In my other life….

…I have been running from breast cancer and losing both my father and my grandfather, all in the same year. I’m not ready for NaNo. Last year I miscarried a pregnancy, and my due date was November second, so when NaNoWriMo came around that year I wasn’t overly enthusiastic. After the miscarriage, I was diagnosed with Stage 0 breast cancer; I’d had my first mastectomy on October 6th and that hadn’t really left me in great shape either. Two weeks after last year’s NaNo– which I dropped out of to go see my family for Thanksgiving– drew to a close, my father literally dropped dead at work, his last words being, “Guys, I don’t feel so good.”

I’m not saying that NaNo is jinxed, but I am starting to develop a Pavlovian aversion to it.

So we’ll see what happens this year.

Must- resist- can’t- AAAAARGH!

So I think I’m gonna do WriMo this year. Why, when November seems to be out to get me? Because I’m already recuperating from an October surgery that has hopefully stopped a tiny little scrap of early breast cancer from getting out of hand– er, I mean, you know.
So in the spirit of the unofficial motto of the Young Survival Coalition– “Fuck YOU Cancer!”– I’m going to go ahead and do it.
Besides, I still can’t drive for another two weeks and it’s either this or Rune Factory Frontier– again.
So to prepare for November, I installed the WriMoDemon app by Kris Jacque onto my iPhone, and found a cute little app nearby called “Story Seed Generator” by D. Brad Talton Jr. When I fired it up for the first time, I got the following suggestion:
This is a mythology story.
The Main Character is… a guild of bards.
The Setting is… A constitutional republic where dreams become truth.
The Story is about… The death of a nation.
Sounds enough like Tigana that I’m going to spin again. Here goes…
This is a fairy tale story.
The Main Character is… A cool-headed thief’s identical twin and a spunky lady.
The Setting is… The dark ages, in a dungeon in the underworld/heaven/the depths of hell/a faraway land.
The Story is about… A tournament to decide the greatest rider in the land.
Hmm, this smacks of the exploits of Hanse Shadowspawn and just about everything Terry Pratchett has ever written. M’kay, let’s try again…
This is a supernatural thriller story.
The MC is… A thoughtless police chief who is unable to avert the terrible calamity to come.
The Setting is… A world where a lost city has been rediscovered.
The Story is about… A tragic series of murders.
Dingdingding! I can’t do this one because it sounds too much like The City of Ember.
But this is fun and I could do it all day…

Oakie-doakie, so far I’ve come across The Caves of Steel, Heart of Darkness, Huckleberry Finn, and everything ever printed by Clive Cussler, including the new collaborations with his son. The fact that these were all generated by a randomizing app is proof that every possible story has already been written.
So I think I might go with the Lovejoy-esque story “A detective thriller story wheere e main character is an artistic pirate who thinks everyone is watching him set in a monarchical nation where births are arranged by the state and an unforeseeable series of murders unfold.” Or maybe the one about the wise hotel manager with a mark that condemns him as a criminal during the roaring twnties in a secret clubhouse, where one man’s search for truth in a world gone mad leads to some kind of conclusion. Then again, the cool inventor with the power to regenerate from any wound who lives in Charleston WV in the distant future who gets involved with a powerful alien technology and discovers that using it has a cost sounds great… Except that it’s the inversion of 1632, and I already have a 1632 fanfic underway…
Hmmm….

Can I do it this year?

So, both times that I’ve tried NaNo, I’ve come down with serious and potentially life-threatening illnesses. This year, I’ve got a head start, actually, on the serious disease situation, so will I risk life and limb for 50K worth of words? I don’t know…

PneuNaNoWriMonia

I got to 28K last weekend! Bernard has been fantastic, I’ve not lost files, I know exactly where my thumb drive Manny is, and I have a clear ending to the novel. Last Tuesday I think I had some of my most inspired NaNo moments evar.
Going into Thanksgiving, I still thought it would be possible to get to 50. At least maybe I’d go to the TGIO party for our region. Then on Wednesday in the car on the way to The Thanksgiving, I started feeling bad. Then I felt badder.
Today a nice, funny doctor told me I’ve developed pneumonia in the middle lobe of my right lung.
So I figure this to be the towel mark for NaNoWriMo 2009.
I had so much fun this year, actually sucked it up and went and met some really neat people. I have to say we had a fantastic ML and the write-in I went to was a lot of fun.
Bye NaNo ’09!

In Fluenza

Contracted some kind of flu. Got my seasonal vaccination a month and a half ago, so it might be the New Flu. Might not be. I just know that I’m tired, behind, and grateful that, regardless of what kind of bug this was, we weren’t any sicker than we were.
18K, suckahs!

How to Free the Ties that Bind?

I’m sitting at the public library trying to figure out how to unplug my power cord, which is wedged between the wall and the side of this carell, without involving the guy on the other side of the divider who has somehow entwined his cord with mine, and has neglected to push his cord all the way into the socket. Crap, I hate interacting with other people.

My LOLcat

No cat in the world can get her nap on as fast as this one. She jumped up in my lap, meowed, and stretched out on Bernard asleep.

Bernard Hits the Sauce

So I took a huge gamble and bought a $10 power adapter from Amazon. To my surpise, not only did I get the right kind, it is an actual Dell adapter.

The battery light came on as soon as I plugged it in! I went into setup when I booted him up, and saw that the battery is being charged and am getting no more annoying power configuration messages.

Keeping my fingers crossed (when I’m not busy typing!)

Hoorah.

Service Pack 2 installed. I now have iTunes on board! Now let’s write!

Fun with Windows

I’m currently caught in a seemingly endless cycle of Windows updates and software upgrades. I can’t get the service pack I need unless I have the correct version of IE. I can’t seem to upgrade IE without installing that service pack first. Arg! Speaking of which, am I gonna have to go to the pirates for this one?
So while Bernard is pretending to fetch updates I think I’ll write for a while. But wait, Bernard is busy updating his lazy ass. Arrg!