I won National Novel Writing Month!

30 days, 50071 words written, 6 scarves knitted. It's been quite the adventure.

(There are more than six scarves here, but two of them are unfinished, and three of them are from October, if you remember the last picture.)

It was awesome. It was absolutely worth all the sleep deprivation, all the stress, all the time spent holed up in my room pounding away at the keyboard at ungodly hours. The community was amazing, both my class here at Stanford and the online community that sprang up around the forums and chatrooms as everyone raced towards 50K.

And I actually rather like my novel this year! I haven't really gone back to the other two 50K+ NaNo novels I've written, simply because I didn't think they were really worth editing. (Well, that's not strictly true; I did edit one of them extensively, or tried to, but hit a wall about halfway through -- I think I got through seven or so chapters -- and decided that it just wasn't good enough.) This year's... we'll see. I like it, still, after spending a month wrangling with it, so I think it has some small glimmer of promise.

Anyhow, for those interested, my stats page and user info are here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/127574. You'll notice the few days towards the end when I pulled all-nighters and pounded out about 6000 words a day. Worth it, all of it, even so. Don't ask about the plateaus in weeks two and three.

Time to catch up on everything -- work, reading, friends, sleep, life. Same time next year, folks!

Thanksgiving

A short piece I wrote just now, in honor of the holiday:

On this day, out of all the year,
I think of all that I hold dear:
For songs I've sung and books I've read,
For those with whom I've broken bread,
For new friends made and old friends kept,
For times I laughed and times I wept,
For things I've learned and things I've found:
In life, in self, mundane, profound;
For beauty, love, and all good things,
I give my thanks for all life brings.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Bulbous Bouffant

One of my NaNoWriMo classmates showed this to us a week or two ago -- maybe it's because we were so burned out after typing away for hours, but we found it very entertaining in a spacey, surreal way:



I often find that if I say a word many times, it starts to sound strange and somehow incorrect to my ears. And some words are just irrationally funny-sounding if you really think about them. Or maybe I've been writing for way too long.

If I Used Twitter

last night's status would have been:

re-upholstering a couch, knitting like a fiend, and blasting Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

That is all.

Chris Baty at Stanford

My NaNoWriMo class has evening workshops every Tuesday, and this week, Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo) came to dinner with us! He told us the story of how NaNoWriMo became what it is, and I got him to sign my copy of No Plot, No Problem!, and we did word sprints, (not necessarily in that order) and it was fun times for all.

And then, lo and behold, we were written up in the Office of Letters and Light blog (OLL is the organization that encompasses NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy.):

http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/1536511865/nanowrimo-takes-stanford-by-storm

I'm all the way in the back in the picture, so you can barely see it's me.

Happy Armistice Day!

Today is the 92nd anniversary of the end of the Great War, which is now celebrated as Armistice Day, and also Veterans' Day. It is also (as a result) Polish Independence Day.

World War I was, for Europe, what World War II was for the United States. It was devastating, brutal, and tremendously inefficient trench warfare, where people were gassed en masse and mere inches of ground were gained at the price of thousands of deaths. Europe went into the second World War decades later with this legacy in mind, with a sort of stoicism and resignation that the Americans didn't quite understand. (Battle of Britain, anyone?)

Anyways, happy Armistice Day.

It's over 9000!

My wordcount, that is.

I only very recently learned about the etymology of that particular internet meme, and just now have a singular opportunity in which to employ the phrase. I am amused. :)

Happy Guy Fawkes Night!

To all you pyromaniacs out there (given the friends I have, there have got to be some pyros), a very merry Bonfire Night to you.

Seeing as the United States haven't been colonies for well over two centuries, we don't really celebrate Guy Fawkes Night out here. But we should, because bonfires are awesome, and so are fireworks and toffee apples. Also, that particular succession crisis (that entire century or so was practically one big succession crisis) was very interesting, especially since it was spiced with religious conflict and ethnic tensions. And explosives.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot, 
I know of no reason 
Why the Gunpowder Treason 
Should ever be forgot.

NaNoWriMo

starts now. My posting will probably be much less frequent this coming month, since I'll be spending most of my "free" time typing like a madwoman. And knitting scarves.

That is all -- I have a novel to write. Happy All Hallow's!

Edit: I've added a widget to the sidebar so that interested parties can track my wordcount in realtime. ("Aethyr" is my username on the NaNoWriMo website.)

Christmas Knitting

So I've decided to knit a bunch of my Stanford friends scarves for the holidays -- enough of them that I started in October. I went to buy more yarn with Julie yesterday, and I think I'll need to make another yarn run in a few weeks. Here's (me with) eleven skeins of yarn and three finished scarves:

I've been getting some of my patterns off of this website; it's particularly useful because each entry provides both the full stitch notation and pictures. If you knit, it's a wonderful resource.

I can't wait until I get to give these to people in two months or so!