Enthusiastic Failure » National Novel Writing Month

50K or Bust

Shashi — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:50:17 +0000

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.

See more progress on: Self-publish a book

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Shashi 7, Real Life 0

Shashi — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:27:49 +0000

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.

Recognising Shoddy Tarot

Shashi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:55:10 +0000

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.

Shoddy Pilot Webcomic

The NaNoWriMo Furoshiki

Shashi — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:45:38 +0000

National Novel Writing Month Furoshiki

The finished pattern for my National Novel Writing Month furoshiki, featuring lots of Cyrillic letters and writing icons.

I’ve ordered a yard of fabric with this pattern from Spoonflower, which should arrive in plenty of time for me to do all the cutting and hemming needed before NaNoWriMo. I think i can get one large furoshiki and two smaller ones from a single yard. I really only need one, though, so i’m planning on selling the other two. If they sell well (i.e., enough to actually cover the cost of having expensive custom fabric printed up) i might make them a regular product. Which would give me a wonderful excuse to do more fabric designs…