Diana's Writing Blog

Yeah, I’m super late posting an update. Mostly because I was home visiting my sister before she goes back to college. We shopped and I fixed her laptop and we watched tons of crappy scary movies and went to see Juno in the theater.

We had so much fun that it couldn’t be squeezed into one weekend. Round about 3:30 on Sunday it was still snowing heavily and my sister and I hadn’t gone to Juno yet. So, it was either drive through a blizzard for 3 hours or call in sick to work and go see a movie. I chose movie. Turned out to be a good choice. Juno was awesome.

Anyway, I hung around Monday and met my sister and I met Mom and Dad for lunch at KFC. Then I took off and made it home almost before the sun went down, which is good because the only thing worse than driving through the snow is driving through snow in the dark. The weather was pretty good, though. It only snowed really bad for about half an hour of the 2 and a half hour trip.

In other news, I’m still squeeing over the AWESOMENESS of Torchwood. Granted, James Marsters as an omnisexual, morally ambiguous badass is kind of a can’t miss premise for an episode. But the writers also threw in hilarious dialogue and they actually made James’ and John’s characters’ relationships endearing.

Basically, James Marsters plays the classic hot ex who you know is bad for you and you know they bring out the worst in you. But you’ve got so much history and they’re so damn hot that you have to keep reminding yourself that screwing them would be a really bad idea.

So, in writing news, I’ve reached 60,000 words and am nowhere near done. So, I’m jumping the goal up to 100,000 words. Sheesh. I hope it won’t take that long, though.

Oh, and I’m typing it up on Google Docs so I can work on it both at work and at home and it’s gotten so big that I had to split the file in two to avoid Google’s document size limit. Sweet merciful Jesus.

Okay, looking over how far I still have to go, I may have to revise my new goal. But I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

In other news, my alarm failed to go off this morning and I slept till 10. I was so pissed! This has to be the fifth time it happened. It’s not like I get in trouble or anything, but it doesn’t exactly make me look good. I’m going to have to work out a secondary alarm system or something, I think….

Well, I’m inching toward the end of this novel, I think. Of course, it’s in super rough format and will need to be heavily edited (at least another month). But somehow just getting the bones of the story written makes editing a lot easier and helps me sort out where I’m going with it, at least. The interactions between people seem a bit forced, but I’m hoping that’ll be fixable once I know more about their characters. I have to be able to, like, channel them to properly do dialogue.

Anyway, I aimed for 52,000 today just to reset my word count to something easy to remember. And I’m aiming for 60,000 by next week. Hopefully this mother’ll finish up in another 20 pages.

I broke 50,000 baby! I’m like 8 days late on my quota of 50,000 by Dec. 31, but I started late, so there. Anyway, as predicted, the novel’s not quite done. I’d say it’s about 3/4 to 2/3 done, though. Probably another week or two and then I start on the next novel. And start editing. Yep, getting right on that. I might get a book about self-editing from Amazon as a reward for my awesome writing progress.

Okay, this novel is definitely going to be more than 50,000 words, but it’s still pretty impressive to be close to 50,000 words. With luck, it won’t be too much more. I already have another novel I want to work on. Also, about every time I’m home, I have a conversation that goes something like this:

“So, did you start editing your 2nd Lori novel?” (she just finished reading the finalish draft of the first)
“Uh…Yeah…Meant to…I’ll probably do that next week.”
“Okay. Cause I really want to read it.”

So, I should probably actually get on that. God, between writing 2,000 words a day and editing what I’ve already written, this could be like a full time job or something. Sheesh!

So, I went out to start my car yesterday and the engine wouldn’t catch. I put some dry gas in and, you know, prayed that it would magically fix itself over night. I came out this morning and all the melty slush had frozen solid. Not a promising start to the day.

I tried my car and…nope. It made even less promising noises than yesterday. And I made this face: >< and called the auto shop.

Now, I should mention, that I very carefully chose my current apartment because a) it’s about two miles from where I work, b) it’s right on the highway and therefore has a good chance of being plowed in the morning, and c) it’s a block away from my car repair place.

So, I called the repair place and explained the situation (“Well, I could call a tow truck, but I’m only a block away…”) and the guy said he’d come down and try to get it going. Thirty-five minutes later and he hadn’t shown. I called and found out that he’d forgotten about me. I made this face: But he was there before the receptionist lady finished telling me that he was on his way.

So, at about 9:45, he got there and cranked on the starter and hit the gas. No luck. He opened the hood and checked to make sure it wasn’t something horrible, but it still looked like it was just a frozen gas line. So, he tried one more time and…managed to get it started! And then he was like, “No charge. Call me if it acts up. My name’s John.”

I think he likes me. He’s the same guy who knocked $50 off my bill last time I had to get my crappy car fixed. Or, he’s just a super nice guy. Either way, it’s a pretty good day to be me.

In other news, my sister came up Friday night and we basically sat around and watched movies all weekend long. Seriously, I think we watched like 10 movies, including 10th Kingdom, which is like 6 hours long. And we watched season 5 of Daria, thanks to kitty_bandit . And we put together the 3D puzzle I got for Christmas. It was more fun than it sounds, trust me. Plus, it was just nice to have company up here for once.

Well, my writing quota suffered, but here goes anyway:

So, I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m starting to get really into steampunk. I don’t if I’m getting into it because I’m seeing it everywhere, or if I’m seeing it everywhere because I’m getting into it. It just seems like steampunk creations are coming over my crafting RSS feeds, I’m seeing movies like Golden Compass and Tin Man (shut up, you love it)…I’m just in a steampunky kind of mood. Oh, and I miss Myst. *sigh*

Of course, this is starting to spill into my writing, which isn’t entirely bad. It’s an alternate reality fantasy sort of book where two girls get pulled into a world with every sort of creature (unicorns, fairies, etc.) except humans. But the sort of medieval setting that I started with is so done to death. I assert that fairies were pulling humans through to their world up until the early 1800s, so that’s about right for steampunk. And you have to think that some technology would sneak through with the humans. Of course, if I have inventions leaking through, I’m going to have to deal with guns. Their current level of weaponry ends at cannons, so that would definitely change a lot of the book, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ah, enough of my rambling, tonight’s writing update: