Day Seven

Today's wordcount: 11,676. Tomorrow's goal: 13,336. Needless to say, I made it over the five-digit mark.

The only good thing I ever had to say about Professor Gray is that technically he knew his subject, which was Abnormal Psychology. Aside from that, he was nothing more than everything that his last name implied. Everything from his eyes to his tweed suit to his personality was gray. He probably had unsweetened oatmeal for breakfast and showered in dishwater. Even his voice matched his personal pallet.

“Good morning, class. Please settle down while I take attendance.” He required us all to sit in alphabetical order by last name; he was the only college professor I ever knew of who did so. We all sat in relative quiet while he went through his seating chart and checked us off row by row, starting in one corner and working his way to the opposing one. Those who were unfortunate enough to have quiet voices or to not pay attention the first time were marked absent.

“Here,” I said loudly the second he called my name. I wasn’t about to take an X on his sheet when I was sitting right in front of him.

When he was finished with his roster, he filed it in a manila folder, which went into a stack of other similar folders, and then pulled a sheaf of meticulous notes out of his textbook.

“Today,” he announced in a voice completely devoid of inflection or emotion, “We are going to do a comparison exercise. You will work in partners.” There was a general shifting noise throughout the classroom as people made to sit with their friends, but it was silenced when Professor Gray cleared his throat. “I have paired you up by name so that you won’t be working with people who will distract you.” Though no one actually said anything, there was a distinct feel of disappoint that wafted through the air at his statement. We should have known better than to think he would let us get away with enjoying his class.

“Abramson, Finlay,” he said. “Allen, Delano.” Having been the first name on the list, I immediately tuned out the rest and starting looking around for someone by the last name of Finlay. The last name might have been useful had we all been wearing nametags. It didn’t seem to occur to the man that most people referred to each other by their first names and not their last ones. For someone who also taught social psychology, he was distincly lacking in a functional understanding of people being social.

An Excerpt

Last night's word count: 8,442. Today's goal: 10,002. Five digits, twenty percent of the novel. We can do it!

And now for a short excerpt to get you all wondering...

To say that I knew who Seth was, of course, was not to say that we were friends, or that I had ever exchanged more than a startled glance with him. Everybody who had gone to my high school during the four years he was there knew exactly who he was; he really couldn’t be missed. It seemed as though he looked in the mirror each morning and decided he wasn’t noticeable enough naturally, so he added things to make himself moreso. For the most part it was black clothing, studded with metal spikes and dripping with chains, but he was a little more creative than the school’s gothic crew. I had seen him add to the outfit, among other things, hunter-orange sneakers, a large drooping silk peony, a midnight-blue blazer, and various bright jewelry and even brighter nail polish. These things had not, fortunately, been all at the same time, though there were certainly days when looking at him was the visual equivalent of riding a roller coaster through a tropical forest.

I avoided him like I tried to avoid snakes in the woods, not always successful, but always enthusiastic. No one who was anyone at school spoke to him, and they too tried their best to leave him plenty of space, moreso than any human actually needed. On the occasions that he would appear somewhere that we were, the girls would make their way elsewhere, some more loudly and hastily than others. The guys would either walk away in contempt or else loudly announce to him what his proper place was: not there. The most noticeable thing about him was how he seemed never to take the slightest notice of these things. I had seen him yelled at, insulted, run from, and even pushed into walls, but he always continued whatever he was doing without missing a step, the look of freakish calm on his face never changing.

Day Five

Day Five. As of last night, I've reached 6,770 words, just a little bit over the daily goal. Today's goal is 8,335.

I found a wonderfully inspiring thread in the NaNo forums yesterday, discussing how people have let their plots and their characters create themselves rather than trying to force them. I find this particularly inspiring because that's something I have a hard time with. I have a tendency to plot madly, carefully design my characters, and then force both to stay that way rather than letting them surprise me. It's probable that I'd be better off doing it the other way.

I have yet to see if I can actually convince myself to let that happen, of course.

Day Three

Day Three of NaNo. (If you read the timestamp on the post, it claims that today is Tuesday. I disagree. For me it's still Monday, and therefore day 3).

5,123 words by the 12:04am. I really wish I had posted them five minutes earlier to the NaNo website, because now they appear in the awesome little graph thing as having been written on Tuesday and not Monday. The problem with that is that it now appears that I wrote nothing on Monday, and this is certainly not the case. In fact I wrote 1,614 words today.

Unfortunately, it's now time to go have a talk with my neighbor, who seems to think it's a good idea to play her crappy music at full volume at almost 1am.

Let The Chaos Begin

It's November 1st. Most of you are probably saying, "So?" That means one thing for me, though: NaNoWriMo. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this recently, so I won't go into the background again. But today it has officially begun!

Novel is working-titled Retribution, but I don't like that very much, and hopefully I will come up with something better soon.

Today's wordcount: 1,702.

I kept a blog last year specifically devoted to NaNo, and I may resurrect it. If I decide to do so, I'll post the link here so you can follow.

On Global Warming

I never thought I had it in me to care much about politics, and I still profess to a certain extent that I don't give a flying rat. But at the 2004 election, I was still a few months short of voting age, and so I now have more reason to care than I did before. Not that I think I actually have a say - I don't, and I won't unless and until this country gets rid of its electoral college.

Research, however, is still interesting, if only from an academic standpoint, and to know where things around us are headed and why. It's also fascinating, after reading a certain amount of research, to realize just how many people lie to how many other people; but I won't tell you what to think. Read this article and think for yourself. I challenge you not to be a lemming.

The Three Reasons I Almost Never Post

Finally, I'm working more than three hours a week. It's about time. I had hours in the CS Lab as a tutor/monitor on Thursday and Sunday mornings, and now I'm working in the IT Helpdesk on Monday mornings, Tuesday nights, and Friday mornings.

Schedule says I have to be in here at 7:30am on Fridays. It's news to me that that's actually an hour at which people are awake and functional. But I suppose that if I have to be up at obscene a.m., I'm at least getting paid for it.

Hopefully this will give me something else to blog about, as I came to the conclusion yesterday that most of what happens in my life falls into one of three categories:
A) It's just not interesting enough to write down
B) It would appear as either braggery or sympathy-fishing if I wrote it down
C) It's something you don't need and/or want to know about.

Then there's category C.1: It's incriminating, and therefore I plead the 5th. Don't let this alarm you. (You know that putting things in other people's mail boxes is a federal offense? I think everyone has committed a crime at some point, and many of them are just unaware of it.) I like to think I'm too smart to leave trails, like announcing that I put things in mailboxes. Hey, at least they're business cards and not rotten eggs, right?

In other news, I'll be doing NaNoWriMo again in November. For those of you I haven't yet subjected to the speech, that stands for NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. The goal is to write 50,000 words of fiction between November 1st and 30th - no cutting, editing, or over-thinking allowed. Just write, for quantity and not quality. (That's then followed by the optional NaNoEdMo: National Novel Editing Month, in December. If that has a website, I'm unaware of it.)

Certainly that will give me something to blog about, provided I don't wear my fingers out typing said novel (and programming for classes) before I can update the blog.