GO VOTE

Before doing anything else, I want to remind my fellow Americans that today - assuming you're reading this when it came out on Tuesday - is Election Day. If you haven't voted yet, go out and do that now. Seriously. Stop reading. Go! This blog will still be here when you're done.

Heck, depending on how long the polling lines are, bring me with you and read while you're queuing. Actually, no. Don't do that. Instead, brush up on your ballot if you haven't done so yet. Again, there are tons of resources online, but the one I've seen most frequently is vote411.org.

Also remember that your employer is LEGALLY OBLIGATED to give you adequate time to vote, so be sure to check in to double check on your rights. Don't delay though... if you're home in your PJs until your shift starts at 5pm you've had more than adequate time to vote. So... again... GO! NOW! Don't wait!

Also also... Uber and Lyft are joining forces to help get people to and from polling locations. Check to see if these services are in your area, and if they are, check to see if you qualify for a discounted or even FREE ride to the polls!

Today is not just "Thank god, now the political ads, phone calls, and mailers will stop" day. Today is your chance to affect this country. Today is your chance to make sure your voice is heard. And for the jaded and disenfranchised Millennials and Gen Zers - assuming you're 18+, are there 18+ Gen Zers? I don't know where the generation cut-off is - THIS IS OUR YEAR! If we go out and vote we are the MAJORITY of the population right now. We CAN affect change if we want it. We CAN form the country we want, not just one we inherit from previous generations.

Finally, just a friendly reminder to DOUBLE CHECK your ballot before you officially cast it. You may have slipped up and colored in/pressed/punched out the wrong candidate. You could have that glorious "hanging chad" situation. There could have been a glitch in the system which voted for out-of-party candidates even if you voted Straight Ticket. I've seen reports of that happening before, and apparently it's a known glitch that no one is bothering to fix???? So, yes. No matter how you vote, double check that you ARE voting for who you think you are.

Okay, I'll pack up my soap box now...

Instead, I.... guess.... I'll talk about NaNo? I kind of don't want to though.

I was all geared up for it for the past few months. I even had notes upon notes upon notes to try to help me get organized for this month.

Then November hits and....

My current total is 3504

I don't know why, but I just keep either avoiding writing when I have down time at work - instead obsessively playing one of my mobile games - or I run out of time to write outside of work. Sunday was my day off. Hubby was at work for about 8hrs. I had the whole day to write and catch up. I had every intention of doing that. Heck, the NY Giants had a bye-week, so it's not like I really had any of the football games to watch.

Instead, I did just that: watch football. Specifically the Miami Dolphins game. Mostly because that's Hubby's team and that way I could let him know how it was going; assuming it was going well.

I also cleaned. The apartment needed that badly. I scrubbed down the bathroom, and tried desperately to vacuum every inch of carpet I could. Mostly because Hubby had a neat idea for a Halloween pumpkin this year after seeing a kit for it: a unicorn.

I even painted the horn with glow-in-the-dark paint.

The problem though... well... take a look.

Yup. Hubby thought "wouldn't it be awesome if the unicorn sparkled with glitter!?"

Hubby really likes glitter.

He also got glitter all over our front porch as he tried to apply it to the pumpkin...

So sparkly!

Of course, we had to bring the pumpkin inside to let everything finish drying since it was raining all week.... which meant carrying said pumpkin - and the subsequent tracking from the front porch inside by more than just Hubby and I - brought these Crafting Herpes inside. I am fighting the best I can, but all I can hope for is that our apartment goes into remission. Lord knows we'll have another outbreak though. I mean, I'm STILL finding needles from our fake Christmas tree.... soooooo....

Anyway, my point being, I spent Sunday cleaning instead of catching up on my writing. By about 9pm I just waved the white flag and called it my one allotted "day off." Ignoring that I really shouldn't have taken it if I was so far behind my goal....

For those who might not be able to see since the font in that NaNo calendar is so small in the above image, I should have been at 6668 words on the 4th. Actually, using the 5-days-a-week goal, I should have been at 9088 words. Both should have been easy. I've written spur-of-the-moment one-shot stories longer!

Instead, I sat at 2650 words. Ooof. And I didn't even add another 900 yesterday. Just barely over 3500 words after five days!? Such a rough, ROUGH, slow start.

My only real consolations are:

1. At least I AM writing. That's something, I guess. And I still have the rest of the month to catch up. I mean, I lost my work TWICE last year and STILL managed to win. I have time. I'm not out yet.
2. Ali Luke, for various reasons, was only able to write about 30 words that first week, and then another 1700+ yesterday, so she was only at about 1800 when she called it a night on Monday. She's written novels before. She's PUBLISHED novels before. She's a PROFESSIONAL WRITER. If she can have a slow-start as well, then maybe it's not so bad. Life gets in the way, you just need to know how to overcome it and persevere.

You want to know who's kicking butt with NaNo though? Cyhyr. She has CLASSES and a child and she wasn't in the proper mindset for writing for a long time. Yet she fell in love with her story and her characters and she is killing it!

She blew past 2,000 words on the FIRST DAY. She has slowed down a bit since, and had to skip writing on Saturday for various reasons, but she's still at 5948 words. Sure, that's still technically behind where one should be to hit 50,000 words in 30 days, but she's not aiming for word count. She's aiming for x-hours of writing, and she's hitting that goal pretty well based on her posts.

We also have a NaNo game going where we post the last line we wrote for that day, without any context. Hers have been a lot more interesting than mine:

Day 1: "I just want to go home."
Day 2: "We fight together or not at all."
Day 4: "The daemons can be understood."

Comparatively, here's mine:

Day 1: It was the same thing since the day I became Chat Noir: mine and Ladybug's Miraculous jewels.
Day 2: I didn't wait for Chat Noir to react, I was out the door, on the patio, and throwing my yo-yo at the terrace house across the street.
Day 3: "They probably saw the video and are going to come rescue me soon.”

We're both slackers and haven't yet posted what our final line yesterday was.

We did also get ChibiSunnie unofficially involved as well. She's too busy to actually participate in NaNoWriMo, but she did have a plot bunny that wouldn't leave her alone, and so she decided to share her last line of the day with us as well: "We might be getting older in different stages, but we can still figure out getting old together."

Not quite content with just this little game, Cy decided she was going to go an extra mile on her Tumblr. A way to get us excited for her writing, and a way for her to stay excited as she picked out bits of her writing she loved. Each day that she writes, she posts her top three parts; mostly just a line or two. She also shares something she particularly loved about that day's writing. Something like working with a character she particularly loves or getting to learn more about an OC she created.

You can check out her NaNo posts on her Tumblr. She really does have some particularly intriguing lines. I'm not even in the Final Fantasy fandom, let alone FF XV specifically, and yet I can't wait for her to have the story polished enough that she's cool with me reading it.

Now to just get MYSELF that excited about my writing.

Knives from the Scott Pilgrim comic books
by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I really don't know what it is with this story. I have wanted to write it for over a year, and yet I'm completely stalling now. I just don't know what I want to do with it, really. I think. I'm not sure, really.

I've been sort of all over the place with it. Prior to NaNo starting I wrote three or four scenes that I really liked and was really driven to write. I'll be splicing them into the full story once I catch up with where I think they'd fit. Then, November 1st I just couldn't figure out how to start this darn story, so I just kind of jumped in half way through what I pictured as the first chapter. I still wasn't really feeling it - hence the small word count - so I jumped again to chapter two. I then thought I knew how I wanted to start the story, so November 2nd I backtracked and wrote until I caught up to the main drama of that first chapter. Yesterday I finally caught up to the part of chapter 1 I started on the 1st, and moved a touch past it. I know we're "not supposed" to edit, but I did slightly. I grabbed this paragraph and that sentence and the phrase over there that I wanted to shift as I wrote. Then I interjected some narration now that I knew more about the scene, and I deleted sentences that no longer made sense. It was quick edits, and I MOSTLY kept it the same - I think I deleted maybe 50 words? - so I'll call it fair game....

I just keep trying to follow what I'm inspired to write... I just... haven't been though.

I think I miiiiiight have figured out this morning why that is.

Before I get to that, I want to share something else real quick. I swear it's relevant.

At about 10pm last night, while I was scrolling through Tumblr, I saw an amusing ask:

A little context: Buggachat has, on occasion, been asked if she knew of a particular fanfic, or where to find it. Generally it's something like "I've been trying to find a fic where Marinette is a kleptomaniac. I know it was on AO3 somewhere, but I can't seem to find it again. Q^Q You wouldn't happen to know the name of it, would you?"

Bug would then either be like "Oh yeah! I know that story!" and drop a link - both answering the ask and promoting the story to everyone who follows her blog - or she'd pitch the question to her followers: "No, sorry, I've never heard of it, but it sounds amazing! If anyone knows the story Anon is asking about please drop a link." This way the word is again out there, and she's sort of crowd sourcing the question to try to find the story for the asker.

For whatever reason, most of the asks Bug has been posting lately seem to be these "please help me find this story" asks. Which is where the above Ask comes from. It's probably a joke, but that would be fantastic if Anon accidentally called someone out.

Anyway, thinking that would have indeed been a brilliant marketing strategy, I decided to reblog Buggachat's ask with a bit added to the bottom:

I still feel like it was a bit of a ballsy move on my part, hence "shameless plug" being my last hashtag. However, it seemed to have gotten some attention. Before working on this blog - so, about 8:30am - I checked in on Tumblr and saw this:

Otakuprincess15 is obviously talking about me since I'm tagged in their comment. And what a comment as well! I gushed. I thanked them. Amazing in all caps!?

Hacker Girl Facebook sticker
by Birdman, Inc

However, I'd also like to point out Didntwantanaccount right below Otakuprincess15. As far as I could tell, I'm the only one who commented about my story in an attempt to promote it. The original ask and answer said nothing about a particular story, and the previous comments didn't have anything to do with promoting their stories either. So, I think it's reasonable to assume “Peeping Tomcat” is the only story referenced in this post. So I'm pretty positive Didntwantanaccount was also complimenting my story!!!! EEEE. It's awesome to see people talk about it and compliment it.

And I think that's the source of my mental block.

I'm in this weird writing limbo where I worry my stuff isn't good enough because it's not very popular, but then I read my reviews and see people both promoting my work and commenting about how great it is. And both halves of this limbo keeps me stuck.

If I'm on that low swing of "what's the point? I'm not writing anything people want to read anyway" then I have no motivation to write. However, if I'm on the upswing of "It looks like everyone who's read my story loves it! This is amazing!" then I become terrified that lightning won't strike twice.

I might be there right now. That may be why nothing seems nearly as exciting with "One and the Same" as it was with "Peeping Tomcat." I'm frozen in the worry that OatS won't be as good. That people who enjoyed PT will be disappointed in OatS; that they'll see me as a sort of one-hit-wonder; that PT was a fluke.

A discussion with a friend pretty much solidified this fear. Hubby and I both LOVE reading Rick Riordan, if you couldn't tell before simply by following this blog. Now, I get that not everyone is going to like his writing. I don't like the writing of a lot of authors my friends love. It's just personal taste, so we weren't offended when the friend told us he wasn't a fan. He really enjoyed "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief," but he felt like "Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters" was just a rehash of the first book. When he saw a similar formula used yet again in "Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse" he gave up before he hit the half-way point. He then decided to read the Kane Chronicles to see if a different series from the same author would be better.

All three of us agreed that the Kane Chronicles stories are the worst of Riordan's works. We're sorry for any who love these the most, but all three of us found the main characters bland and the "transcription of an audio recording" narration concept a bit jarring.

But that's the thing. Our friend enjoyed the first book he read from the author, but felt the others in the series were too similar and didn't enjoy them as much. He then chose a different narration styling by the author and HATED it to the point that he gave up completely on Riordan.

What if that happens to me? I already have so few readers, what if OatS feels too much like a rehashing of PT? What if the bounce back and forth between first-person Marinette and first-person Adrien is too much of a narration shift and also turns people away?

I feel like all of these fears are completely unwarranted, but it's still lingering there. And I think that's the block I have to work through. I just.... I don't know what I need to do, but I need to find a way to fall in love with this story again.

I need to get as excited by what I discover while writing as Cyhyr does.

You'd think watching the Miraculous season 2 finale would help with that. It just got me more excited about the show, but not exactly my story.

Add in the fact that I failed for the first time with my resolution to write something new every month. I couldn't figure out the time to write last week - obviously; check out my November count again.

So, here's that swing back into my writing funk. I was doing so well too! I don't know what it is about being 34, but I've noticed a distinct drop in my reading and writing since my birthday. I just got so overwhelmed with everything that week, and I don't think I've ever had the mental vacation to catch up. I really REALLY need to just take a week in December to be at home and let my mind recharge; get my home cleaned up again. I was going to take a week in November, but my manager put the schedule together faster than I could decide which week to take.

Here's to this week going better. I do have writing sprints tonight at my writing group anyway. Maybe it will be just what I need.

In the meantime, here's one last reminder to my American readers....