Hot Chocolate No Longer

Okay, so I swear for about the tenth time this week (and maybe 50th this month :P) I've wanted hot chocolate. Because of this, I get all excited, go heat the water, wash my big graduation mug and everything, make it, set it in front of me. . . and promptly forget about it. Then it gets cold, and I have to heat in the microwave, at which point I forget about it all over again. I've also done this with tea and ramen. My mind has lost the capacity to remember hot drinks. Just like it cannot store the information of where I put my cell phone last. Or maybe it's just cause I'm always up way too late. :)

So that was random, but I thought it was a rather interesting phenomena. And now I have that dang muppets song in my head. (phenomena, doo doo, doo doo doo, phenomona, doo doo doo doo. . . .)

And the crazy little kitten we recently adopted is rampaging about the livingroom again, chasing invisible nothings and meowing. Early she very efficiently stalked and captured a stuffed teddy, pouncing frantically and running from the room with it in her mouth. For a moment I really thought she'd caught a mouse, she was so protective and paranoid of her "kill". Lol :)

Spelling!!

This is why I could never win a spelling bee! I've long known that I learned most of my grammar and spelling from reading (and my mom), but this is apparently what happens when you grow up reading British books. Okay, so it started with my spell checker constantly stopping me from writing "arguement". It kept saying the proper word was "argument", which looked completely wrong to me. It also complains about "judgement" and "develope". Finally, having grown sick of this, I googled it, and found out that most of my spelling "errors" are actually British spellings of the words.

Problem: I spell by what looks right to me, and I've been using these spellings since I was very little, so they're what come naturally. Sigh. Oh well, I like having a little Brit English mixed in with my stories, and if I ever get published I'm sure they'll just slaughter and Americanize them at that point anyway. I forced my spellchecker to accept them all though, mwa ha ha ha to that.

So anyway, here's my list of words I apparently spell "wrong".

arguement
judgement
develope (still can't quite find a conclusive source on whether this is a British spelling or just a misspelling)(edit: apparently, it's just me being random and misspelling it)
dialogue (the American spelling for me is more slang, like "Let's sit and have a dialog, shall we?")
catalogue
dreampt
leapt
learnt
dwelt (etc, all of these look wrong to me with the "ed" on the end instead of the "t")
knitted
etc.

It's even gone so far that with some, like dialogue above, the British and American spellings have different connotations. e.g. I would use "color" to describe blue or green, but "colour" for physical changes. ("That's my favorite color" vs "Her face coloured with embarrassment")

Grey and gray are different for me as well, grey being more yellow, and gray being more blue.

And I know that lots of people use center and centre, as well as theater and theatre as words with almost different meanings, the latter, British spelling often connoting something of more sophistication.

Anyway, there are some others I jump back and forth with, but mostly I seem to be an American girl with British tendencies. Hmm, that sounds almost like I just said I was bisexual when it comes to literature. :)

I did it. Wow.

At the beginning of November, I really wanted to start this, but it was still kind of just a "yeah, I'll get a few pages out, get some ideas, but abandon it halfway through like everything else I do". I never quite believed that I would make it, even when I was staying a week ahead of schedule, and especially not when I spent three days writing nothing (twice). But I did it! I wrote 50,000 words in 25 days.

Now my goal is to actually finish this story. If I do that, it will be the first novel I've ever finished. That's my new goal, and I think it'll probably be much much harder. But I won NaNoWriMo almost a week ahead of schedule. Right now, I feel like I can do anything. This would make a great patronus moment, if you know what I mean. :) Yay!!

Oh, and I got ahead of my mom again. :) Bob, you're next!! (I can dream, right?)

And, in the way I do things, I wrote a poem about my success. For Once at Allpoetry.

NaNoWriMo

Those are my NaNo 2008 stats. Yep. I know I'll finish it, by this point that's basically inevitable, unless I die in the next few days. *looks around with a paranoid glare*

Yeah, I like that I actually wrote this year, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to actually do anything with this story. So much rambling description, so little good plot. Sigh. We will see when I read it after November is over.

The calendar isn't as pretty, but I think it's a cool widget, so I'll put it up here too.



edit: these widgets update each year, so they're no longer current to this post. They'll stay at 2010, since after that I changed my username.

Art and semi-writing

So I'm actually attempting NaNoWriMo this year, and I'm up to 36,669 words, around a week ahead of schedule. But for the past few days, I've been so bleh that I haven't written much of anything. So I've been drawing a bit, and have come to realize that I am a much better artist than I give myself credit for, especially when I'm not constantly comparing my art to that of other people, all of whom I see as being "better". So when I just draw unrestrained, I'm actually quite pleased with what I put out. Check out my deviantart for some of these new coolidinks pictures.

Oh, and one more problem. I haven't really written any poetry since August. Sigh. And here I thought I'd pushed past my problems with that and was actually going to keep it up fairly regularly. Sigh.


This thing below is to get me points on hatchlings, a game on facebook. Because I'm silly like that.