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.