Well, I don’t have much time right now as I have to get ready for work soon, but suffice to say that there is A LOT to catch up on!

• The largest change has been my change of address. I now live with my sister in a 2 bedroom villa. It’s not that large but it’s cosy and a good size for just the two of us. I have a queen size bed now which is awesome.
• Business is still chugging along, though it stalled for a while there. Not making much money at this point, but what the hey. I’m making a little. Just working out kinks in my process. Working on four sites currently.
• Comic has been on hold since Script Frenzy. Haven’t felt like it but I plan to start drawing at that moment of inspiration. It will come eventually. :-/
• I skimmed Drawing the Line a couple of months ago, and decided that it sucked beyond repair. I consider it my practice novel and nothing more. The plot is just too pathetic.
• Next month I’ve booked a trip for my sis and I to go to Melbourne. I paid for it all since I owe her money.
• I own a laptop again. Brand new from Catch of the Day. I made sure it had a dual core processor so I wouldn’t get frustrated with how long it took to do ANYTHING such as even load a browser, unlike the Compaq Presario I bought off Dad for $150.
• I am a member of Contours gym. It was really tough for the first few weeks. I got so sore all the time. Now I don’t get sore but do get muscular fatigue for about 4 hours after I go, so I make sure I do it in the late afternoon so I can focus on working during the day. I’m seeing an improvement in my strength, but my weight hasn’t decreased at all. Hopefully it’s due to my big, heavy, bulging muscles.

So that’s a quick update on my life right now. Will try to fill it greater details when I have a bit more time

Later!

I got stuck into it nice and early today, and I’m proud to say that the first draft of my first ever novel, is now complete! Exactly in the timeframe I was shooting for, too.

The grand total word count is 121,601, at least according to yWriter. This is an incredible milestone. Not long ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed I could actually pull something like this off. I thought I was far too lazy to keep chipping away at something so enormous. And yet, I did 121k in just two months.

Now, by all accounts, the best thing to do is let a fresh batch of novel cool for at least a month before starting on the editing. It makes sense, because I view my current novel as a piece of crap not worth touching right now anyway. In a month or so, I will be able to view it objectively and edit it as such. I’ve never edited a story before (presumably why I was always marked badly in creative writing at school), so I’ll be borrowing a book about it from the library. I have the gist of what I should be doing, but mainly plotwise. The quality of writing, I will likely need help with to some extent. Probably one of my biggest pitfalls is that I don’t read much fiction. It’s pretty good for originality (no plagiarism from me), but very bad for sentence construction, ideas for similes and metaphors, dialogue, that kind of thing. I think I did a decent job for someone who read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley a few years ago, then didn’t pick up a single piece of fiction until midway through November this year (I read Playing For Keeps by Mur Lafferty, by the way).

But anyway, it’ll still be quite some time before this novel is ready for the public eye. But I will keep you updated.

Nevertheless, I am about 98% complete. It feels so close, and yet it’s so hard to figure it out. See, I’ve outlined up to the end of this scene I am now writing. But I need to work out what happens afterwards, which is probably an important part of the meshing of the story. Well, we’ll see what happens.

Haven’t worked on the comic in a few days, sadly. But once the novel is out of the way it’ll be much easier to work on.

Anyway, I will try to recover the post as it was stored in my fallible human hard drive (also known as my “brain”). Ahem.

So, in keeping with my vow to finish the first draft of my novel before New Year’s, Drawing the Line is coming to its non-red-herring climax. Hurrah! Basically a chapter to go, or around 4,000 words. If I keep up what I did today, 1.8k, I’ll be done on the 30th. I will be finished by New Years.

Having said that, my climax is really hard to write now. My characters have developed beyond their original motivations when I planned this scene in detail two long months ago. Le sigh. Well, filling plot holes is a job for future drafts. My main mission is to get this junk out, despite my utter annoyance with it. I am so sick of writing this novel, you have no idea. I like my characters, but I am sick of describing all their actions and thoughts. They’re real enough in my head now that it seems like they’re lazy in that they’re making me write their stupid story, instead of them doing it.

On the NaNoWriMo forums, people kept talking about their characters as real people that had personalities and spoke to them in their head. I’m starting to understand it. But my characters are uncooperative. They keep willing me to stop writing about them doing heroic things. They just want to run away and hide. Screw you guys!

Do I sound crazy yet? I think writers need to have a crazy streak… writing begets crazy, and crazy begets writing. The circle of storytelling spins for eternity. Or something.

Late November, I was blessed with a broken fifth metatarsal.

“Blessed?” you ask? Well, okay, so that’s a slight exaggeration. What I mean is that it gave me something of a “free pass” through the holiday period. For the first time in six years, I do not have to face the horrors of working in the service industry on Christmas Eve. Thank you, little bone, thank you so very much.

But wait! There’s more!

Being so inactive, though I’m sure it’s bad for my health, also allowed my creativity to flow, and it’s what caused so many project ideas to form. I was already working on my novel for NaNoWriMo, but most other things surfaced during my idle time.  It really pays to take a time out once in a while. I’ve finally figured out how my motivation works, or at least I think so.

Anyway, I think this has put things into perspective for me. I’ve had a great three weeks of crutch-wielding, arse-sitting and sounding like something out of a haunted house as I walk (clank, bonk, phwoosh, clank…), as Mum put it the other day.

It has also brought to the forefront other medical concerns that I have been putting off. Might talk about that in a future blog.

I procrastinated SO HARD, I actually spent most of my time marking every spam page in the AVENwiki. Then I played the Spicks and Specks board game with Allyson for a long while.

Ended up only writing about 800 words on my novel (I started AFTER MIDNIGHT, mind you), and nothing else on any other projects.

I hope to do far more today.