Yes sirree, Bob.

My work is coming in sporadic spurts today. Fortunately, one of my procrastinating endeavors turned into something productive. (Why yes, my pretty, that was all a part of the plan.)

Lynn Viehl has posted a worldbuilding notebook, "It Only Took God Six Days: Worldbuilding within Reason". Here for: blog | PDF. Haven't actually read it yet, but the title is humorous. Plus, I'm getting sick of the 2YN worldbuilding section. Don't tell.

Also, I'm in the market for an internal cheerleader. ... Anybody?

Yetis do Tulsa

Finally recouped from this weekend's Conestoga 12 conference in Tulsa, Okla. It was an inspiring weekend. Met awesome people and great authors, discovered new books to check out, and learned some secrets of the trade.

Made Mark Henry some brain cake. (See photo of Eliza and the bubble-gum pink icing.) (Guilty admission: Don't have a picture of the final cake. Anyone else?)

Learned interesting tidbits about life that I was better off not knowing. (Can anyone say "olive fetishes"?)

Bought a couple of books, had them signed, and I've already finished one of them (highly enjoyable). Received free books, bookmarks, buttons, postcards, pens and the like. Shay wants a shirt that says "Swag Whore."

The best part of going besides the fun times, cool people, was how the panelists made writing a book and being published seem not only easy, but an attainable goal. The projected mindset was "If we could do it, you can definitely do it."

Pact

I bit the bullet yesterday. Shay and I made a pact to finish our manuscripts in time to go to RT in April. Technically, my goals are:

* Finished rough draft by January 1, 2009.
* "Final" draft by April 1, 2009
* RT end of April, 2009

Met with the Yetis last night (translation: writing group). Between them and My Favorite (translation: W.) had some world building breakthroughs.

St. Patty's luck requested

I just applied for an editorial position with a local newspaper. Wish me luck. All thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

Rock Band

Some entertainment for you. Create your own band and album cover. (Courtesy of Burr Settles on FAWM.)

The article title is the Band name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Last few words of the very last quote is the Album Title: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
Third picture is Album Cover: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

My results:


Band name: Zealandia
Album Title: "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." ~ Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

New Ideas

I had a great Tuesday night. The only thing that could have made it better would have been being in two places at once. I needed that time-thingy Hermione had in Prisoner of Azkaban.

The other night I was looking for "What else is out there?" Or possibly, "What goes bump in the night?" I surfed Wikipedia and distilled it down to a smaller list. I just want something different. (Basically because I have separate vampire and werewolf stories right now.) I have an idea for a heroine and I needed a world to build that she could mold to.

Anyway, I was looking through my American Legends and Folktale books and found a great idea. I'm sufficiently stoked about it. I'm still trying to work the idea out in my head (and on paper). It does fall into one of those categories on the list, but is different enough with a "local" twang that I think it's a rare idea. It's not quite ready for me to share yet. I want to nail more things down before I do.

I have a question: How many projects (stories, etc.) do you work on at one time? Do you have all these other ideas, but only focus on one thing at a time?

2YN-ing

Been working on my 2YN. (Makes me think of Y2K. heh) The latest assignment is about goals and conflict. I've come up with so much conflict - I think I have some of my subplots worked out because of it. Woohoo! My OWG would be proud of the rocks I've collected to throw at my main character.

I also reread part of my NaNo. Turns out, it has more potential than I thought. There are some really good scenes. A few sentences really dance on their own too. (Of course, those are usually the ones that end up being edited out...)

Update

November ended up being a very rough month. My personal life hit the fan.

Things seem to be ironing themselves out now. I've joined the Forward Motion 2 Year Novel "class". About 6 others from my rl writing group have too. It's nice to be able to share that with a face-to-face support group.

I've put my NaNo story on hold for now. I did glance back through it and found that it's not all tripe. This heartens me. I'm focusing on my werewolf story for now, though I've been debating on simultaneously working on my vampire novel. I think that may be biting off more than I can chew.

Decisions

I had a miniature meltdown earlier. I'm better now. I talked it through with Wesley and decided to postpone my defense. I've officially told my adviser. I feel much more relaxed.

I had to decide a few things for me to be able to finish (and not get to this point again in the spring).
I'm not going back to bed after work or taking Wesley to work. I'm going to work at least two hours a day on the paper and write for fun for at least one hour. And I have to do those three hours of work before Wesley gets home in the evenings. That way I'm accountable to myself.

If I actually work two hours a day on the paper, I think I can be pretty much finished in the next month or so. I've set myself a hard deadline (because I told my adviser and Wesley) of March 1 to be through with defense and post-defense edits.

I am declaring it: I AM NOT A PROCRASTINATOR!

(I think I need theme music.)

Tomorrow I'll contact the department so I can sign up for my one-hour extension class so I stay enrolled.

Okay, I'm off to write for NaNo.