so that's why I have a tablet!

I got a little Wacom Bamboo tablet for . . . I think it was my birthday last year. Or maybe the year before. My not remembering the exact date may show exactly how much I haven't used it. I mean, I asked for it, I wanted it, I was excited for it. I'd seen people do digital drawings in tutorial videos and had been blown away by all the options. The possibilities of layers, for one, made me want to dance around in glee, clutching the tablet to my bosom. Ahem. Anyway.

So I plugged it in, loaded the drivers, had fun writing "omg I am writing with a tablet" a few dozen times before dragging out whatever photoediting software I was using at the time (might have been Paintshop Pro, maybe Paint.net). I scribbled excitedly. And it looked like . . . a scribble. A scribble where all the lines were a uniform blackness, a uniform unattractive fatness. I blinked, and tried again. Same thing. Not exactly the sexy depictions of line quality I'd seen in tutorial videos.

NaNo day 30: and there was much rejoicing!

I finished the darn thing!

Ahem. That is to say, I got 94,380 words for NaNo this year. Not the 100k I was aiming for. Certainly not the 150k I was dreaming about. But I got something much cooler than wordcount, which was the spectacularly glowy feeling of typing END at the bottom of my manuscript. Danica, queen of procrastination, of starting new novels instead of finding middles and ends, and ooh look a squirrel, has now finished two novels!

NaNo days 21-23 (11k day!)

I was about 1000 words under my goal on Monday, and by the time I got home from school on Tuesday (about 5) I was so beat I couldn't even think about my novel.  Several hours of art homework later (of the "it's due tomorrow" variety), and I went to bed early, deciding that maybe I should get more than 5 hours of sleep at least one night this week.  So nothing for the 22nd.

However, I have the rest of today to myself, so I'm aiming for 1k an hour until midnight.  With my average typing speed, that's about 20 minutes out of every hour, which I'm sure I can easily find--so long as I don't procrastinate too much or get dreadfully stuck. If all goes well, that will give me (at least) a 10k day, putting me back on track for 100k.

Then I just hope to keep my daily 4202 goal through the two Thanksgiving dinners I have this weekend (one for each side of the family).

NaNo day 20 - fighting against a lazy Sunday

7:46 pm, and about a hundred words to show for it.  Plus, it was once again hard to convince myself to leave my bed this mor-afternoon. I wonder if leaving the house and being social is what pushes my moods into the basement the next day.

If I take the time to look at it, Thursday I was at school until five, leaving just enough time to come home and get something to eat before going to writers' group and getting my story critiqued, which despite being exceedingly beneficial to the writing process, is always an added source of stress. And Friday I woke up more depressed than I remember being for quite some time. After puttering about the house for all of Friday, I woke up on Saturday in a much better mood, which remained for most of the day and sustained me through going downtown to a write-in then doing laundry at a way too noisy laundromat. And today, I once again woke up without the motivation to do anything but sleep.

NaNo day 18 (and the start of 19)

Is it already the 19th? Glory. This month has had the strangest feeling of dragging past, but suddenly, we're nearing the end stretch. Which reminds me about that photography final assignment I've been neglecting, which is to document my experience with NaNo this year. I think I've journaled twice. Oops.

But anyway, after not meeting my goal for 3 days in a row (and not even writing anything 2 of those days) I somehow pulled a 5k day. I'm still not quite sure myself how I manged it. I woke up incredibly depressed and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep so I could escape back into my dreams for a while. But I dragged my butt out of bed, knowing I had to make today count as far as my words went. So what did I do? Spent the next 3 hours googling bipolar. Yep.

NaNo day 6 - back on track?

After only writing about 1000 words on the 4th, and nothing yesterday (due to a close friend's wedding), I got my goal of 4000 today! That put me above my cheaty wordcount, and up to 13782. I am /never/ posting a wordcount before it's written again! If I do end up writing most of the day's words after midnight, my graph will just have to look strange. I can deal. :)

And I was really happy with myself, because I was writing along with @NaNoWordSprints on twitter and got 1000 words written in 20 minutes, until I realized that it was all introspection. Doh. That's what National Novel Editing Month in March is for!

NaNo day 3 - bad NaNo person

It's NaNo day 4 today, but I have a confession to make about yesterday. I'm a bad NaNo person. I told myself I wouldn't do this this year, but then I did.

two hours until it all begins

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but somehow just never got around to it. Really I've been meaning to write something--anything--on this blog for quite some time now, but yet again I've been living up to my least favorite part of the title. I think it started a while back with a post I started to write, but couldn't finish for various reasons. Somehow that created a mental block--I told myself I couldn't blog until I finished that post. Silly really.

So anyway, I left it right until the wire, but here's my NaNo pre-blog:

My goal this year is 150k. I fully recognize how crazy that is, especially with how badly I've been dealing with stress lately. I'm still going to try for it, but definitely not beat myself up if I don't make it. The thing is, every year that I do NaNo I further amaze myself with just how much I can do if I'm committed and believe in myself. So I don't want to slow down, or set a more reasonable goal, because what's the fun in reason after you've seen at least one crazy goal through to the end?

Anyway, I'm not staying up through midnight to get a head start on writing like I usually do; I want a good night's sleep, and the opportunity to wake up early and knock out a few thousand words before class. So good night, and sleep well: I'll most likely sprint with you in the morning. :)

snippets - week two

Since this was my first Book-in-a-Week, I thought I would manage to write every day, but I still missed two right in the middle of the week. I think it's just about the need to take a notebook with me everywhere and make time to write.  But I did write 50 pages on Friday (my goal for the whole week), so that made up for it.

first book-in-a-week

Tomorrow I get to start my first challenge on Book-in-a-Week! If you haven't heard of it, it isn't necessarily writing a book in a week--though I'm sure you could if you wanted to and were really committed. Anyway, it happens one set week out of every month. To participate, you set yourself a page goal (minimum of 10) and then try to stick with it. Like NaNoWriMo, you have a community of writers all trying to do the same thing you are (or similar, depending on what each person's goal is) at the same time, so you can all rally together and support each other.

I'm very excited for it. I've been looking for a good way to find that writing push other times of the year than November, and this looks like it's just that. I set the goal of 50 pages, which takes me to 1750 words per day. I've already been trying for 1000 a day, so I hope it won't be too hard to get that extra three pages written.

Being me, I wanted to try for an insanely high goal, but then I remembered the part where I have school and a semi-job and will also be doing the Artist's Way challenge on that site at the same time, and grew some sanity. Still, one of these months I want to try for 200 pages or more, because I'm sure I could do it if I just pushed (and didn't have other obligations). Last NaNo, I managed 15,000 words one Sunday.

So anyway, expect updates on this, either sometime during the week, or next Sunday/Monday. I'm also planning on posting a bit about my photography at some point, so stay tuned for that as well! :)

--
Listening to: Sleeping Sun by Nightwish. One of my first favourites by this band.

snippets - week one

A new 'feature' I'm trying out on my blog is posting little snippets of what I've written each day (since I'm once again trying for a daily writing goal). However, posting one every day would be a pain, so I'll be putting a group of them up once a week (probably on Sunday nights, since I say the week starts on Monday). This is probably the best way to see what I'm working on, and I'll try not to put up any major spoilers for my stories. :)

So here's this week's writing snippets! All writing is copyright (C) Danica West and not to be reused without permission. Though it's all first draft stuff, so why anyone would steal it is beyond me. :D

taking back my real name

About a year ago, this blog (and most of my online profiles) went through a big change. Namely, I stopped using my real name, and instead adopted the online persona of Gwendydd ar Adain.

I did this for several reasons; one small one was the blogs I was keeping at that point weren't very professional, and I didn't want them showing up on employer searches. Also, I was just a bit worried about how much of myself I was putting on the internet. I wanted to try out being me without the consequences of being me in real life (a big part of this is my being queer and living in Mormon Utah). So I switched over to Gwen.

However, lately I've been thinking about this more and more. I'm a writer, my name is going to be my brand, and an online presence is very important for writers in today's market. So why would I hide behind a pseudonym that I don't intend to put on my stories?

So from now on, I'll be using my real name. And I hope to one day post here that you can find stories under that name in a magazine or on a website, or that my novel will be in bookstores soon. Just look for Danica West.

--
Listening to: Astronaut by Amanda Palmer. Writer that I am, I don't think words can express how much I love this song.

another check on the bucket list

Quite a bit has happened since that last very boring post. One thing: I've decided that blogging just to blog, especially when my blog has "rarely updated" in the title, is silly. If I can't take the time to make what I'm saying make sense, or at least make it amusing, why post at all?

My attempt at humor (click to make it bigger).

Anyway, I can't believe I haven't posted about this yet, but here it is: This July, I went to a writers' retreat for my writing group. I had a goal in mind, but I had no idea if I would be able to reach it. "Shoot for the stars and you at least won't shoot yourself in the foot" was firmly in my mind.

june recap

I think I've been putting off writing this blog entry mainly because June was a blur to me. But really, I don't have much to say. I spent most of the month helping my cousin with a large etsy order, so basically I was making friendship bracelets all month. I took some days off, or rather, did fewer bracelets on some days, just because my brain was starting to leak out of my ears. But we should have the order finished by tomorrow, so at least I'll soon have my time to myself again.

In the free time I'm about to have, I've decided to work on my own etsy shop. Watching my cousin running her business really made me want to actually get mine off the ground. I've had an etsy shop for a few years now, but I've never listed anything in it for more than a few days, and nothing was ever bought. I've decided to change that and really work on making my main product sale-able. So that, and writing, will probably be my focus for the next few weeks.

Business will have to battle with a few other things though. 50/90 started yesterday, and I've already written four songs just in the hope that if I have a bad week I won't fall too far behind. I'll also be getting my new camera in a few days, so I'll have that to play with. But if I manage my time properly, and actually treat my writing and etsy work like a real job, then I should have time for everything I want to do.

And hopefully if that happens, I'll have something more interesting to blog about!


--
Listening to: Simple Together by Alanis Morissette. This song really affects me now in ways it never did before.

weird pain

This is random. Anyway, I'm a hopeless romantic, and nothing is better for me than angst: star-crossed lovers and hopeless relationships that somehow manage to make it (or don't). I eat that up like candy. However, sometimes when I'm reading or watching TV or a movie, and there's a big momentous scene--like a couple that's been denying that they love each other and finally come out with it, or someone is injured--I'll get this sharp shooting pain in my neck and chest. It's almost like when you say your heart leaps out of your chest, like the emotion becomes too much for my heart to hold in.

new goals

As I said in a previous blog post, I'm taking a bit of a break from writing this month. So instead of a story a day or even a poem a day, I have new goals. Hey, I have to fill my days with something! (Even if lately that's mostly been crocheting while watching Babylon 5 on Netflix. :D)

tour of my garden: first of june

I thought a nice way to start this month would be to give a tour of my garden. I've put in about five hours in the past two days working on it, and plan to do more all week. This is my garden after that hard work. I'll go around and point out the things that are new. (as in, that watering can. Yay! I've always wanted a watering can!)

end of may

Well, I finished Story a Day, and met my revised goal of 22 stories! One twitter fiction, several that I would consider flash fiction, and two songs, but also several in the 2000 to 4000 word range. And definitely a bunch I want to go back and revise and send through my critique group, and maybe try to sell after that. I'd love it if my first sale came from one of these stories.

Anyway, I'm planning on a longer post tomorrow about my garden, and then comes June, which I have dubbed the month of cleaning. Maybe I'll post updates on that, but I'm giving writing a break for a while, so unless I'm really struck by something in June, there probably won't be much in that area for a month. July 4 is the beginning of 50/90, so I'll definitely make up for it then. And I haven't yet decided if I'll try to write a novel in three days in June as practice for the real deal. I'll have to see what I have as far as time (and sanity) goes.

Right now? I just feel like sleeping.

Tomato in a Tire would a pretty great band name.

--
Listening to: Better by Plumb. I'm really liking this album. Some very catchy and interesting songs.

winding down

Hey, excitement! I already have three posts this month. My unofficial goal is 4 posts a month, or roughly one a week. Anyway, here's an update on the craziness that has been May.

ugh

Ughhh. That says it all. This story a day thing is grueling. I hope it gets easier as the month goes on. I won't let myself give up--I gave myself yesterday (goodness, it's already after midnight; the day before, then) as a free day, since I was unexpectedly occupied all day long, but it's only a free day in that I didn't have to finish my story then. I still started it, wrote some on my phone, and now I'm telling myself I have to finish it. And start and finish a story for today/yesterday. And then go to bed. And then write another when I wake up. Where's this crazy authoritative me when I'm watching hours of Babylon 5 and Futurama instead of writing?

edit: Dude, I've had this blog since 2008! Crazy. Don't know how I didn't realize that before. (Procrastinating by reading all old blog posts = both fail and win. Though at least the 'rarely updated' part of the title held up more than it has lately: less to read through! Not that it's a bad thing I'm posting more often. I just wish I had interesting things to post about. More interesting than writing and laziness.)

--
Listening to: Ich bin ein wahrer Satan by ASP. Love this band. Good writing music, since I can't sing along to or understand most of it. I pick lots of Gaelic music for the same reason.

addicted

I think I'm addicted to writing challenges. I keep trying to push myself harder and harder, doing more and more. That's why 150k is my goal for NaNo this year. And I found this today. I really want to try it. The only real con I can see is that it would happen right after the first week of college, but since I'm only taking an art and photography class this semester, it probably wouldn't be that hard to squeeze in. And it's over Labor Day weekend. Pros of that would include me coming back to school after the weekend and having huge bragging rights. But anyway. I might try a 3 day novel on my own in June (or a week-novel, at the most) just to see if I can do it, and to get myself excited about it. Really, some part of me wants to do it now, now now now, but that's just impulsive manic me, so I'm ignoring her. Really, manic me, we have other obligations. Our short stories are our priority right now. (manic me pouts.)

I think the hardest part would be the arc and finishing, which I'm hoping to get better at through all these short stories. Because I wrote 15,000 words in one day last NaNo, and the website says the 3 day novels come out to be about 100 pages. If that's manuscript pages, at 250 words a page that's only 25,000 words. I think I could do that. If my fingers don't fall off, that is. Always a concern. :)

Anyway, late night rambling blog post done now!

--
Listening to: The Hunger by Fireflight. I have the hunger to get some writing done! Really, I swear I'm addicted.

may day, may day

Okay, so it's not May Day anymore. But it is a day where I have enough time to write a long-overdue blog post! So that counts.

one third

I have so far managed at least one poem every day this month (and on some days more), bringing me to the total of 15. Not spectacular, but enough to be happy with. I'm on page 43 of 100 in my script, and I haven't written in it today. That 43 is in text pages; in pages that I've laid out to later be drawn I now have over 100, which I'm rather proud of. Plenty of material for drawing in May.

day two

of April, and I've kept my schedules: over 250 words, 3 script pages, and a poem today. Well, by now, yesterday; I might try and get my stuff for today done before bed, but . . . oh, hey, when did it get to be 0200? Hmm. In that case, maybe not.

frenzied fingers

I'm still awake. It's nearly 4 am with school in the morning (well, I only have to drive Row to her class, but I do have to wake up for that). But I have 11 pages of my Screnzy and my first NaPoWriMo poem written. Technically, I have about 32 pages for my Screnzy, because I'm doing a graphic novel, but many of those are primarily picture pages, so I'm counting pages as only the text. I also sketched out very very rough outlines for the first seven pages of this script.

allpoetry

So today I did something that I've been thinking about for a while now: I removed all my poems from allpoetry. All 776 of them. I remember wanting when I was younger to be one of those people with 1000 or 2000 poems posted on there, but really, what does the number matter?

I didn't delete them for real, of course; I have them saved off on my computer. I just think I've moved beyond that site, and I didn't want to leave them up there, obligating me to return. I left my account up though, so I can go back and start writing there again if I feel like doping so in the future. But I think I've moved past it; I no longer have a deep-seated need for people to see and like my work. At the moment, I'm feeling much more like an Emily Dickinson: keep it all in a storage trunk, and some crazy relative can edit it to make it more PC and publish it when I'm dead.

Was it the best idea to do this on a down day? Probably not. But manic me didn't have the balls to do it, and I think it needed to be done. It's strange: for so long my allpoetry was my webpage, where I directed anyone who wanted to know more about me. But now, I've lost the need for it. I write in notebooks and on scraps of paper, and occasionally post things to my private journal. This feels to me like a big part of growing up and setting aside my emo teenage past, and really defining what poetry is to me: a way to make people like me and garner compliments; a cool dramatic thing to affix next to my name, like dreamer; or an inherent part of who I am--the burning need to put words on the page.


--
Listening to: Exile by Enya, my old friend in times like these.

short bursts and time to think

Last night I sent off my first paper manuscript. I decided to send my Arizona story to Cricket, since they're a good paying market. I'm still poking around to see if my Rumpelstiltskin story could be sellable to any market other than the magazine I wrote it for (initially, I was going to send it to Cricket, since they'll take fairy tale retellings, but I decided I like my Arizona story better, so I sent it in first). I brought Willow with me when I went to the post office at about 4 am, and after seeing no signs prohibiting pets, let her ride on my shoulder while I poked at the machine to weigh and print postage for my package.

thoughts on rejection

I just got my first rejection letter for a story I submitted. I have mixed feelings about this. In my writing group, we say that rejection letters are something to celebrate and collect, because they mean you're sending out stories, or something. But it still would have been nice to be published. Oh well. (I need to actually ask my writing group why we celebrate them; just so we don't get bogged down and depressed?)

I'll take the opportunity tomorrow to look at markets and see if I can send it out again. Maybe I'll work on my other story that I could possibly sell--to fix the things my writing group pointed out--and send that out too. Because as nice as writing every day has been for simply producing words, it would also be good if I started editing and submitting what I've written.

two weeks and more

Today marks eighteen days of me keeping my writing goal! Two days in that were over 1000 words, and four were 500 or more. That totals to nearly 9000 words, most of which were added to my NaNo novel (with about 2000 written in my quarterly challenge story for my writing group). And while that evil little gnome in the back of my head is saying that I wrote that much in one of my self-imposed Epic Sundays during NaNo, I'm heartily ignoring it. 9000 words is nothing to sneeze at, whether it's written in one day or two weeks, and the real accomplishment here is that I've been writing every single day for more than two weeks.

FAWM 2011 - victory dance

At least to my mind, fourteen songs written in one month doesn't sound nearly as impressive as 50 thousand words. It especially doesn't sound as impressive as 135k--my NaNo for last year. And yet, with my just-under-one-day-early completion of FAWM, there's this warm little glow in my chest that says not only that I won, but that I accomplished what I set out to do, which was something fairly new and somewhat scary to me.

250 words a day

I really can't wait for school to be out. Not that I'm not enjoying it (well, except for that ridiculously stupid Microsoft Tech class which is required for the Computer credit of a General ED degree), but having to wake up every morning really is starting to kill me. I am a night person; I hit my creative peak at about 3 am. So when I'm lying in bed at that time, trying to sleep, and instead thinking of things I could make for my etsy shop, it isn't a good thing.

During the summer, my schedule is somewhere along the lines of sleeping until seven to ten pm, then staying up for twelve hours, and sleeping for another twelve, etc. It naturally reverts this way during the weekend too, although recently it's been more like force myself out of bed at twelve hours because I don't want to mess up my sleep schedule too desperately. Maybe it's not healthy to be able and willing to sleep for 18 hours straight, but that's just how I am I guess.

But anyway, the one thing that it's been good for is I've been getting my writing done in bed every night, using the apps I downloaded for my phone (mentioned in the last post). So here's my stats as far as this week has gone, even though it hasn't yet been a full week since I made the goal to write like this:

2/19: 627 words

2/20: 680 words

2/21: 428 words

2/22: 628 words

2/23: 416 words

2/24: 282 words

The point of showing this is that my word goal all along has been one page a day, or 250 words; most nights I've either doubled that, or gotten pretty close to doing so. Last year, when I crashed and burned at attempting WriYe, I had the goal to write 1667 words a day so I could complete about a NaNo a month.

Ha. Depression and writer's block quickly saw to that goal, and each day I didn't meet it I felt more depressed about missing it, and less apt to write--vicious cycle. But then I saw this page and was inspired. So even though I know I'm capable of crazy amounts of writing, such as 15,000 words in one day last NaNo, trying to push for even the 1000 mark when my moods are so completely unpredictable from day to day is just setting myself up for failure. So I'm shooting for that low goal at the bare minimum, and most days doing much much better. Maybe I'll switch to the 500 one at some point, but for now, with school and everything, I'm good for that low mark.

Now, I don't really know why I'm posting about this; it's been shown quite often that when I make a big commitment to something, then post it on my blog, it fails. But I'm still going strong in FAWM, with only 2 songs left to write and 3 (and a half) days to do it in. So maybe I can break the cycle, and keep to my writing goal this time.

--

Listening to: Hour like a Vega Sympathy by Danica West. Yep. My own song is stuck in my head. Kind sad. :)

LTUE and FAWM (acronym soup)

I just got back from LTUE (Life, The Universe, and Everything) and I already can't believe I have to wait an entire year before it happens again. LTUE is a magic place for creative people, especially writers, filled with support and tips, fun and friends.

direction

I really don't set much by my horoscope, but this whole thing about the signs changing has certainly set me to thinking (that and my astronomy class). I've always liked being an Aries: identifying with my inner fire, my stubbornness, my impatience. But after initially rejecting even the thought of being a Pisces (I'm no wishy washy fish; I'm a ram!) I took a better look at what the sign actually was, and the first thing I saw was "You're definitely a dreamer, Pisces". The first and foremost way that I identify myself is 'a dreamer'. So now I'm conflicted. I really do like the idea of being an Aries, a fiery redhead heroine, but I know that deep down at the center of my secret self, I'm really less aggressive than I act in public. So maybe I'm both? That makes me imagine a shape-shifting fish-ram. Anyway, it's something to consider at least. Again, not that I really place much faith in my horoscope, but they've been oddly true lately (both Pisces and Aries, actually).

internet

So I finally created a website for me that actually does the job of consolidating 'internet me' into one place. I need to add more to it, but for now it'll serve the purpose it was created for. It's probably overly dramatic, but hey, I'm in a dramatic mood right now, and that's just another part of me I guess.

starting the new year

So for a start to the new year, yesterday was both good and bad. I was actually quite productive: I finished my Alice in Wonderland ravelry swap project--which looks awesome and I'm very proud of--and made a penguin phone cozy for my mom and a rabbit phone cozy for my sister. And yet, I was still randomly depressed all day. I think that it was a good example of the fact that my moods often have little to no correlation with my actions because I actually have my sleep schedule back to normal and I had an enjoyable day, but I still felt like just curling up and crying.

But anyway, that's boring, so I'll talk about something else now. For the past few years, I've made resolutions to do all kinds of things for the new year--to write more, to be less lazy, to focus more on my studies and get better grades, to finally figure out what I want to do with my life--and every time, I fail utterly, and am depressed for most of January after the first week doesn't meet my expectations. So this year, I made no such resolutions. I would love for all of those things to happen, but those are ongoing goals, and I'm not going to try and force the change just because the year felt like changing. I need to be the one to feel like changing.

Also, I got to level 79 on my priest, and my hunter is at 83. :D