Long time no see!

So it’s been a few days, hasn’t it? I can’t say it’s entirely my fault though – I was unexpectedly hijacked by work for a full day earlier this week. And yes, I do mean a FULL day. I went into work at 8 AM, and didn’t leave until 7:30 PM. After the drive home and a quick bite to eat, I was working remotely until 1 AM. I guess I don’t have to mention that I was completely exhausted after this, do I? And then because what I was working on was rather urgent, and folks would have questions the next day, I had to be up bright and early working from home Friday. That was one day I was so incredibly happy to be able to WFH too… I was exhausted.

So follow that up with a day-long LAN party yesterday, and there you have it: where I’ve been the past three days. I guess that’s not too weird though, I’m sure lots of folks have work + parties that tend to get in the way of NaNo. However I at least knew the LAN was coming up though. Work I hadn’t quite intended that to be so… draining on me. And my creative juices. It took all I could muster to get myself to settle down today and do some writing. I found I kept putting it off. Likely because I felt guilty for missing it for days. Yet here I am after I got my regular update in. Not *too* bad I suppose, but goodness do I have a bunch of writing ahead of me.

In other news, I put up our Christmas tree today! It’s a bit early, I know, but it’s always sad to take down Halloween decorations and not have anything to put up in it’s place. Besides I felt pretty satisfied with our Halloween this year. By the time we started taking it down, I was ready for the holidays to come. How about you all?

So we had a frightful showdown with a less-than-pleased leader of the pack, but Terry survived. Now I’m switching gears to focus on Suzie and Fred now, who are currently bored out of their minds. I guess that’s what happens when you’re in a poorly organized protection program.

Project: The Secrets of Leekston (Working)
Deadline: End of 2011 (Preferably much sooner)
New words written: 1,897
Present total word count: 39,579
Total Word Count for 2011: 122,075

Parasites and a Moral Dilemma

Friday I got an announcement email reminding bloggers not only about the fact that NaNoWriMo was coming up at the beginning of November, but also a really neat idea about how to gear up for it. I wrote on my first NaNo last year, and simply fell in love with it. It not only gave me an excuse to devote time each day to writing, but also forced me to quite being so darn nit-picky about my word choices and simply get the ideas down on paper. Evidently that was really the impetus that forced me to action. I had written on a few Big Bangs last year, and being able to devote an entire month to writing original work simply seemed marvelous.

So naturally I’m planning on writing again this November. I’m settling in to do some outlining in just a few moments actually. But the part of the notice that really seemed clever was the idea to join Post a Day during the month of October to gear up for writing everyday in November. Well, I thought, I’ll be sure to do that! I post on my WordPress blog almost every day anyway!

Well… to make a long story short, that just didn’t happen yesterday. The first day and already my best intentions were fouled. Oh well, I’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose. So in true writer fashion I’ll begin this the second day of the month instead of the first, and try to give some updates as to my planning for next month. Maybe with a few ideas as well behind them. By the way, here is what prevented me from making said blog update yesterday.

When I woke up I was in the mood to bake. Now this is not in fact that strange for me. My fondness for baking is rather renowned among my friends and family (not that they’re complaining), and so I started in immediately. I made some orange rolls that had to rise twice before I could actually cook them. And I also volunteered to make pizza crusts for our D20 Future tabletop campaign we started last night. The bread machine made that so very easy too! (Between that and my mixer, it’s no wonder I bake so much!) Include the icing I made for the orange rolls and the marinara sauce for the pizza, and whoosh – time seemed to fly by. Then we piled all the goodies into my car to head over. As usual, the pizza was delish – not to mention so much more filling than your regular delivery pizza. Then it was on to the gaming.

Our campaign has a pretty fun setup. My character is a jazz lounge singer that’s taking her gig to Mars to try her hand at entertainment on another planet. She’s not exactly a fighter, but instead I’m turning her into an empath similar to Deanna Troi. Anyway one of the head leaders on the 1000+ passenger ship got a strange virus a week into the voyage. Upon further investigation of this passenger and five others, we learn that actually the infection is a parasite that turns into a huge black leech thing that pumps its dozens of babies into the host of the body and uses it as an incubator. To make matters worse, the leeches turn out to get loose on one of the decks and now we’re trying to decide if it’s salvageable. Do we kill the entire deck of people and parasites and write them off as a lost cause? Do we go through a slow and steady sweep and clean – risking the possible infection of our staff and crew? Do we notify the captain even though he could disconnect the passenger section of his ship and leave us all floating in space? Dang I love science fiction!

Anyway, that’s what was preoccupying my time yesterday. Don’t you love moral dilemmas?

An Empath at Heart

Pulled from sweething10. This is awesome because Deanna is like my favorite character from this series so far. I’m only on episode 6 or so, but I did just watch an episode last night. 😉

—–

Your results:
You are Deanna Troi

Deanna Troi
75%
Jean-Luc Picard
70%
Uhura
55%
Beverly Crusher
55%
Spock
52%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)
50%
Geordi LaForge
50%
Will Riker
45%
Data
42%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
40%
James T. Kirk (Captain)
30%
Mr. Scott
30%
Chekov
30%
Mr. Sulu
20%
Worf
5%
You are a caring and loving individual.
You understand people’s emotions and
you are able to comfort and counsel them.


Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Hitting the Pavement Hard

I’m back! The vacation was a blast – beach fun, Universal Studios, and plenty of time to read and relax. I finished up The Secret Garden on the trip down, read through Maria Schneider’s short story “Year of the Mountain Lion”, and even started on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I’m absolutely LOVING this novel though, and find I keep picking it up during the day to get a quick escape into fantasy for a bit. It’s reminding me how much I enjoy reading high fantasy like this in completely made-up worlds. It’s truly fun. And the sarcastic humor mixed with fairy tale worlds all through the book helps quite a bit as well.

Tonight I’ve got several things on my plate:

  • Reviewing the proof for “Against Our Better Judgment”
  • Resubmitting “Dear, Sweet Lydia”
  • Editing my Lucius Big Bang piece “As the Seventh Month Dies”
  • And finally – working on combining my novel into a Scrivener project and adding in the sections that need adding.

Whew! You get no rest after a vacation. It took me hours cleaning out the 200+ emails in my work email this morning too. I love taking time off – but getting acclimated to the work/writing regiment again always takes some time. Hopefully by the end of tonight I’ll have a few items crossed off this list. Friday and Saturday are going to be pretty busy, so I need to use my time wisely – while I have it!

And to give yourself a break from the typical blog world, here’s a video that I took at Lido Beach down in Florida over the weekend. The surf at sunset. =)

And of course this wouldn’t be complete without a few pictures of Hogwarts from Universal Studios! xD

IMG_0707Hogwarts Castle! You could seriously see it from almost every point of the park too! It was so freaking cool. And the ride inside of it was awesome – you get a quick tour through the castle and get to see portraits of the Founders arguing. It was just great!

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I love how topsy-turvy the skyline is for Hogsmeade. The snow just mocked us though since the temperatures were easily above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The entrance to The Three Broomsticks! And I loooved the Butterbeer. It was so delicious! As my sister suspects, I also think cream soda was a major component of the recipe. 😉

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The decoration inside of The Three Broomsticks was beautiful! I truly felt like I was transported into another time period – kind of a mixture of the Victorian age with a magical twist. You really get a feel for how outdated the wizarding world is compared to the Muggle world in terms of style and décor. Of course if you had magic to replace the things you’d normally use electricity for, there would be no need to upgrade your technology, right?