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.