Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

Still awake

I know, I know. I’m awake now. I could be cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes, taking out the trash, doing my laundry… Instead I’m working on things on my computer that need updating. I’m posting to my blog. I’m tracking what I eat in another blog. I’m balancing my checkbook in Quicken. I’m drawing a new comic strip. I’m listening to the CDs I got from Burn, Baby Burn.

Actually, I’m going to bed soon. I need to be able to wake up in the morning. Makes it a lot easier to get to work on time, I find. Maybe I’ll post about my feelings tomorrow.

MENoWriMo

So recently I mentioned briefly that I am planning on writing a novel in a month. This was inspired by National Novel Writing Month, a project I may or may not be able to participate in when November finally rolls around, but which I appreciate and encourage you to take a look into. I encourage you to take a look into it, because I’m going to be mirroring it here/at Modern Evil in the month of May. There are a variety of reasons for choosing May, the easiest to explain is that it’s 6 months removed from NaNoWriMo. And I have been recently informed (no, I don’t look at calendars much) that May even has one more day than November to try to get your novel done.

That’s right. Your novel. I want you to join me. I already have several people who will be writing novels in the month of May, and I want to get as many people involved as possible. It’ll be a Modern Evil Novel Writing Month. I’ve just created a new discussion forum on the subject, so we can all share tales of our progress/writer’s block and how trying to write a novel is interfering with our lives. I’m considering creating blog-like pages for people to post their work as they write it (if they like), and I’m thinking of contacting the people behind the real NaNoWriMo to let them know what we’re doing here.

If you’re too lazy to actually go to the NaNoWriMo website and read their FAQ, their extended FAQ, and their further extended FAQ, I’ll lay out the basic guidelines for you here:

1. People looking to write classy, complex novels should not participate. People looking to get extensive feedback and people who take their writing very seriously should also go elsewhere.
2. Start writing not before 00:00:01 local time, Wednesday, May 1st.
3. Write a novel of at least 50,000 words by 23:59:59 local time, Friday, May 31st.
4. All participants must be working on the same deadline.
5. You cannot write one word 50,000 times. That is neither novel, nor a novel.
6. 50,000 words is not a limit, it is a goal. If your story requires more words, write them!
7. Outlines are encouraged. Notes are encouraged. Partially written chapters are punishable by death.
8. Take a look at these tips and strategy for getting a novel done in a month.

That pretty much covers the guidelines and conveys the mood of what we’re trying to do here. “NaNoWriMo is all about the magical power of deadlines. Give someone a goal and a goal-minded community and miracles are bound to happen. Pies will be eaten at amazing rates. Sheep will be herded like never before. And novels will be written in a month.” (from the NaNoWriMo website) MENoWriMo is about the same things, but it is also about being too impatient to wait for November and turning Modern Evil’s most avid readers into novelists.

Anyone who emails me a completed novel of 50,000 words or more by 00:00:01 Saturday, June 1st will have the opportunity to have it hosted on Modern Evil, or just read by a friend. In fact, I’ll gladly send my completed novel to anyone who sends me theirs, well in advance of putting any of them online. More importantly, anyone who completes a novel before June 1st will have a personal sense of satisfaction that comes from having been part of this whole thing, and having written your own novel.

I can’t think of anything else to say about this right now, but feel free to email me at teel@modernevil.com if you’re interested in joining us, have any questions, or just wanted to express your dissatisfaction with the way I live my life.

Falling behind … catching up

Just before Zoe arrived on Sunday, I cleaned the dishes & the counter so that we would have space to work. By the end of the adventure, just about every dish I own had been used, and many of the bowls used and washed several times. More garbage was generated in one afternoon than my household normally produces in a week, and I did not have the opportunity to do my laundry because I was busy making specialty foods. As always on Sunday nights, I was awake late watching TV (though not as late as normal due to a well-timed re-run), and have consequently found myself napping in the afternoons when I get home from work. I’ve fallen behind. My kitchen is an awful mess, I’m running out of clean clothes, and when I get home from work I’m too tired to address these issues.

I had some other things come up recently that stood in my way of getting Modern Evil finished and online by my own deadline. Today I spent the whole day working on catching up on that, and at least the site is there. There are some problems with the layout from where I’m sitting because of the unpredictable ways IE5/Mac interprets float, but other than that, everything came together in s reasonable way. A few more days late than I had hoped, but still usable.

I feel like I’m typing this so I don’t have to type about the real issues. So I don’ have to face my real feelings. I feel like I won’t be as likely to type anything on Modern Evil or FYTH in May because I’ll want to focus all my words into getting the novel done. What ever happened to my post on that? Huh. I guess I’ll have to take a look for that around here somewhere. I know I started something.

Sensitivity to light

This morning when I woke up, I don’t remember having a headache. Still, I seem to have more of the same headache from last night, now that I’m back at work. I’d like to belive it’s a problem with the glare from the awful, awful lights here. Other people have complained about getting headaches from the lights here, so at least I wouldn’t be imagining it if I thought that was it. I hope it isn’t just stress. If I’m getting so stressed out just by coming to work that I have painful headaches, I’m pretty bad off.