuring out why your subconscious is messing with you.

So i’ve spent most of the week tinkering around with things i’m having trouble with – like my deep hatred of editing. Can’t exactly finish a novel without editing it, and it’s the thing i’ve gotten stuck on every time.

Discovery? I really like my stories.

‘Duh’ moment, and seemingly has nothing to do with my dislike of editing stories. Except i don’t like the first draft so much. I like the idea, i liked writing it, and now i just want the whole editing process to be done with so i can have my nice shiny story already.

Apparently the i just want the whole editing process to be done with bit is the only bit to have been bubbling up to a level of consciousness at which i actually notice it. Taken out of context, it’s very easy to mistake ‘i just want this to be done’ with ‘i just don’t want to do this any more.’

I wonder if editing will be any easier if i just start constantly reminding myself my ‘hatred’ of editing is really impatience…

random other stuff

• The anti-global-warming argument: What if we’re creating a better world for nothing? (and the older, actually-a-post-instead-of-just-a-comic What I’d Say if I Was Wrong About Climate Change) And, for those who genuinely enjoy yelling at the radio, Breakpoint News had their own bit of AGW this week.
• Why Piracy Works flowchart – i’m not one to condone piracy just because the legal version is mildly annoying, but yeah. Pirates = strip out everything unnecessary in order to shrink file size; MPAA = cram as much ‘we need to increase profits and decrease piracy as much as possible’ crap in as they can fit on the DVD.

I submitted the first chapter of Angels Unaware to Critique Circle for feedback.

Crits thus far can be summed up as ‘Cut this, cut this, this is okay but not really necessary, cut this, and… okay, you just. um. have a tendency to overwrite in general.’

I imagine overwriting is a common problem amongst NaNoers. ‘Dammit i’ve been writing for three hours, i haven’t slept in two days, and i’ve still got fifty words to hit today’s word count… fine! Make the President’s speech longer!’

At some point during NaNoWriMo i heard of Tarot for Writers, which uses tarot cards to brainstorm character personalities and plot outlines. I’ve been lusting after it ever since and finally gave in and downloaded the Kindle version last night and have been drawing cards for my novel characters (especially the borderline random and unrealistic minor ones).

It’s far more oriented towards writers who are just starting their novels than those who have already written one and are trying to edit, but it’s still proving useful. At the very least it’s prodding me to be a bit more creative – most other tarot spreads, if they touch on personality or backstory at all, do so in the sense of how it all affects a bigger problem. The Tarot for Writers spreads don’t have the whole ‘real live person with a backstory you can’t change on a whim’ limitation.

It has awesome plot-outlining bits, too. I’m going to go nuts with this next November… i’m already having trouble resisting the urge to play around with the various plot spreads. Maybe by the time i’m done pulling cards to work on a whole small cult worth of character design the novelty will have worn off a bit.

random other stuff

• I somehow suspect i’m going to end up with a copy of Out of the Box & On the Page before i’m done editing. Right now i need more editing advice than idea-generating advice, though.
• The ‘post-literate’ Cat and Girl strip makes me giggle – though i admit to being on the pro-spelling side. And the comments below have devolved into pro- vs anti-spelling debate of most wondrous form, including at least one impromptu mini-poem.

Non-art-geeks may not already know about this, but every year around this time the major colour companies declare a ‘colour of the year’ (ie, Pantone has declared 2010 to be a Turquoise year.)

Of course, experts can’t even discuss straight data without arguments cropping up over interpretation of said data. Experts announcing a colour naturally ends with all the colour nerds playing with entirely different colours.

Can the leading color authorities really forecast a color trend anyway? I mean, if you’re the most influential voice in a field and you forecast something… You’re not really forecasting, you’re telling people what they want. We don’t think people want to be told what they want. We want you to tell us what you want.
Announcing a single color to represent the entire year is a lot like announcing a single song to represent the entire year. Yes, there will be a clear top grossing or breakout song of 2010, but that song can’t really speak for every person. Nor can a single color. BUT, every person can speak for their own color of 2010… and that’s what we want you to do.
- COLOURlovers

So COLOURlovers (…and actually probably a few other colour-sites, too, though COLOURlovers is the only one i visit often…) set up a choose-it-yourself Colour of the Year page. Right now the most popular is Hope for Tomorrow Orange – my year, however, is shaping up to be more As a Kid Yellow.

I love it. Yellow’s not my favourite colour, but it matches my plans for the upcoming year so perfectly. Blue is too mellow, pink is too gentle, hot pinks and reds are just all wrong. Yellow is ‘i have the energy to edit this novel’. Yellow is ‘i can do anything and what i don’t know how to do, i can learn’. Yellow is flying-wild enthusiasm and excitement. Yellow is so totally my 2010.

And the person who originally named this particular shade on COLOURlovers called it ‘As a Kid’. It really doesn’t get any more perfect than that.

random other stuff…

• What No One Will Tell You About the New Year – makes the quite accurate point of ‘the shift from December 31st to January 1st is no different than June 17th to the 18th’ (better known as ‘you’re the same person now as you were in 2009 and just pretending something magical will happen at midnight won’t make it so.’) Not to discourage New Year’s resolutions… just pointing out they won’t necessarily turn out better than resolutions any other time of the year. Though there is some mental boost to starting something precisely on calendar dates, as anyone who has stayed up all Halloween night to start novelling exactly at midnight on the first of November can attest…
• On the subject of resolutions, designing and working towards a perfect average day is possibly one of the best. Also a semi-sneaky way of working any resolution you want to stick to regularly into a broader goal.
• Gretchen Rubin is doing a Year of Happiness challenge, with a different focus every month. (She’s also written a book on happiness, which comes out… erm, today.)

I read my 2007 NaNo again last night. It’s… actually really good (says the person who wrote it and is therefore not biased at all… well, it’s good compared to most of my other hacked-out-in-a-month novels).

It’s still very much a rough draft but i’m happy with it. I can do something with this. I can make it good.

That said, if any alien biologists, cult psychologists, or world-destruction-ologists know anything about two-hearted knife wound victims, otherwise sensible cult members, and slowly but irreversibly making Earth uninhabitable… i think i could use the help.

One of these years i will fail at NaNoWriMo. And there will be much crying on my part.

I don’t actually like the novel i wrote this month. Like, at all. But i’m not done with it yet, either, and… i kind of want to actually finish it. Except i also want to get started on editing Angels Unaware. Gah.

Maybe i should just take tonight off, celebrate my 50K, and worry about everything else tomorrow.

I still have pretty much no grasp on tarot cards as of yet, but i was watching some Bones last night and saw an episode including a psychic who used tarot cards. It was almost cool, except i knew the commonly accepted definitions behind at least half the cards shown on-screen and most of her explanations of them were way off. So, basically i know tarot just well enough to know when someone else is doing it wrong.

(For example, there is simply no way you can use tarot cards to figure out there’s a pile of bodies buried under a fountain. Even the ninety-nine-cents-a-minute phone-readers advertised at three in the morning wouldn’t try to pull crap like that.)

Of course, i also don’t use my tarot for actual divination purposes, and the psychic in ‘Bones’ was portrayed as an actual, honest-to-goodness psychic. Presuming psychics can exist (and with a little poking around with mild telepathy and talents for examining subconscious thoughts, there’s at least plausible explanations for them), it wouldn’t have been completely ludicrous for the psychic to be simply using her tarot cards to guide and focus her psychic visions. In that case, she wouldn’t need to have even a basic understanding of ‘real’ tarot – ‘Hm, this card shows a person in bed. My awesome psychic intuition tells me it’s a literal depiction of a man you’re friends with being sick in bed.’

They didn’t actually explain that in the show, though, which irritated me to no end. At one point Booth is interrogating the psychic – because, let’s face it, you can’t just say ‘Hey, there’s a dozen bodies buried under the fountain, you might want to go check on that’ without the cops thinking you were involved somehow – and when she’s asked how she knew where the bodies were, the psychic basically says ‘Well, it’s difficult to explain what i do with the cards.’

I can do it in a single (albeit somewhat run-on) sentence, woman: You have stronger intuition than most people, but the exact details of your intuition are often fuzzy, so you use the cards as a focal point to help complete the visions. YAY.

I have no patience for people who pretend stuff cannot be explained, who act like it just is and if you can’t accept it, you’re too close-minded to deal with.

unrelated random somewhat-tarot stuff:

I’m finishing up the character matrix for my NaNo, which meant doing another tarot reading for one of my characters. By sheer accident, he’s basically a young male Sarah Palin. He’s certainly not going to be a duplicate of her by the time i get around to actually writing, but i find it somewhat amusing. And a bit frightening – she fits perfectly into the novel. As a villain.

Actually, pretty much all my current antagonists are the dragon version of the Republican party. That wasn’t really intentional at all – i needed evil dragon politicians and every time i pull a card for one of them it matches fairly well with the current Republican party’s beliefs, with just enough variation to make them individuals instead of GOPbots. Granted, i don’t think McCain has ever plotted to kidnap a half-dragon boy in order to prevent illegal immigration from an alternate dimension, but some conspiracy theorist can probably pull up a website relating a similar story.

I’d normally have updated earlier (sticking with #98 on my 101 list, ‘update weekly’), but my internet has been pretty shoddy lately. It works, then it doesn’t, then it does. Still doesn’t properly work, but whatever. I’ll not let that stop me. Though it does mean any update will be random hodgepodge ‘everything i meant to write all week and didn’t’ thrown together instead of anything coherent.

On the novelling front: lots of character-building, lots of world-building, lots of research. My current novel project is going to read like an urban fantasy, even though in my head it’s more of a hard sci-fi novel, so i’m basically creating alternate versions of the whole world and trying to work out plausible reasons for the alternate version to exist. I really hate stories in which there’s no logical explanation for why something happens the way it does – even a technobabble sem-logical explanation, ‘Doctor Who’-style, is better than nothing. Heck, even if the explanation isn’t in the story, if there could plausibly be an explanation, i’m okay. But ‘well, it just magically happens‘ doesn’t go over so well with me. So even though my novel involves alternate realms populated by dragons, and even though i don’t plan on explaining any of the actual science in the story, i’ve been doing a ridiculous amount of research on hyperspace. I think i’ll own every single book ever written by Michio Kaku by the time November is over… Then there’s the research i’m doing on fae and technopagans and coffee and Watergate and Buddhism. It’s a long list.

I’ve also been sort-of using my tarot deck – mostly simple readings for my characters. Someone on the National Novel Writing Month forums mentioned they have a simple four-card layout they use to determine a character’s fears, hopes, loves, and hates, and that plus one extra card used to determine a dominant personality trait has given me many wonderful ideas for my characters. I still have to look up the meanings behind just about every card, and i don’t have any traditional layouts like the Celtic Cross memorised yet, but i’m starting to get a feel for the cards.

Dvorak – i’m kind of hoping to have figured out before NaNoWriMo starts, but i’ve been slowed up a bit by my lack of consistent internet and my ‘hey, i can just use online programs!’ attitude of last week. I do have the home row more or less memorised now; that’s a start.

And as far as replacing my software with open-source stuff, i’ve actually gone backwards a step – i’ve switched, at least temporarily, from Firefox to Opera. Opera’s noticeably faster (important right now, when the next page load could be my last for twenty hours), and for whatever reason Firefox keeps crashing even when the internet’s working. I’ve heard people complaining about the latest version of Firefox but it seemed to be working fairly well for me for a while and only started crashing recently; maybe i’ll just reinstall the whole thing once my connection’s properly functioning again.

I’m starting to plan my novel for National Novel Writing Month, aka “the greatest time of the year, evar.” NaNoWriMo is a crazy month of creative explosion followed by a month-long high of “wow, i did something totally impossible. It sucked, but i did it.”

Christmas, by comparison, is a mere day of family and fun followed by “wow, i gave and got cool presents. and socks.”

So… it’s not even October yet. And i’m crazy hyper for November to start. This year… i’m breaking out the big guns. And the dragons.