Well, my laptop is officially ten months old and the only things fked up with it are software. No soda-spilling, no hinge-breaking. That can only be considered a good thing, I think. I love you, baby Dell. Please don’t quit on me yet!

Second, I’ve done all my holiday shopping. Took me a miserable day in Philly, but everyone has ended up with something that they more or less might like.

Third, my sister has come home, with all the drama that that entails. (*sigh*)

And finally, I might almost sort of have a chance at almost having a job! My dad talked to someone in his office who has a daughter who’s employed who could pass around my resume and it looks like it might be having positive results. I can’t imagine being employed after so long bumming around the house, but it could really sort of almost happen! (I refuse to get my hopes up too high though)

I’m sitting here with my story open. It should be the easiest thing in the world to write.

You see, I’ve talked about the novel from hell before on this blog. It’s an idea, characters, plot that I’ve had since I was 12. It’s even a fairly decent one, ten years later. The original, when typed out (it’s actually the second draft; the first is still all in notebooks down in the basement) clocks in at 301,904 words. I’ve reread it only a couple of times since it was typed up. There are moments where it is cringe-worthy awful, where it’s clear that I had no idea what I was doing and everything is stilted and sounds like a monkey could have done better. And there are still scenes in it that I can read over and think “wow. I got *everything* right for those two pages.” It is a massive opus of a novel; there are at least three dozen important characters and the scene changes often and unpredictably. But by the end of typing it up, by the end of those first two handwritten drafts, I know these characters better than I know some people in real life. At it’s core, it’s a story of fear and war and treachery and despair that turns into redemption and courage and heroism and sacrifice. But that original novel, which is now on its fifth computer, isn’t anything even remotely like publish-worthy and the problem is that no amount of editing can make it so. Massive chunks of it need to be rewritten. Entire subplots need to be overhauled. The knowledge of a 22 year old who actually knows something about world politics now needs to replace the hopeless imaginings of a 12 year old who figured she could make it up as she went along. A handful of the characters who are adults need to be rewritten so that they don’t sound like mopey teenagers.

I’ve been trying to do it for the past decade. I’ve got a whole subfolder in my writing folder that’s called “novel from hell”.  It’s incredibly badly organized and things are as uselessly titled as v2.5.2 or such things. Or else “idea” or “something” or “scene”. When I get up the courage to work seriously on it, it usually takes me at least forty minutes to find the relevant file. I have rewritten it so many times. I have jumped back in time and tried to write the story that comes first, which is just as interesting. It has jumped from Russia to Canada and back again. Nearly all of the main characters have switched names once or twice, and some of them have then gone back to their old names. (I mean, come on. A character named Nicolaas and the same one then named Gregor sound like two totally different men to me.) I still haven’t decided if I’m even capable of writing it yet; I suspect I’m not. I won’t ever stop trying and I’m sure that one day, I’ll wake up and some of the more fundamental problems will have answered themselves. I’ll know which bit of the story actually has to be written.

For example, do you start back when one of the  protagonists is in university and first decides that he can/has to fix the world? Do you start after he’s figured out how to do it? Do you start it when he starts the war? Midway through the war? At the end of the war when he dies and his son betrays him (which is where the original story starts)? Because the story *used* to be about his son, Ivan, betraying everything after he decides that he doesn’t want his father’s world any more and turns against his father’s organization, and ultimately leads humanity to victory over it.  But there’s a just as compelling story to be told about Vasily/Nikolai/Nicholas, his father, and the rise to power and ultimate doom. Oh, yeah, and the difference between the two is that the Ivan story portrays his father’s organization, Svoboda (Russian for freedom), as the terrorists that they really are and the Vasily story portrays them as idealists with a cause and the means to get to a better future.

Anyway, one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, I keep the characters alive in a number of ways. Mostly through silly stories that would count as fanfic for the damn thing. One of those is the one that’s open right now. It’s supposed to be emotional and powerful, and I’m sitting in the middle of a pretty important scene. It’s even one of the rare ones that gets a name (as opposed to the dozen documents I’ve got which are all snip[number]). I know what’s going to happen, I know how it’s going to happen. Yet I’m just kind of staring at it; since Wednesday, I’ve written not quite 250 words on it.

I’ve told myself that I’m not allowed to look at any of the drafts from NaNo until January. It’ll take me a while to get through them, even if on the first read I’m just trying to get broad sweeps of what does and doesn’t work.  I don’t want to work on something brand new right now; I’ve not even got any particularly good ideas lately. I could troll through my possibles folder and see if any of the ideas grab me, but I don’t really want to. And I definitely don’t want to sit through the agony of trying to come up with a clever way to rewrite the novel from hell so close to Christmas. Leaving me with “The Last Day that Mattered”. Which obviously just doesn’t want to be written. In that, it gets something from it’s parent/predecessor/family.

Sometimes I love my laptop. Really. It’s little and pretty and I haven’t managed to spill anything on it in the nearly 10 months that I’ve owned it. When we got it, (it’s a Dell XPS), my mom was concerned about some issues regarding bad graphic cards on these models. This laptop was an emergency replacement when the evil IBM died, so the decision to purchase was made over less than a weekend. I said I’d keep it, we had a good warranty that would require the people I bought it from to keep replacing the graphic card for a couple of years gratis, or until they got sick of the expense and gave me something new. So, naturally, that was what I worried about. But I don’t do a lot of graphics-intensive things on here and 10 months in, we’re still good. No, hardware-ly speaking, this laptop has been great thus far. No keys flying off, no hinges failing, etc.

In June-ish, MSOffice decided to uninstall itself. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. Eventually, we convinced it to come back, and it’s not gone on vacation since. But I have all kinds of screwy things going on with my windows updater and I was never able to install service pack somethingoranother for Vista this past summer. Honestly, it doesn’t bug me *that* much. Do you know the 4 applications that I use on my laptop? Word, Firefox, iTunes, Y!Messenger. I don’t think I have a single game loaded onto this sucker. So if it comes to the point where we have to just take this thing and set it back to factory default it would probably solve a whole lot of stressy problems. Because I know fk-all about computers, I’m terrified of viruses. Fortunately, I do have a firewall, a secure network, an anti-virus program and windows defender -which I found a way to download updated definitions for directly since updater doesn’t like looking for updates anymore. My biggest fear is that I’ll lose my writing. But I’ve got it on a flash drive and I made a backup on CD last night, so I know that it’s mostly me looking for something to worry about and my computer illiteracy is a great focus for it. And now that November is over, even if my laptop was out of commission for any period of time, there are 2 other computers in the house.

What brought me to write this blog was that my laptop decided to BSOD on me about half an hour ago. Now, with the evil IBM, that sucker would BSOD if you looked at it funny, but this is the first time it’s happened on this one. Naturally, because I know nothing about laptops, it just makes me scowl and squint funny at it.

Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. I was planning on doing some writing tonight, but now I’m sure I can stress about things I have no realistic way to fix, given I’ve no actual knowledge of anything. Hah! I am such a great procrastinator.

Also, I’m not really looking for advice if you want to comment. Telling me things I can do is actually more likely to set my worry-meter off than anything else. Commiserate. Tell me how much computers suck.

The only thing I console myself with? Unlike the old Dell, unlike the evil IBM, the *hardware* is still good. If I have to wipe it, I’ve still got a machine that turns on and does shit for me. As it’s been made perfectly clear to me that this was the very last one my parents will buy for me, that’s sort of an important reassurance until I’m employed.

I’m reasonably sure that someone  donated $10 in my name to the NaNo site. I have acquired a halo and my name’s on the donation page.

’scool. I’m grateful for it. But I’d love to know who did it, so I can thank you properly. So if you’re reading this and you’re the one, drop me a pm or post in the comments here or something. (Also so I don’t think that I’ve misplaced my mind and done it myself, which I know I haven’t.)

Edited mid-morning Thursday: the person who donated has contacted me, and I’ll thank them here as well as privately. Thank you. It is people like you who keep NaNo up when people like me don’t have two dimes to rub together. It’s people like you that make me reaffirm the fact that some day, when I have a steady job and money, I’m going to donate  big to Nano. Not ten bucks, not fifty. I say here, in plain english, and anyone who sees this can hold me to it, but when I am older and employed and can afford both food and rent/bills in my place, and have a nice little cushion for when I go back to being staggeringly unemployed – I will donate more than a thousand dollars to NaNo. I’m thinking that that will probably be around the 20th anniversary, which seems fitting.

Hello, to all of you lurky readers. Yes, I know you’re there. I have a nifty stats page that shows me how many hits I get per day/week/month. It doesn’t count unique hits so I suppose it’s possible that I have one or two really, really, REALLY dedicated fans out there who come to the site hundreds of times a day. See, I’m going to share some stats with you. Last November (2008), over the course of the entire month, I got 857 hits. This November, I got 10,681. On the last day of November, I got over 1500 hits in 24 hours. This is freakin’ awesome. I love that. Of course, I’m a little obsessed by things like that and I won’t deny that many days during November, I would be updating the stats page every 15 minutes. It was usually open while I was writing, and it’s at the point where if I type in “s” in my little address-bar-window, the first site that comes up is the stats page.

Anyway. The one thing that I also notice is that post-November, the hits go way, way down. Seriously down. And then they spike again in October, when the new Nano forums go up. It’s a steady decline through December, and by January, I’m down to seriously one or two people who click on me occasionally by accident.

I get it. I’m really only interesting for one thing. I write lots and lots of words in November and everyone comes here either to a) see if I’m a giant fraud/hoax/joke b) to see how I do it c) to commiserate in my general moaning the entire month.  And to be fair, outside of November, I really don’t post that much and the posts generally aren’t incredibly interesting. Worse, now that I’m not even in school anymore, pretty much all I can write about, about myself, is how I sit in this chair all day and bleatingly moan for someone to hire me. I have an Ivy League degree and speak 3 languages other than English, I can write a million words in 30 days, and come the beginning of next year, I’ll probably be working in Target. Awesome. (On the other hand, I bet there are lots of fun stories that I’ll get there. But that’s seriously not the point).

So, my lurky readers, let’s make a deal. I know that I’m not a very interesting person, and I know YOU are (most likely) more interested in reading other things. I expect that most of you will vanish over the next couple of weeks and my stats will go back to where they were 3 or 4 months ago. But I’m going to make an effort, too. I do lots of reading; I’ll try to put up book reviews. I do writing the rest of the year, so I’ll try to comment on that. If I’m ever lucky enough to get a job, I might comment (in an oblique way) about that. I won’t do the news, because I want to keep this blog impartial for the day when an employer stumbles on it.

And on the day when I become a famous, NYT-bestselling author, I will give all of you longtime lurky readers a signed copy of the book. Promise.  You can hold onto this post and shove it in my face on that day. And honestly, I’ll be so over the moon that I’m there that I won’t even blink. I’ll just grab up a dozen copies, sign them off and mail them away.

So, for the few of you that are reading to the end of this post, let’s try to make this work, you and I. I don’t expect you to come every day like you did in November. I won’t update every day. But once a week? Sure. I can probably do that.

Well, here it is. 1:06pm December 1. I got up an hour ago, I’ve taken a shower (I choose not to think about how long it’s been since I took my last). The only things open are Firefox and iTunes.  No Word documents whatsoever.

I won’t lie. I’ve been sitting here for a little while thinking “hmm. wtf am I gonna do now”. There are lots of things that in principle I could do. I could start thinking about Christmas shopping. I could tidy up my room. I could *read a book*. I’ve still got Steven Erikson’s latest, that I imported from the UK back in September, that I only made it to page 200 on and I really want to read that. And there’s also this nifty little piece of writing that I stumbled on a few days ago; it was out of place so I opened it, read it, and have been wanting to work on it for days. It’s neat and features such paragraphs as

“And no one would step in between them, everyone would stand by the sidelines as the friendship imploded, as Vasily locked himself away for another brooding weekend, emerging each successive time aged another few years and eyes a little more dead;  as Nicolaas left headquarters to get secretly high, a secret he knew was secret to none. Then the stares afterwards, ever glancing to bare inner arms as though he would tattoo himself so visibly with the shame of what he did when he could no longer take the world, or could no longer take the sight of the man who stared back at him in the mirror.”

(Okay. I had to open that document to get those lines)

Anyway, there are probably lots of you lurky readers that want to know what the hell I plan to do with this lot now that it’s written and stored in multiple places online and on my flash drive. The first answer is? Let them sit quietly for a little while and ferment.

Then, in January or February, perhaps, I’ll pull the suckers back out and read them. I’ve already forgotten half of them anyway, but I’m still emotionally connected to all the characters. Right now, having just written them, I want to say that three of my four projects will make it to second draft. Under the Infinite Skies is just a silly mess – oh, it’s coherent and everything, it’s just never going to be workable into anything useful…and I don’t want it to be. It’s harmless and silly and it was fun to write. After I’ve read them in a few months time, then I’ll decide how best to proceed: either a) keep pretty much exactly the same plot and rework all the bits that don’t exist or b) take the characters and revamp the plot – it would still go along the same lines but might make more sense or c) good god this is a bunch of crap, let’s get rid of it right now.

Now, I’ve had a couple of requests via PM about some deluded souls who want to read these first drafts. So I’ll throw it out here: if you think you can stagger through a first draft (99.5% grammar/spelling perfect) and actually want to, send me a request through here with an email address or something. But pause for a moment before even thinking about it: the each book in the trilogy is 200,000 and Just a Glimpse is 300,000.  I would prefer that if you *do* decide you want to read something, that you be willing to at least try to do more than glance at the first page.

In the off-chance that you are thinking “hmm, I’ve got oodles of spare time, I wonder how I can best waste it…maybe looking at one of Kate’s Pieces of Dreck” but don’t know which to choose, the following are updated summaries about each of them, now that they’ve actually been written

Legend of Paredin: An old man comes to a village and tells Rawlan that he is the heir of the kingdom to the north, and that his throne has been usurped by the evil Jaron and that it’s his obligation to join the resistance and fight to free the country, a country about which he knows nothing, doesn’t speak the language, can’t even use a sword, etc. Sensibly, Rawlan refuses.  But the resistance starts getting ugly and refugees stream across the borders into Rawlan’s village. He decides that he has to go and take charge, if only to control them and keep them from burning villages to the ground. But when he joins the resistance, it’s just the beginning of a massive web of lies as he learns who he really is and who is actually behind everything that has happened to his new, adopted kingdom. (This is the one I wrote on November 1, and while there are some subplots that vanish into thin air, I think it’s actually pretty decently written for a first draft written in 24 hours.)

Under the Infinite Skies: At one point, the premise made sense to me, and I think that it was based somewhat on my bare-bones knowledge of places like Cyprus. There are two countries who decide to perfectly amicably erect a wall between them and sever all relations between them. On the last night, there’s a giant country-wide party, and a cop from one side ends up sleeping with a young man from the other side. A decade later, he gets a call that because he’s good at catching serial killers, he has to go to the other side and help catch this one (big surprise, it’s the guy he met at the party 10 years previous). When the killer sees him, he assumes that it’s because Vahn, the cop, has finally come back because he loves him. The investigation proceeds, Vahn gets more and more suspicious, and everything nearly ends in tears before it works out for the best. (I don’t think that structurally there’s a lot wrong with this, but it’s a mess conceptually, and the plotline is silly, which is why it’s going to forever be a first draft.)

Just a Glimpse: Enter into a world where you are defined, restricted, and segregated by your class – only certain jobs go to certain classes, certain drugs are legal for some and not others, privileges, housing, etc. You are what color your ID card says you are. But it’s a system on the verge of collapse and Cameron Alman, the leader, is losing control as his pseudo-democratic Congress tries to gain more control for itself. As Cameron is already something of a folk hero, the leader of the Congress makes plans to kidnap him, torture him, and make him confess all the awful things he did during the revolution so that no one will have any respect for him, and then the leader of Congress, Connor Haney, can take over. But when the plan is actually carried out, things go from bad to worse as everyone tries to get a piece of the pie, from the Alman Loyalists to the Church. Meanwhile, the mysterious prison camp just on the border of the city contains a terrible secret, one that might bring down the whole country if only someone can get in and out again without getting killed. (I didn’t have a solid plot when I went into this one, more like an idea and a world and some characters, so the plot wanders for a little before settling down, and I think it’s going to need heavy editing and trimming, but I do like the world it’s set in. Also, if you’re tempted here, beware: there are 15 viewpoints. Just an fyi)

This is How it Ends: The country of Fayrotin is involved in a generations-long war with the ’squids’, but there are those who want it to end, those who want to keep fighting to the bitter end, and those who don’t care how many die in order to force the war to end. And while they think that the squids are all unified in their desire to fight the humans to the bitter end, they’re wrong.  But this is not a simple story of a war to end all wars – this is a war that has been going on for millenia and can trace its roots all the way back to the old homeland, all the way back to Earth. Across thousands of years, three species, the end is coming and in nearly all of the cases, it is brought upon themselves. (This one is so damn hard to summarize even after the fact because so much is going on, but it was a lot of fun to write, and there are *aliens* in it)

So, what am I going to go and do right now (I swear, I just had to edit that sentence because I typed “write” instead of right)? I’m going to post this blog, go sit on the forums for a while doing absolutely nothing, go back and look at the story mentioned at the beginning of this blog, probably not write anything on it but I might make notes.  Then I’m going to go downstairs and for the first time in a couple of weeks, start making dinner – something that I actually enjoy doing but haven’t had any time for over the past week or two. And later, I’m holding my mother to the promise of a bottle of alcohol of my choice (within reason) to be purchased at the liquor store. I’m thinking Bailey’s, but I haven’t decided yet. Tonight, I’m not going to sit in my room with the door closed, headphones on, typing away. I’m going to go downstairs and watch tv with the family. I might even have a drink while I do so. At probably about 1 or 2 in the morning, I’ll go to bed. I won’t be up until 4 or 5 writing.

It’s a strange feeling. Nano, I already miss you. Can’t wait till next year.

(For the record, I haven’t decided what I’m doing next year. Given that I’m desperately hoping to be employed by then, I may try to write as much as I can while holding down a full-time job. Or I might try to write 50,000 in Russian, which makes me shudder in horror even as I contemplate it. But I took four years of it in college and it might be a useful skills refresher, even if the grammar would make someone want to kill themselves over it. I think 1,667 words of Russian a day would be a real challenge for me.)

And, in case you can’t tell, I obviously miss writing. This blog is nearly 1800 words long.

click to biggenate and check the WC. That’s the total Nano file, with all of the stories smooshed together

11:38pm November 30, 2009

Fuck yeah.

Fuck yeah, man.

7k to go, and a bit under 3 hours to do it. Hurrah.

985k

Hot damn, I think I can do this. Even if it means I must have House DVR-ed for me. That would be a good after-Nano treat anyway. House and some Southern Comfort…mmm. Haven’t had any of that in weeks. (Yep, I did Nano nearly totally sober this year)

So, about 6 hours to go, 15k to write, and dinner still to eat, but I hear the table being set downstairs, so this will be a good break for the hands and nourishment for the stomach (using the last of thanksgiving turkey tonight…turkey pot pie)

977k, 23k to go.  (In principle and if crunched, as mentioned before, I could have as few as 20k to go)

I’m sort of getting into the groove, but that doesn’t take away the panic.
I looked in the mirror at myself a few minutes ago. I look like a pale, greasy vampire with giant shadows under my eyes.

Yet, I shall prevail.

985 by dinner! (whenever that might be )