Also on Skippy’s blog was a reference to 101 things in 1001 days, a long-term goals project focusing on doing a set list of things in the ensuing 1001 days precisely. For me, the end date is going to be Friday, 5 October 2012 (calculated using this tool). That’s shortly before the Mayan apocalypse, right?

Anyway, I have finished my list and here it is! I’ll be ticking them off as I go. Currently uncompleted goals are bold.

1. Get a full-time job that I don’t hate
2. Read the Hitchhiker’s Guide series
3. Make one new local offline friend
4. Quit Woolworths (in conjunction with #1)
5. If I can’t buy a house yet, at least save up $10,000+
6. Get down to 85kg or lighter, and keep it that way
7. Get the matching tattoos my sister and I have been planning since we were in England
8. Actually edit a NaNoWriMo novel
9. Try to get novel published
10. Hold the “plank” exercise for 60 seconds or more
11. Go to the gym twice in one day
12. Go to the gym every day from Monday-Saturday (it’s closed Sundays) for at least one week
13. See a psychiatrist about my anxiety
14. Have my gonadectomy
15. Release the first issue of Ather & Earth
16. Visit New Zealand
17. Go on a road trip
18. Go to the beach and go in the water (you’d think this would be an easy one, considering I live right by a beach… but I just never go)
19. Get up early enough to watch the sun rise over the lake
20. Pay off my Barter Card balance and close my account
21. Learn to use a Javascript library
22. Own a smart phone, preferably a Google one
23. Visit the Blue Mountains
24. Find out if I’m allergic to any food
25. Have a shift at Woolworths where I do not want to scream in frustration
26. Go one day without coffee
27. Go two days without using a computer or video game of any kind
28. Go one month where I work on Ather & Earth every single day.
29. Go a month without buying anything made of chocolate or chocolate flavoured or containing chocolate
30. Settle into a smooth weekly routine
31. Drink 2 litres of water in one day
32. Earn over $40k in one year
33. Radically change my hair
34. Spend a night out without having a panic attack
35. Cook a gourmet meal on my own
36. Connect my computer to my TV to become a Media Centre
37. Buy better wheels for my rollerskates
38. Quit playing Bejeweled
39. Visit 24 hour K-Mart between 1am and 4am, just ’cause
40. Visit Jamberoo Action Park
41. Buy a DSLR camera
42. Move to a bigger house
43. Be complimented on my home by a visitor
44. Drink a large Boost Juice
45. Catch and eat a fish
46. Get a perfect score on Rhythm Kung Fu (Advanced) in Wii Fit Plus
47. Refrain from eating anything sugary on Christmas Day
48. Buy that Beatles collection on the USB flash drive in the green apple
49. Make delicious cocktails at home
50. Roast green coffee beans in a popcorn maker
51. Watch all Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes
52. Buy a block of chocolate and eat it over the space of a week rather than all at once
53. Win something. Anything.
54. Finish at least the first draft of at least two novels
55. Get my car’s headlights fixed
56. Build a new shoe rack
57. Learn how to use the washer-dryer properly
58. Go one month without seeing an insect or arachnid in the house
59. Go on a waterslide
60. Get a kitten
61. Meet three people in person that I met online
62. Clean up my Gmail and keep up with all the emails instead of just looking at them all, sighing, and closing the tab
63. Visit Uluru
64. Get revenge on someone
65. Bake fresh bread
66. Go to bed at 9:30pm
67. Spend a full day exclusively in bed except for using the bathroom
68. Make a really horribly designed website for fun
69. Live in the Greater Wollongong area
70. Eat a taco
71. Brew stout beer
72. Make tiramisu
73. Find a cake wreck and submit it to Cake Wrecks
74. Make steak and stout pot pies
75. Consider myself a responsible adult
76. See Melbourne when it’s sunny
77. Finish Final Fantasy V
78. Feel financially secure
79. Skate backwards for three laps at the skating rink
80. Make scouse
81. Make Irish soda bread
82. Make soda bread ice cream
83. Go to Bowral
84. Borrow a book from the local library
85. Make real buttermilk pancakes topped with sliced strawberries and pure maple syrup
86. See the New Years fireworks in Sydney Harbour
87. Have a picnic on the grass
88. Wander the Haywards Bay home display village
89. Take my parents out to dinner
90. Learn how to take care of my car properly
91. Make a sand sculpture
92. Visit Caringbah Shopping Village for the first time since 2007
93. Eat at Outback Steakhouse
94. Buy a deck of Uno cards
95. Visit the Southern Gateway Centre
96. Walk on the Sea Cliff Bridge
97. Stay awake for 35 hours straight, and see if I start hallucinating
98. Get some new bedroom décor
99. Make an animated short
100. Eat at the Nan Tien Temple
101. Go hang-gliding

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.

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.