going home

off to cork this evening for a wedding on friday. i'm kinda excited now... having yummy delicious left-overs from last night, got all my scenes for this week done, despite not getting anything done on monday. well - they are not the most polished scenes in the world, but still.

last night we made a mince beef madras. it needed a little soy sauce, but was really yummy then. and i cheated and bought canned tomatoes - i think if i was making it again i'd skin and chop up proper ones.

penelope_stone will be around for the weekend and has invited me out with her. i've not seen her in ages, so i think i may tag along with her and liam on Halloween.

i don't really have a lot of news...

mcm expo, london

I've been wearing this cool hat all day, it's got 2 massive purple and black stripy "ears" that hang down to my waist. it looks totally mad today, but yesterday it looked almost dull when compared to what some people were wearing. pink wigs, blue wigs, people in furry costume, anime characters, game characters, people in boxes and robots and daleks.
yea - the expo was amazing, if only for the number of people dressed up. and so many people's costumes were brilliant - they looked like a lot of time had been put into them. one of the most fun parts of the con was hanging out in the corridor and watching everyone go past.

saturday we just spent looking around at everything: artists, stalls, games, comics, movies, crazy people playing ddr, and we caught a few shows on the stages. sunday we did mostly the same, but me and tom played bayonetta and we all went to watch the cosplay masquerade, and we caught a taiko drumming session, and i got to pet an alien. he was very dog-like O_o

i have loads of pics that i should upload, but i haven't looked at most of them yet. i'm having a non-sort-of-day. i got very little writing done, and even sitting down to write this was difficult. anyway - tomorrow will be better... except that we are off to a wedding afters tonight, so hmmm.

goodbye, then.

sometimes my subjects get like tags

I finished devil may cry last night. i found the last 2 missions utterly frustrating. the second last is set up so that you battle all the bosses that you have already battled twice. it seems that capcom ran out of interesting ideas, but i guess people who prefer battles would like it. i prefer puzzles. the last battle was stupidly hard. hard to the point where i got the guy down to one bar of life and then couldn't hit him any more because he started jumping all over the place and casting spells and being generally annoying. the only reason i managed to beat him was because of an item i had, not because of any combos or weapons. i roll my eyes at that game.

ah well. i then went on to uncharted2. i think i'll have fun with this game, once the controls sink in. the first mission is unlike anything i've played before (not that i've played that many games) but i was impressed with the way they structured it. and drake is, as always, so much fun.

writing is going well - i got three scenes done yesterday. they were about 500 words each, but still. i should be finished ch. 3 today. ch. 3 is about 3,000 words - which for me is pathetically short - i have scenes longer than that (ok - almost). so i may have to shuffle it into chs. 2 and 4. or maybe i'll leave it, because it does stand nicely on its own - a wrap up to act 1.

i don't have much other news. going to london on friday for mcm expo. the excitement hasn't really sunk in yet. i don't think it will until i'm standing in the queue waiting to go in.

Wacom bamboo

this entry is being written from lordkilljoy's new toy, a Wacom bamboo graphics tablet (A5). Cool, but it does have its problems. As in, i would be faster writing this by typing, but it's fun to hand write onto your computer and see the text come up like normal on the text box. Yea, allow me to demonstrate by not correcting the following sentence:
thissentence ispure, uneditd output fromMac OS X `S B handwritingrecognitionpmgmm,Jnkw$. Yea, maybe i need to adjust the sliders for my handwriting width. OK, i've done that. Let's See how it turns out now. dedicated readers of my Lj may have noticed that i do capitalize my handwritten words - it is purely an "i couldn't be bothered with hitting shift" problem with typing.
Yea. this entry has taken way too long to write.
It has taken me 20 minutes to get this far. the other crazy thing is that Inkwell makes a little writing sound for you - as if the real sound of stylus on tablet wasn't enough. OK, i made some adjustments + things seem to be going a lot smoother. What i do like is the little symbols that mean spacebar (for editing) and return. Ugh, this refuses to recognise my capital i as what it is. it keeps wanting to put J or T. Annoying.
Right. i've had enough. Good night.
P.S. i'm playing Devil may Cry 4 at the moment and it is so much fun. totally over the top ridiculous, but in a good way.

I wrote about 2,000 words today, and about 3,000 yesterday. Ahh, the exciting bits are so easy to get through. Tomorrow should go well enough too - it's an entirely new scene, but it involves characters i like and they are talking about fun types of things (conspiracy - always fun) and it's leading up to the introduction of Azrynn, woo.

mulkabu is up tomorrow - we are all going to kevin smith, so i'm kind of trying to get a bit done before then. But i have two scenes left this week - one tomorrow and one on friday.

me and lordkilljoy went to see zombieland on sunday. it was fun, nothing serious and a lot of laughs. Up is the next thing to see.

I'm still playing assassin's creed. i imagine that today, i will beat lordkilljoy's score for it. he didn't even get that score. i did. and he made such a fuss about me getting him free achievement points that i have to do better on my own account.

and now he's home. so i'm going to go :)

cleaning

dyson make the best hoovering machines of anyone, ever. i hate hoovering, but the dyson does really make it very easy. and today it was making a kind of funny sound so i went about pulling all the hairs and threads (and massive length of twine o_O) that was wrapped around the suction thing out and now it works even better.

as i said yesterday, i took today off writing. i'm having serious doubts about the scene i'm writing at the moment. i think it's a bit too contrived - i have some information to tell and that is the only purpose that this scene serves, it doesn't really fit into the story. hopefully monday will bring a clear head and an objective viewpoint on it.

i don't have any other news, really. lordkilljoy is sleeping and then we're heading down to cork for the weekend. i might go play assassin's creed for a bit.

writing woes

this week has been significantly harder than last week. all the scenes that i have to write are ones that i couldn't write last time round and it seems that i still can't write them. and then i begin to question if they are really necessary, and should i just get rid of them, but i don't like doing that - that's what nanowrimo has taught me - you don't lose word count.
i'm fine with the descriptive bits, but as soon as anyone starts talking, i'm just like: what on earth do these people have to say to each other and then i just write very directly and it seems so unnatural and forced and the shortest conversations ever.
i just want to take the rest of the day off, but then i'd be bored.
i am thinking of moving tomorrow's scene to chapter 5 or something though - i think it comes just a little too early. then i could spend tomorrow cleaning the apartment because it is a terrible mess. i haven't hoovered in about a month. (shhh, don't tell anyone.)

first frost

first frost of the winter and i woke to the sound of the neighbour scraping the ice off their car and thought, "oh, great. another 5 months of being woken by this sound." (yes - we are 3 floors up, and yes i can hear that scraping loud enough to wake me. there are gaps 1cm big around the balcony door in the bedroom.)
but it's a lovely morning - crisp blue sky, little wisps of cloud - a bit cold, the thermometer in here is only reading 17.7degrees. i wonder how nymph will fare over the winter as his tank water temperature plummets to 10 / 12 degrees.

that's all i wanted to say. it's almost 9 - time to start writing for the day.

random procrastination

i got 3 scenes done today, but i'm worried about the rest of the week because it's new stuff until next week and we are off to cork for the weekend, so i can't slak off on the actual writing bits. the only problem is that i don't feel at all inspired this week. editing is ok, but even the edits don't seem that great - i'm not really adding in much inspiring things, just deleting things that really don't work. see i can't even write properly - that last sentence was so inelegant.
then from next week on i'm into the stuff that hasn't been touched since my last stab at editing last year. there are quite a few chapters that need new scenes written, culminating in ch. 6, which is completely different to the original chapter 6 except for one scene.
i also now have a chapter 1.5.5. remember i mentioned that ch 1 was 10,000+ words and i cut it in half - well, ch 1.5 then blossomed, so i had to cut it in half too. it seems i will have 21 chapters in total when its all done - 19 main ones and the pro- and epilogues. still not bad. at least it's not like some books with three page chapters, but the book itself has over 80 chapters. i always find that wierd.
yep - this is not going to be a monster of a fantasy - a nice 120,000 words i think - maybe 150,000 at the very most. although, if my chapters all grow like ch 1 did, then i may have a chapter naming problem on my hands.
see, the reason i don't like books with 80-odd chapters is because i like named chapters. just numbers always seems very impersonal. and then i could be like feist with a table of contents - not really. i don't like them either, because you risk spoiling the book - as a reader you can't help flicking though the contents and wondering what's going to happen in the story to cause things like "death of a hero" and who's going to die and stuff. well - no chapter name is that explicit, but you get the idea.

i just realized that i'm procrastinating. golly - i've not done that on here in a while. it must be nano time. i cleaned out the press under the sink today too (and yes - i still got 3 scenes edited). i must be secretly petrified about writing these new scenes. hmmm...

it's miserable weather too, though. so dark and grey. dull. uninspiring. and raining too. i was going to go to lidl and get fish for dinner, but it's just too miserable out.

now... what was i going to post about? there was definitely something, but then lordkilljoy came home and distracted me. it was something short, possibly seasonal, but i just can't remember.

short update on stuff - 16 week plan is going really well.
playing assassin's creed again. one of the quests in fable 2 broke and i got annoyed with it.

ahhh - i remember what i wanted to post. lordkilljoy got edge (magazine) on friday and there was a little dust cover on it. and ezio featured on that, so i cut him out and stuck him up next to my computer. he's been keeping me company all day :)

ok, gotta go.

autumn

I have a feeling that tomorrow the trees will be significantly more bare than they were yesterday. big storm today - wind, lashing rain, the sound of tyres on wet tarmac, girls screaming as they try to walk straight in the gale.
i've been kinda looking forward to this - it's been cloudy for the last few days, the kind of cloudy that makes you think a good storm would be good for the sky. and here it is... only i wish it had happened yesterday, because we were going to go into town and i don't think that's going to happen now. we'd planned to go see district 9, and i suppose even if it was raining, it's not like we'd be trudging around in it for hours.

i don't really have much else to say - waiting for lordkilljoy to get up. he stayed playing games 'til 3am this morning. i was sensible and went to bed at 12:30.

my journal

ok - this is wierd. livejournal says my journal was created on 4th october at 7am, but my first post was the 3rd at 3pm. that was 2001, by the way. i can't believe my journal is 8 years old. that's 8 years of writing daily happenings, random thoughts, just plain randomness, good things, bad things, journeys, changes - you can practically see me grow up on the pages of my journal.

anyway, because i more than likely won't be online over the weekend - happy birthday journal. i love you :)

silly connection

Ever since we got our new internet in july, my connection has been on and off (unable to find certificates, limited connectivity, crashing out, unable to connect to wireless card, all sorts of fun things) and every so often i go at it to see if i can make it work properly. invariably i just make things worse and end up having to do a system restore to get it working at all. so today - since i'm a week ahead in my 16 week plan, i decided to go at it again. now it seems that the router will only pick up my pc if another pc is already connected to it. it won't start up wireless broadcasting just for my pc, no matter how hard i plead with it.
so i have it working now (but the laptop is also connected) and i'm just hoping that when i turn on my computer on monday i'll see a fresh, bright-eyed and ready connection waiting for me. i'm not keeping my hopes up on that, though.

i'm back playing fable2 at the moment. did i mention that already? i started a new character and am really enjoying the game. i've gotten up to new stuff in the game and it's really exciting. in fact, i enjoyed my time in the spire so much that i'm going to take my old character (the evil one) there and see just how bad things get. my good char woosed out at having to kill a fellow guard.

i'm back to 4 layers today (and fingerless-gloves). i had on 3 yesterday. i think it's the humidity is getting to me. i put on my hello kitty jumper this morning and was delighted by the smell of nag champa from the health fair, which is the last time i wore this jumper. i can still smell it now, but not as much - every time i moved during the day i'd get this lovely whiff. i'm totally considering putting an unopened box at the bottom of the wardrobe. mmmmm :)

wardrobe and cupboard are the wierdest words ever. and what's wierder is that they are both places to keep stuff. odd.

right, so. i'll go now.