OH. MY. GOSH. The past ten minutes have been intense and excruciating. I went into the next to last day of NaNoWriMo today at 46,000 words. Ish. I wanted to knock it out today, since tomorrow is the last day and I also have yet to read the book for class tomorrow night (due to the fact that I hate school). But I spent the whole day wasting time by putting up way too many Christmas trees in my house (which were awesome, and will shortly appear on this blog), and didn't start writing until around 6 pm.
Then I somehow got motivated and just kept going and decided to knock the whole thing out. So I finished up a little after 8 o'clock with around 50,300 words (according to Open Office). I was relieved, because I had written the ending a while back, and I had just gotten to the ending, so I was out of plot. Figuring I was good to go, I used an algorithm to randomize my novel (so no one could steal it off the NaNoWriMo server, because it's clearly a future bestseller!) and uploaded it. Imagine my surprise. . .and fury. . . when it set my word count back to 49,345 words. Apparently there is a discrepancy of 1,000 words between their word counter and mine!
Did I mention I was out of plot at this time? I went back into my novel, pretty much picked a paragraph at random and started adding tons of descriptions of wherever the heck the characters had happened to be in this scene. I then uploaded it again. It returned a word count of 49,645 words-ish. By this point, I'm pretty much furious and punching the couch, yelling, etc. I go back and add some more flowery nonsense to my novel. Finally, just before I'm about to have a heart attack and chuck my laptop across the room, the thing gives me a word count of 50,006. 6 words to spare. I'll take it. By this point, I'm pretty much hating NaNoWriMo. The daily writing had gotten to be almost like torture, and their word count validator was just the icing on the cake of torture. I say all this now, but I like to punish myself, so I'm sure next November I'll be on here ranting again about the pain that is NaNoWriMo, just as I have for four Novembers in a row now.
But for now, I'll just be relieved that it's over. And I guess it was cool that I actually finished the plot this year (a first), because now I'll be able to get a free copy of my novel actually printed like a book, which will be cool, even though I'm hating everything about my novel at the moment.
And 50,000 words of a novel is going to seem like nothing when I start tackling those 60 pages of term paper writing I have yet to do. . .especially since I only have a week to write them!
Last night we went to see the lights at James Island County Park with Wes, Kelly, & Noah. It was of course, extra fun with Noah. Like when there was a husky in the car next to us and Noah kept saying, "There's the woof (wolf)!" There were a few rough patches when the mean people told him he wasn't tall enough to ride the "little train," even though they had let him ride it before. He was heartbroken at first, but some popcorn soon cheered him up.
But the best moment of the evening was when Noah was singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and he got to the line "Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to. . ." and he trailed off and then said, "Momma, did he cut him?" None of us were sure where that came from, but it was pretty hilarious. Fortunately, the next time around, the lyrics were back to normal.
We had a really great evening getting to see the lights. Plus, there were flamingo ornaments at the gift shop. Which means that an entire flamingo-themed tree might be in the works. . .stay tuned. . .
A brief disclaimer: The pictures on this blog are going to look a lot like the pictures on Wes & Kelly's blog. Because they are the same. Due to me stealing them from Kelly's Facebook page since I left my camera at home the other night. (Also, I promise Cy has other shirts. Even though he is wearing that blue sweater in pretty much every family picture on every holiday.)
Anyway, that being said. . .we had a really great Thanksgiving. I spent most of Wednesday baking to get ready for the big day. I made my first-ever pumpkin pie (with homemade crust!) and it turned out great! I also made a cranberry apple crunch dish (basically apple crisp with cranberries) that turned out pretty delicious too. I wasn't sure the pie was going to happen at one point on Wednesday. . .there were a lot of hiccups involving the crust instructions being out of order and then being confusing, and then me not being able to get a hold of my mom for clarification due to her being in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina, with no cell phone service. But I ended up just winging it on the end and it turned out all right. Cy even liked the pie, so it must have been pretty good.
On Thursday, we took it easy in the morning--didn't do too much at all. Then we headed over to Wes & Kelly's house around 3:15 where we had dinner with Frank & Andrea, Mike & Jean, and Wes, Kelly, & Noah. There was so much food it was insane. I think I put about a tablespoon of everything on my plate and filled up the entire plate. Aside from that, it was nice just to get to take some time out from all of our crazy lives and spend some time together, just hanging out and catching up.
We wrapped up our Thanksgiving by watching the movie The Proposal. . .at which we laughed hysterically. Overall, it was a really great day.
Last weekend, Rachel came down to spend the weekend so that we could go see New Moon together. We drove up to Florence on Friday and had dinner with my parents at Cracker Barrel, then Rachel climbed in the car with us and we drove back to Chucktown. We spent Friday night watching/laughing at Twilight (and Saturday morning, as we were too tired to finish it on Friday after our road trip).
On Saturday morning, we hit up Wal-Mart in search of New Moon t-shirts. We didn't find any, however, we did find these super cool Madagascar Christmas stuffed animals. It turns out that Madagascar Christmas animals really enjoy riding around on the Roomba. Who knew?
After watching a few spoofs of New Moon on Youtube to get us in the mood, we went to the theater (Cy bought us tickets in advance, just in case they sold out). There was a pretty big line waiting to get into the theater, and we were afraid we were going to get trampled at first, but it turned out okay. The new Citadel Mall theater is really nice, and we enjoyed the movie--it was a lot better than Twilight (which we decided was because Robert Pattinson was hardly in it).
Saturday night we went to Joe Pasta and Cupcake (yum), then watched The Pink Panther 2 and caught up on some homework/noveling. Then Sunday morning it was church, and then back on the road to Florence and home again. Did I mention it was snowing in Charleston when we left? Weird. It was a quick, whirlwind weekend, but we had tons of fun!
Just wanted to post an update - we went to the ob/gyn for my monthly checkup this morning and everything was great. They said my weight was good, we talked through a few questions as well as some future plans, and then we got to hear the baby's heartbeat - loud and strong in the 150's! We were also excited to find out that we get to have the next ultrasound and find out if it's a boy or a girl sooner than we thought! We didn't think that it would be until after Christmas because of the holiday, but they have me scheduled for Friday, Dec. 18. That will be a nice early Christmas present! :)
In other news, Cy is doing much better these days. For anyone who hasn't heard (again, not that I think the readership of this blog is terribly extensive), he had a scary episode last Wednesday where he passed out at work (for reasons unknown) and fell and hit his head on a cubicle wall. We spent about 6 hours in the ER while they ran all kinds of tests, but they didn't find anything, which is good and bad. Good, because there's nothing obviously wrong. But bad, because we still don't know what caused it and we are just hoping it won't happen again. After that, he has been suffering from concussion symptoms ever since. It has been a rough week for us but he finally seems to be making some progress toward getting better.
And in yet other news, we are excited about Rachel coming tomorrow to stay for the weekend. We have a weekend of Twilight-filled fun planned. We are going to watch Twilight, then go see New Moon on Saturday. (I am sure we will manage to squeeze in a trip to Joe Pasta and Cupcake as well.)
And now for other, less exciting updates. School is nearing to a close. Both my Tuesday and my Wednesday class meet only once more each (first week of December). Unfortunately, I have my Monday night class 3 more times, plus a 4th time to take the final exam. Other than that, I just have to churn out two 15 page term papers (I have yet to write a single word) and a 30 page bibliography project (at least I have rounded up the 100+ sources needed for that - they finally cut me off at the library the other day and said I couldn't have any more books until I brought some back!). Needless to say, I absolutely cannot wait to be completely finished.
As for NaNoWriMo, it is going okay. . .not as great as years past. I have just been too busy spending all my days working on school projects, and then I'm just too exhausted by the time I get home from class at night. At only 23,000 words as of right now, I am lagging behind, but still in the running. I am planning to catch up some this week, and maybe even get ahead next week when I have a break from school.
All right, I have bored everyone (all one or two of my readers) enough with my less than exciting life. On December 18, I will have much more exciting news to post (as well as pictures)!
An update on the graduate comprehensive exam: I got an email yesterday afternoon saying that not only had I passed the exam, but that the quality of my exam was so high that the committee elected to designate mine as "passed with honors," which they said was awarded very rarely, only to the best exams.
YEA! Now I just have to survive one more month of classes and I will be DONE!
It's that crazy time of year again. . .National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo began at 12 am on Nov. 1. Since I'm finishing up my last semester of graduate school (taking 3 whopping classes) and I have about a billion papers to write before the end of the month, and I'm also in the midst of an epic battle with morning sickness that lasts all day long. . .well, I was going to sit this one out. (I think I may have said the same thing last year too - due to working full time and taking grad classes.)
But then I thought about it, and this would be my fourth year in a row participating. Ever since November '06 I've been hooked. And due to writing billions of term papers on subjects I couldn't care less about, I haven't been doing a lot of "fun" writing. And then I realized that maybe a little NaNoWriMo was just the kind of stress relief activity I needed to get me through this last semester.
So I decided on Oct. 31 that I would do it. But then I had a big problem. Normally, I spend the months leading up to NaNoWriMo coming up with a plot and characters, and I usually have at least an outline when I get started. Not this year. The last few months have been consumed with studying for the comprehensive exam.
Then it hit me: everyone is turning out teen vampire novels right and left these days. Certainly that would be much easier to tackle than the elaborate restructuring of Jane Eyre into the Southern Gothic mode that I undertook last year (and have yet to finish). And better yet? Why not borrow a famous plot for my teen vampire novel?
To make a long story short (although hopefully I'll be able to make my actual story at least 50,000 words by Nov. 30): I decided to steal the plot of Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (which I'm actually writing about in a paper right now, so I had a chance to brush up on it), but write my novel about a teenage girl who is so obsessed with teen vampire novels (like Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, etc.) that she starts to suspect that everyone around her just might be one of the walking undead. So that's what I'm attempting to do right now. And so far, I'm having a lot of fun. I've read so many teen vampire novels myself (hate to admit it, but it's true) that it's coming pretty easily. I finished out yesterday (day 2) with 4,332 words (about 1,000 words ahead of schedule). Hopefully I can keep cranking out 1500 or so words per day to get to that goal of 50,000 by November 30!
(And hopefully no one will read my blog and steal my already stolen plot since I laid it out there. Shouldn't be a problem - pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway. Also, hopefully I won't get my novel confused with my Jane Austen paper and start writing about vampires in Northanger Abbey. That could be problematic.)
OH. MY. GOSH. The past ten minutes have been intense and excruciating. I went into the next to last day of NaNoWriMo today at 46,000 words. Ish. I wanted to knock it out today, since tomorrow is the last day and I also have yet to read the book for class tomorrow night (due to the fact that I hate school). But I spent the whole day wasting time by putting up way too many Christmas trees in my house (which were awesome, and will shortly appear on this blog), and didn't start writing until around 6 pm.
