Category Archives: NaNoWriMo

The New Deal

bloggery, NaNoWriMo

I can tell you one thing with certainty. The writing game ain’t easy. I keep pushing that basically every time I write a post (though a more accurate estimate might be I complain about it in every 0.84697 posts) partly because that’s the whole point of this blog (surprise!). (The other point of this blog is to, over time, gain traction in the culture at large to accept the use of parantheticals in prose. Us parentheses users have lived in the dark for too long!)

Anyway. I am here to announce to the brick wall that I have decided not to do NaNoWriMo. It was a tough call, because I really wanted to give it a go, but it looks like the responsible choice for this year is to save up my momentum for next year. Continue reading The New Deal →

500 Days and no NaNo?

bloggery, NaNoWriMo, writing

If you know me (and I find it fair to presume you do to some extent if you read this blog) then you probably know I love arbitrary numbers. Let me tell you a little about it. When I look at a digital clock, I try to work the numbers, be it by adding, multiplying, factoring, whatever, to make the resulting calculation be an even 0, 5, or 10 multiple. When numbers start to get pretty big, I like to look for factors of 2, which is why I harassed my friend Lance to let me see his score on a game when it turned out to exactly equal 65,536. (Unfortunately, this incident turned out to be just sloppy programming, as the game’s score did not update past 2^16 for some reason.)

I do not find 365 to be a particularly appealing number. Oh, sure, it’s a useful number, because it gives us an idea of how long we have to wait until the next Thanksgiving (36 days until the Glorious Revolution of sweet potatoes, taken out of the oppressive casserole dish and placed into the freedom of my mouth). But 365 isn’t a particularly round number. Couldn’t we, like, I dunno, strap some rockets to the earth and decrease our orbital period to 350? That’s only a 15 difference. We can have 14 months with an even 25 days then, and the sunscreen industry will boom. Continue reading 500 Days and no NaNo? →

Update, downdate, everywaydate

bloggery, NaNoWriMo, writing

For a time, this blag seemed to be on the upswing. I was posting pretty regularly, and even occasionally avoiding hedging my phrases with unnecessary adverbs. But lately? A steady march of adverbs and a general lack of my posts.

Well, let us get right down to it. I’ve been busy.

I mean, in theory, I’m busy, you’re busy, everyone’s busy all the time, but it has been an especially busy time for me. For the first time in a while, I’ve got a paying gig. And by that I mean some work that actually puts dollars directly in the bank account. That’s good, because we have some unexpected expenses just over the horizon. (Does it sound silly to say that unexpected expenses are not here yet? Doesn’t that mean that they are expected now, and that I can no longer claim this particular brand of victimhood? Well, I didn’t anticipate that they would show up, so I’m just going to stick to it.)  Continue reading Update, downdate, everywaydate →