I have the kind of body type where everyone assumes that I’ve lost weight.

I don’t know what this means.

Let’s say, for example, that I haven’t changed my net mass in approximately six months. Let’s say I last saw you five months ago. Let’s say I saw you today. You’ll say, statistically proven, without fail, “Holy shit, you’ve lost weight!”.

I haven’t been able to figure this out. I am able to predict it, clockwork precise. Why? How does this happen?

I need to keep my jelly in check. I am aware of my own jelly. I am aware of the jelly reduction that common sense demands.

But anyone I haven’t seen since at least February: “You’ve already reduced your jelly! You are a jelly reducing machine!”

But there is no jelly reduction. I weigh the exact same. There is something about my body type.

I posess some kind of nostalgia fatness. Some kind of fatness where people remember me fatter than I really am. Such that, even if I’m still kind of fat, people are all like, “Holy shit, you’ve lost weight.” It’s wierd.

Wierd science.

It’s kind of… demotivating.

Gord and I shot this a million years ago. I wasn’t going to put it online until I had more material to follow it up with. But realistically, I’m lazy. I may never make anything ever again. Might as well put it out there. New Years and all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3-vodQFF9Q

Current Count: 7,561

I would really like to make the 10,000 mark by bedtime tonight. I think this is a reasonable goal. With any luck, I’ll be able to nail another 1,000 before lunch, and then I’ve got until sleep overtakes me to do another 1,500.

I’m happier with the story now. I like it more. I may even love it, actually.

It’s still terrible. But I’m beginning to feel like the mother of an ugly, ill-behaved hoodlum. Sometimes, the best part about something is that it came from somewhere inside of you. And sometimes, that’s enough.

I’m a bit stuck. Stuck has a different meaning here. When I’m stuck on a story written any other month, I can be stuck for weeks, stuck forever. I have written 1,500 words this morning. I stopped writing at 12:08pm. I have been stuck for approximately 16 minutes. The pace is so frantic, and the bar is so low, that stuck and taking a break are interchangeable. I will likely be unstuck sometime after lunch. If nothing appropriate to what has come before comes to mind by then, I will sic some terrible happening unto our heroes, not previously set up, no need for explanation.

Diablo Ex Machina.

Current Word Count: 5,565

Which means that I’ve crossed the 10% threshold. 10% of the 50,000 goal mark, at any rate. It doesn’t look like I’ve gotten 10% of my story down yet. My magnificently bad story. As though Uwe Boll were directing literature.

Count: 3029

Ideally, I’d like to be at about 5,000 words by bed time tonight.

This is among the worst prose I have ever written in my adult life. I’m pretty sure the story has been done a dozen times, and in one month time, I’m going to end up with a 50,000 word shit.

Usually, I go back, edit and re-edit as I write. This may be a bad habit. I have a very very difficult time writing stories above a length of, say, 2,000 words. They collapse under the weight of me editing and re-editing. I hate making major changes to the story, ever, because I’ve already spent so much time getting it juuuuuust right. Sometimes, it turns out, when you get to a certain point, major changes to the beginning are necessary in order to make the right ending work. This is the way things work.

Layman’s description of the difference between extroverts and introverts is this: introverts think to speak; extroverts speak to think.

I think maybe the same general duality exists with writing. Some writers outline vigorously, prepare, plan, research: they think the write. Other writers simply start writing, it seems like the ideas they’re using come from the beating heart of the universe itself, and only stop to think when they *really* have to. They write to think

I think my problem is that in editor mode, I’m follow the introvert paradigm. In writer mode, I just try to let space time channel its magic through my autonomous fingers. Editor mode tends to be more powerful than writer mode, but can’t itself produce much text — all of my large stories are savagely victimized in the conflict.

If anything, what NaNoWriMo is doing, is allowing me to let my editor brain sit this one out, and wait as my writer brain churns out a mountain of clunky mess.

I can only hope that at the end of this, when editor brain gets full reign, writer brain has left it something to work with.

I never realized that baking soda was such an excellent exfoliant. My face feels so smooth and soft.

Yesterday, I was el diablo, complete with rubber horns glued to my head with spirit gum, the edges blended with liquid latex and toilet paper. My face, neck and ears, liberally subjected to bright red face paint.

After the first shower left my face still pinkened enough to make me appear in a constant state of rage, baking soda was suggested as the final face paint removal solution. I arrived home from Halloween festivities at 6:30am this morning, and spent half an hour in the shower, scrubbing my face with baking soda. To my great pleasure, the ridiculous discolouration appears to have been completely destroyed, and my face feels delightfully soft.

Also, it stings when I touch it, from the half-hour of aggressive abrasion. The prices we pay.

Before going to sleep, I figured I’d better type at least a little bit, for the sake of National Novel Writing Month of Novel Writing. Get things started.

Current NaNoWriMo word count: 457.

I don’t know what the hell I’m writing, really. But that’s not important. This is an exercise in endurance, and I intend to prove my manly stalwartyness.

As soon as I’ve gotten some proper post-Halloween sleep.

I think I’m going to commit to this NaNoWriMo thing for November. Really, I’ve always had a problem with producing large volumes of material, and a pointless challenge is as good a way as any for me to confront and hopeably overcome that particular problem.

Really, the main thing in upping my productivity to the required 1,600 words per day average, is to sleep less. I love sleep. I think that probably the most successful people in the world are the people who don’t love sleep nearly as much as I do. Or maybe they have a love-hate relationship with sleep. They’re all like, “Hey sleep, I’ve missed you” and spend one beautiful night together in catatonic rest, and then never call again for a month. I need my sleep all of the time. Sleep is starting to feel smothered.

I’ve been practicing, by sleeping less. For the last week, I’ve been getting up at 6:30, when I generally wouldn’t need to be up for work before 8:15 or so. This is me getting ready for the big race. I’m already feeling it, after barely a week. I am tired all of the time. I was expecting this to subside; in fact, the whole reason I started getting up early last week, was to make sure that I was adjusted to my new sleep schedule in time for the big game. Instead, I suspect that I will spend the month of November in a zombie state, shuffling from place to place, bashing out voluminous trash on my keyboard. I’ll get more sleep in December, when I’m editing. The real trick with a first draft of anything, really, is to finish it.

For those who say you can’t polish a turd, remember this:

the trick is not to polish a turd, but to cover it in foil and paint it gold.

One of my favourite things to do, is take a new picture that Bigham has sent me for constructive criticism, add something to it in PhotoShop, and send it back as a magnificent improvement.

At least it wasn’t lens flares this time.

I’m not particularly good at this blogging thing. That this blog is meant to be an official blog, with real names attached to it, makes matters worse. I rarely have much to announce, and Ham and I made a pact to never allow this blog to turn into an everything/nothing chronicle of what we ate for breakfast, how we are feeling emotionally, and what song we want people to believe that we were listening to as we were typing our posts. If this were the kind of blog I used to chronicle my misbehaviours, it would be more populous. This is not to say that in my own life, by seconds and minutes, times of rowdy misbehaviour outnumber moments of gentleness and sensitivity; but rather, misbehaviour is considerably more interesting.

This is also not the place for it.

The trick is to write things up here that are both not personally damaging, and not phenomenally boring. I have yet to figure out how to do this frequently.

I had a LiveJournal, some time ago. I’m really glad that my real name wasn’t attached to that one. I was going through a strange grumpy-and-angry-all-the-damned-time period. I also swore unnecessarily in my writing. Constantly. Go through this post, and find a way to add one “fuck” for every occurrence of “the”. It becomes excessive. Not being angry-all-the time hurts productivity and interestingness as well. Lately, I’m barely angry enough to qualify as being angry-some-of-the-time.
I sprained my ankle last week. Having a sprained ankle is like being angry all of the time, I guess, except, instead of being angry, I’m in a modest but manageable amount of pain. There is a lump on the top of my foot, near the ankle, as big as an egg. I keep poking it. Poking it is probably not helping matters, but it’s a lump the size of an egg on my foot and it’s a wildly different colour from my usual pasty whiteness. I have to poke it. All the time. I suppose, lately, I’m not-behaving-in-a-manner-conducive-to-the-healing-of-injuries-all-the-time.

Which is, in its own way, a kind of misbehaviour.

Andrew says:
http://movies.aol.com/movie/alvin-and-the-chipmunks/28897/main

Bigham says:
do… do i have to watch it in hd?

Andrew says:
YES!

Bigham says:
god fucking damn son.

Andrew says:
Did you just watch it?

Bigham says:
its loading

Bigham says:
oh christ.

Bigham says:
at least it was a short trailer

Andrew says:
Did you just watch a computer animated squirrel eat another computer animated squirrel’s shit? Seriously. Seriously seriously. Before we even get ordinary CG porno, we’ve got the really wierd animal shit eating stuff.

Bigham says:
fantastic.

Bigham says:
you’ve been waiting to say that haven’t you