I'm more than a little late with this, but I managed to make my 400k Wri Ye goal for 2011 and ended with 423,321 words.

Since I didn't end up doing much writing in December (like in previous years), I've just upped that goal to 425k for this year. Let's hope that's not too much extra and that I'm as inspired this year as I was last year. If not then I'm in trouble.

The past few days have been a bit of a mixed bag for me. On both Friday and Sunday I was quite bad and didn't actually start writing until about 11 at night despite not having anything else to do, so I only got 1,595 and 2,073 words done respectively. Saturday and today were totally different though, thanks to the write-ins as a result of which I wrote 4,327 and 6,386 words respectively.

Altogether this puts be at just over 25,000 words, meaning that I'm halfway there. Compared to last year this isn't really much (I won on the 9th then), but I'm quite happy with it. Especially since the past few days I've done less jumping around in the story and had more places where one scene flowed naturally into the next.

The lesson of the past few days? Go to write-ins, they are your NaNo friend!

Stats for today:
Word written today: 6,386
Total word count: 25,036

Okay, so this year my distraction mode has kicked in extra early, hitting me on the 2nd day of NaNo! Yep, that's right, yesterday the only writing I got done was at work between the official end of the work day and the start of the experiment set-up for which I stayed late (we have to wait until a certain before we can start). Beyond that (1,001 words) I didn't do anything and let myself get distracted by re-reading Runaway.

I was hoping to do better today but got sucked into glancing through parts of Dynasty for the first part of the evening and was just about to give up on getting anything done today as well when I suddenly managed to get myself started. The fact that I then didn't go back to re-reading old fic is because tallymark came on Skype and that kept me too distracted to read, so I wrote!

Stats for today:
Word written today: 2,711
Total word count: 10,655

Links used in today's writing:
Wikipedia: Chalk
Wikipedia: Talc
Wikipedia: Baby Powder
So, anyone wanna guess how that figures into a fantasy/horror novel? :)

This is the first year where I didn't start writing around midnight, but I hadn't managed to read all of what I'd written for this idea last year before being distracted, so I decided to focus on that first to prevent myself from accidentally re-writing a scene I'd already done (I absolutely hate it when I do that!). I continued that first thing this morning (I took the day off from work) before I lost power and water as there was a leak in the other studio flat next door and they needed to shut things down to fix it. Therefore I headed into town early to drop my glasses off at the optician and then I went to camp out at the location of the write-in and finally managed to do some writing before everyone else eventually showed up.

So, overall, not my most brilliant day of writing for NaNo ever, but I'm still happy with what I produced and I had made the decision to go more with quality over sheer quantity this year.

Stats for today:
My word count: 6,943

It's just under T - 2 hours until midnight and the start of NaNo 2011!

The local kick-off party wound down a lot earlier than normal this year (probably because it's a work night), so I'm gonna re-read what I wrote last year for this idea before getting side-tracked by that other thing. Hopefully this time I'll stick with it as I really do like the idea and want to finish it. It's become a real series in my mind since I started on it and I really want to follow that through.

Wish me luck!

Just got back from a C.W.I.L. meeting (my local writer's meeting for all things not mainstream with a heavy focus on sci-fi & fantasy) where I got my recent microfiction critiqued. On the bright side I now have a title for it, namely Virtual Strangers. On the other hand it's become quite clear that it still needs a lot of work...

A little random perhaps, but my youngest sister, JT Vancollie, wants to become an actress. Towards this end she did various internships this summer in LA and is spending the semester studying there. During one of the internships, she was working at a music video company who had a ton of interns. As part of their project, they each had to make a commercial and a music video using the skills all of them had to accomplish this.

She decided to do a commercial for chocolate chip cookies (she absolutely love them!). It's called Grandma's Cookies and is funny.

For the music video she chose I Don't Care by Apocalyptica. It can be found here.

Finally, she was asked to act in the video of one of the other interns who did it on Petie-Rico and U-Gene's Nothing 2 Lose. She's in this one a lot, but the easiest way to point her out is to say that she's the white girl on the roof at the beginning and the one who knocks out the cop further in and then stands guard over him. From there you should be able to pick her out in the other scenes. Please note this is NOT SAFE for work!

Hope you enjoy them.

*looks about sheepishly and waves*

Hey guys, I know that I've been gone a really long time from here, but I'm still alive! Sorry about the absence, I've got no real excuse only that I did what I really tried not to do and not only got swallowed up by watching and reading fic in the Supernatural fandom, but also by writing fic for a totally new fandom. Until last night I hadn't really done any original writing in nearly a year despite my resolution to turn my attention that way. I'm sorry for that especially since I have unfinished fics in other fandoms, but an absolutely massive fic there swallowed me whole and I'm still not done with it even though it's probably longer than Dynasty by now despite me not having a co-author for it.

That said, however, last night I did do some original writing. It was just a microfiction of less than 900 words, but then where I might want to submit it doesn't accept anything over 950 words so that's pretty much what I needed. It's a, presently untitled, sci-fi set on Earth in the not too distant future. It's kinda a take on where things like Second Life might lead us with future technology. So I guess it could be social commentary at the same time.

I'm also resolved not to let my NaNo get hijacked this year by fan fic, so I will be writing an original novel for that!

No lj-cut this time as I only have one book to review for April. It's not that I wasn't reading, but rather that the non-fiction book I chose (The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil) was both long and definitely not an easy read. I'll say more on that one later as I didn't finish it until May.

Since I didn't want to drag my nice copy of the aforementioned book with my on my crazy overnight bus trip to Paris, I grabbed the one below instead:

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult (417 pages): 2.5 Stars, Good
This is a book that I got off the 'for sale' list at work as my mom loves the author and the teaser on the front cover was so intriguing that I decided to read it myself before passing it on. Although the last hundred pages got better, overall I felt that this idea was poorly handled. It could have gone a lot of places and it didn't, leaving us instead with just a taster. I also found the shifting pov in the first person wasn't handled in a way that made it easy to follow.

What can I say? I've been swallowed up by a new fandom, but I'll definitely try and do better from now on.

Given how much longer it takes me to read non-fiction versus fiction and the fact that I have so many more fiction books then non-fiction, I might change my earlier decision to trying to read one non-fiction a month instead of every other book.

( Books Finished in March )