27 Topics

I need a list of, there's 9 days left, three sessions a day, 27 topics each to write 1,000 words on. Usually I can get 800ish, tease it out to 1000. Had a spot of trouble getting 3,000 words in today, with my birthday and all. Thanksgiving is probably going to be tougher. But I'll be more prepared for it.

I have a Doc comprised entirely of the bracketed portions from last year, all 4,455 words of them. Expanding those 4,455 words to 50,000, I wondered over on my writing blog the technicalities of the word count there, whether they do or don't count and whatever. I already asked that question, so I'm going to ask a different one now.

What will those 27 topics be? 

There's a lot that needs to be done in the dreaming at the end; I've figured some of that stuff out. But I really want to read Gormenghast to see how that handles action, because I've got a very specific writing style in my head for how the dreamtime goes...

Also, need to do my vlog this month. And one more video. Though I've already filmed much for that, actually.

I haven't watched a single movie all month. I've seen one episode of the Office, and one episode of Burn Notice, but other than that, I haven't really had the time to invest in many other non-writing things.

I mean, I played a lot of Overwatch today. I lost 101 points playing ranked, just kept losing and losing and losing. I'm sure Blizzard would just, give those points back to me, if I explained it was my birthday, but I think my gift today is learning to live with the consequences, even if it's not your fault and it's your teammates who just suck and don't know how to group up and push the point, group up and push the point, it shouldn't be that difficult, and what the heck don't switch up the team comp now, we were balanced, we need another healer, dangit! Some people.

features over bugs

I realized in bed this morning, past midnight but before I went to sleep, that I'm turning, 27, tomorrow. It could be discouraging, to make it this far without really having accomplished anything. But that's not the way I see it, I mean, I've learned to see this as a positive.

Apparently I'm just so complex and awesome that it's going to take a while for even me to figure myself out, and I should be proud for even having made it this far. For example: I only realized last night, tossing in that Chilean Sea Bass thing, that those random tangents I go on to show off all the research I've done or whatever, maybe that's an intrinsic part of my writing style, or at the very least are a feature and not a bug. Maybe some of this information is actually new to people, I don't know. That doesn't mean they have to be structured as random tangents, sticking out as abruptly as they do, but that doesn't mean I have to get rid of them in order for the story to flow better. This month is about rounding things out anyway, and showing not telling. (which totally justifies all the telling I'm thus doing with the random research shoved in.)

Anyway cheerio

New Writing Plan

It occurred to me only last night that I might not succeed this year's NaNoWriMo. Good news, I can still well over make it if I do put into effect that 3,000-word-a-day thing. I want to write, but I don't want to write that much.

Just charging ahead making up words on the fly like I'm doing right now, without any breaks except for like tiny little ones, maybe going back and correcting a mistype, I can fit in 50 words a minute easily. 50 words a minute, that's 3,000 words by the end of the hour, since 3,000 is 50 times 60. It's so convenient, the math just works out. All I have to do is free write for an hour each day, which is like totally possible. And terrifying. There's such a thing as INERTIA and it KEEPS YOU FROM SHIFTING GEARS.

Alright I'm back! I did one half-hour session, and yeah it worked out, but I should have done another... the day's not over yet, but I think we're good for now, just punch in 167 more words onto my 1500. Here's what I observed for the last few minutes of the writing session, going off the rails and writing about the process of writing instead:

I sort of ran out of juice. 20 minutes is good, 3 20 minute sessions instead of 2 30 minute sessions. Oh boy. But man, if I only needed to do like 1667 words a day instead of 3,000, that'd be dope, this'd be so easy, like you don't even. Because I just sat down, and raced, and fi I'd actually had a direction instead of just rambling freewrite, that's 1,500 words right there, well 1,400 right now, but just 267 more to go past that, and, the whole day's writing cranked out in half an hour! They design these to be easy. The goals to be reachable. All we need is the momentum to get going. 55 seconds until time's up; it won't get mad at me that I'm a little under my goal, right? I've gone past the time before, let's see. 25 seconds left.

 Moone thought, no, he spoke aloud! And then he read

here we go. Verbs. Well. 1500 words, right there, my goal was a little higher than that that's right. Only like a third of this is usable. That's the end.

I cut out the unusable stuff, and spent some time adding and shifting sentences and clarifying things, and it's awesome and it looks great, and it's definitely going to work with miminal hassle and guys, this is totally possible!

Raccoon Merch Time!

https://youtube.com/video/RiOHvPL13HE/

That link's never gonna be one; it's what I had for my video before I realized that like three seconds of audio were missing and I had to cancel that upload, fix the file, recompile it and reupload.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlhioQ0LT8

This is the link to the complete video and I am literally the only person who's ever watched it; makes me feel special. But I did so five times! Apparently. And I still couldn't get the closed captioning to come out the way that I wanted.

Epilogue to today's A Real Thing

Starts here but I wasn't sure if the following I wrote was part of it or not; I'm a lot better at word count if it's unstructured idea generation.

She gets defeated somehow, from miles away, Moone possibly not even realizing it. It's amazing. Do we even need to show it? It's so inevitable that Moone come out on top that, like, it'd be so great if we didn't even show it, and leave it all up to the audience's imaginations. Anyway this is when they pull out the big guns with the time travelers, as was foreshadowed. Yay. 

The Brotherhood had hired Anyone, but it's MacBeth specifically who recruits Slice Slit and Slash, getting back into the Brotherhood's graces. Until they're defeated as well. And Xemf uses MacBeth to power the portal to Athena, to use the NOC list to... do something. 

He's a god here in myth, since every man is his ancestor in the dreaming, so which god has a special relationship with Athena? Hephaestus, obviously, but maybe that already happened (ie this is what's happening when Pontifex realizes someone's messing around in the Dreaming,) leaving half-snake Erichthonius to be the ancestor of the entire Brotherhood according to this version of myth; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy (though not a time loop exactly; xemf just ensures that its ancestors are the gods, which is what allows it to go back as hephaestus in the first place... and hephaestus sprung from Athena's head in the first place?, so...? more time travel? maybe that portion of the myth would have counterpart in the lycaon thing, so that's what we see play out; oh heck Gaia is the one who brings back Lycaon's son and who is the technical "mother" of Erichthonius, it connects that way at least, but how to make that make sense?). 

How would xemf or whoever access the dreaming at that point, without having Pontifex's boon? 

Also if Pontifex gives up his entire boon to xemf, does that mean that xemf gets the associated bane as well, since the boon would have no counterpart in Pontifex?

tryna do action but i fall in love just a little ol little bit

I really need a prompt if I want to write, at least a vague vague understanding of how things are going to go. I hadn't been going to write at all today, finding it too tiring; writing anyway, because I'd set up an ambitious goal for myself, I found that the writing itself was rejuvenating; what was tiring was pantsing it, and as long as I had an outline of sorts I was good to go.

Which means that it's time to do action scenes, which I'd been holding off on because I felt unprepared, but I'm about as prepared as I'll ever be, and there's not really any research that can be put into them to stall them more. Finding new supernatural creatures with strange weaknesses that can be used to defeat them? Not today. I have beginnings and endings for the action scenes, but what I realized I needed to make them compelling are goals. An unspoken goal in action is survive, but Moone can do that, so what else is there? Also, solid geography, and, just writing about an action scene isn't writing a scene itself, this is more stalling, sorry.

Going chronologically through the book and finding the scenes that need to be blocked out, on the very first scene I hit a problem. A problem caused by, the research actually being important turns out.

In the first action scene, there's a character with a backup life, only they lose that life which leaves them without that lifeline. The way that suspense beat is set up, though, makes no sense with the research put in. The way that phylacteries would work is, when you die, your soul gets bounded to the phylactery, and that would act as an anchor to this world, so you could keep living? Essentially. But I'd had it, it's a backup life, already in there, which can be whipped out if you die. And thus things get dangerous when the phylactery breaks and there's no backup life. But the way they really would work wouldn't need that part, that's there to ratchet up the tension. So I can't write that action scene without totally restructuring the beats. Like, MacBeth is all, uh-oh, and gets made and there's that, but that doesn't make sense without the excuse to lose the phylactery.

Although the way those work does make using a phylactery to imprison a demon make more sense, over the, "oh it's cracked and it can't hold souls anymore, but I can still use it to hold a soul!" thing I'd had.

I wrote some non-action stuff instead.

Really I'm afraid of nailing down the geography, though. I don't want to make such decisions, and rather have it be vague...

Oh! Spirits by Strumbellas, from a few days ago! No, I remember now, that wasn't the song I'd been trying to remember, that was just going back through all the bands I'd listened to recently and going, Strumbellas? Was this the one? It looks kinda right, I guess... 

It was actually Hozier!



Anyway, looking at it TTDEBCA has its type justified by default; why can't I figure out the way to do it here? I've been doing it manually because I didn't know it was possible to have it be part of the template, but looks like it can be...

tryna succeed but i cant even breaks

Breaks are essential, and them's the breaks. But today I wanted to break from EVERYTHING. Not my best day, but it was pretty solid in terms of productivity, since apparently I DIDN'T take today to break from everything. I need to Instagram. I'll do it tomorrow. And, heck, YouTube this weekend? Not having a job is turning out to be a fulltime job.

I was up to 16 IG subs again, then back to 15, and I'd meant to charge my phone but forgot so I can't check it right now. I'd thought my latest video jumped from like 12 views to like 18 in a short amount of time, but I'd just misread 13, and I haven't gotten any since then, and like the first 8 views are from me, adding closed captioning and stuff like they said to, in this "how to grow your youtube channel" video. I guess they never said results were guaranteed.

how do people even i mean i just don't

Greatest Fanfic Idea Ever and an Explanation of the Origins of *That* Aspect of the Moone/Pontifex Relationship

I structured the first book off of other story/ies, which featured mandatory romance elements, and there's a male part in the role that the female character had in the original, so that's where things went. Buddy cop movies have the same dramatic beats as romances, if you break it down, because it's all about two people getting together and learning to get along (hence the Zootopia Nick x Judy angle; hmm, I think I could very feasibly do a video on this,) and The Anachronominion very well could work as a buddy cop thing, but this NaNoWriMo getting into the characters' heads further, I'm like heck it, and that genie's out of the bottle now. Two dudes who are straight who happen to have the hots for each other. Like that movie Brokeback Mountain.

Also like that movie, French Connection? (no, Last Tango in Paris! Also like that movie Last Tango in Paris.) Which totally fits, right? Because this relationship is based structurally off of a heterosexual relationship in something else, and LTIP is the opposite. It's about a man and a woman and apparently umm a stick of butter, this heterosexual relationship, but the script was originally about a homosexual relationship and they just changed one of the genders is all, but the rest of the movie still totally plays like a homosexual relationship, permeating every other aspect of the film. Including and totally explaining, the stick of butter. I've not seen this nor Ghost, but I imagine the butter and the little clay pot should totally get together and hang out sometime? Oh my gosh, that is the greatest idea ever, and now I'm going to write a fanfic about those two, instead of doing my writing for the day in the form of NaNoWriMo stuff.

Mmm yes...

Pirates!

This new Thugs of Hindostan movie looks totally dope. Indian pirates fighting against East India Trading Company? And one of them is Aamir Khan? Yes please. Aamir Khan in everything, please. And another one of them is Amitabh Bachchan. Him too please. Looking at the film's IMDb page, it doesn't have a very high rating, like, at all, but that's just because for some reason Indian audiences aren't afraid to grade their movie scores on a curve. And also it's probably terrible. But it can't be any worse than, well you know.

But what I think we're all looking forward to is the return of Enthiran, in 2.0 coming out this month. Yeet.

WRITING WRITE WRITERLY

I am on a writing roll right now. I should probably head to bed soon, or before 4:00 at least, because we don't want a repeat of the 1st, finishing off my Halloween story for hours and hours, it getting longer and longer, but...

There's an article here! Jack Kirby was quite the creative, telling you that.

http://comicsalliance.com/jack-kirby-ten-most-amazingly-underused-concepts/

I'm down to 15 IG subscribers! Guess I need to post again soon. Down one from yesterday but that's still a lot for me.

I'm not sure how many views of my latest YouTube are just from me. At least one of them isn't; I know that much. Doing everything they say to do, and I'm still having a tough time of attracting like anybody. Ah well.

Latest Upload

I did all the things in this video that the algorithm experts recommend, and made the subject matter as clickable as I know how. Consider this an experiment in seeing if it's actually possible to grow my channel.

Meanwhile, in InstaLand, my IG account has like, 16 followers? And hasn't lost any like, all month? It's quite a surreal experience for me (you know, it's not, but... it feels like it should be; like, I'm just so accustomed to people dropping me like rocks, and having this, without having gained any additional likes on my latest post since I reported it to you, is just kinda weird, but I guess that's how the algorithms work or whatever.) In the olden days we personified the wind and sea and made pagan gods of 'em; now the vasty mysterious forces that rule our lives are mathematical.

Yeti Movies and Also Genesis (the band)

The trailers to UglyDolls AND Missing Link dropped today. Missing Link turns out to be not just 'squatch but 100% yeti, I mean he IS a sasquatch but he visits his yeti cousins as a plot point that hadn't been in the synopsis, so it's actually also 100% fitting into the yeti trend we're seeing lately, is what I meant by 100%.

SO I've been looking for another song, it's from the 80s, and the vocalist kinda sounded like Paul Simon, and it was awesome, but that's about all I've got? It occurs to me that it may have been Genesis, because Phil Collins kinda sounds like Paul Simon, but I think I would recognize Phil Collins but I can only kinda recognize Peter Gabriel?, but you guys Genesis have been around since the late 60s, apparently, and there's like such a back catalogue even in the 80s that it's like, nope, I think I would have recognized Phil Collins.

Redaction (Spirits! In My Head!)

I got maybe half a paragraph of writing in today! I should just write during writing time, instead of spending most of it trying to track down a song I'd heard. But oh! such good ideas. I'll just have to do, FOUR DAYS WORTH OF WRITING, tomorrow. Or like spread it out, and not melt down and BSOD like I did on day one after spending into the wee hours of the morning finishing off my Halloween story.

So, anyway, the "not like a homosexual fairy" part of Miracle's backstory sucks and is unfunny, and I'd meant to delete before posting it but posted everything up anyway even the crappy stuff because hey that's a place to start; but going back today and trying to fit in what I know of how Unwin's powers would fit into that, didn't work with how it's written? (and I know I can always change that, but it feels like the feeling of  isolation and unreality being part of Miracle's character would fundamentally go away, if it was Unwin strictly that allowed him to realize he had a hidden past life, and so I have to keep it, that he just happens to start remembering that his childhood wasn't real, himself.) Revisiting the paragraph, instead of deleting that crappy unfunny "fairy" line, I just sort of crossed it out like this (I guess because, it had already been counted as part of my word count, so I couldn't delete it?) 

But that made that stupid line, suddenly and out of nowhere, side-splittingly hilarious again?! I don't know what it is. Maybe the acknowledgement that is is unfunny, making it funny, or something; but, oh, man.

It's like, redacting confidential information out of a document, as part of this text for some reason. (In the ~published version~, they'd just have the type set so that the strikethrough is extra thick, so that you get the "redaction" gist but still have the text be legible. And in the audiobook version... they'd, figure something out, I guess.)

This is great. Offers up so many horizons on how to get the humor that I'd been meaning to add into this draft. Most of my attempted humor is kinda dumb, and my humor in general doesn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of it, but now, it doesn't have to, and that makes it even funnier! I think at least.

Also, on the subject of Unwin's powers is it possible for "gifters" or whatever (must look up to see if there's a word for such a concept already) to bestow their boon on someone, but stow its accompanying bane and shoulder that themselves? Seeing how the story possibilities this idea opens up are aitch'a interesting, I'm gonna say, yes!

Anyway "Spirits" by Strumbellas!

Also that album art is just FAB.

Wordcount Paradoxes

If I'm feeling inspired, I can churn out a little over 1,000 words a minute. Hour! I meant hour. Though how amazing would that be. Aiming for 50,000 words, that's 50 hours. One hour forty-five minutes a day on average, I can tell without doing the math, just from the knowledge that it's 1,667 words a day and 1,000 words is one hour (I mean, alright, there is some math involved technically, but it's basic conversion.) "Feeling inspired" is relative, because the most inspiring thing for writing is, writing, and churning up all these ideas too many to write at once. That sounds like a bad stressful thing, but it's not. It's the opposite. That's the best part.

Writing is stressful, but not the act itself; the idea of not doing it, and just feeling unproductive because I'm not doing it, and trying to fill that anxiety gap with things that aren't writing, which doesn't work and only makes me feel more anxious. Buckling down is 100% the hardest part, which is surprising because it'd seem like the easiest part, right?, but it's not.

What helps in writing is just turning the screen off, so there's no distractions and I'm forced to focus on what to write next instead of what I've already written. And no visual clutter, like, oh, look at that tab, time to goof of on the internet now! Though of course research has its time and place as well (turns out having magic wards embedded into walls like I had is a real thing that people did, man am I going to look like a friggin' genius, but no that's like a total coincidence) (like horse skulls and dried-up cats and shoes and jars of piss and things.)

I'm 3,333 words behind though, even with Funny House technically counting for NaNoWriMo. I have done a couple hundred words in notes and stuff, and filling in some small gaps from the original draft, but that's not really much. I got a great way into cracking Unwin's character today though, so I think I'll do his POVs tomorrow.

I Mean, I'm *Pretty* Sure *Cats* is Going to be Animated...

It's the Web Censor profanity filter! Also censoring out the word "queer," the word "porn," and the second half of the phrase "Moby Dick" (though it's up in the air whether I blame them for that one.) And it seems oddly selective, even random, over when it's going to censor words or not (it doesn't in Incognito mode, so...*) My sister logged onto the Chrome for some reason, and it imported her plugins and favorites tabs. That's got to be it, mystery solved.

So I want to talk about all the animated films that are slated to come out next year, anyway. Well, not all of them, but you know. Like, I'm not counting the "live action" Disney CGI remakes or anything, but, heck in no particular order:

There's going to be a Playmobil movie, and an UglyDolls movie, and I'd be a lot more excited for those if the Trolls movie and the Smurfs The Lost Village movie hadn't been so whelming. (UglyDolls is being helmed by  Kelly Asbury, the Smurfs The Lost Village guy, which to be fair I prefer of the two; Playmobil: The Movie is written and directed by WDAS's Lino DiSalvo, head of Frozen's animation department.)

Minecraft film. Detective Pikachu movie. Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Angry Birds 2.

Secret Life of Pets 2.

Lego Movie 2.

Frozen 2; Toy Story 4.

Emoji Movie 2.

no just messing with you, there's no second Emoji Movie coming out

or is there

no there's not

but there is a Wonder Park coming out, not to be confused with this year's live-action theme-park-based "comedy" Action Point. (zing!, Johnny Knoxville! oh wait that's right you make more money than I ever will; I'm sorry!)

The Addams Family! Yaaaay

You know how WAG came out with Smallfoot this year?, of course you do, because ZENDAYA IS MEECHEE

but Laika is coming out with "Missing Link" and Universal is coming out with "Abominable." Which I don't know anything about other than the title, but a lot of people are going to be sorely disappointed (me. I'm going to be sorely disappointed) if it isn't yet another sasquatch film. (I guess it's just an idea whose time has come.)

I just looked it up, it's totally going to be another sasquatch film. So.

Chris "Lilo & Stitch" Sanders is coming out with an animated Call of the Wild movie. Londonheads, be on the lookout, and rejoice with me!

CATS DECEMBER 20 2019 MARK YOUR CALENDARS NOW SO EXCITED GUISE

And of course, there's a couple films whose trailers are already out. Spies in Disguise, and

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON THE HIDDEN WORLD FEBRUARY 22 2019 MARK YOUR CALENDARS NOW SO EXCITED GUISE

You Got the Wrong Heinrich Hoffmann, Man, the Wrong Heinrich Hoffmann!

Alright, so there were three guys named Heinrich Hof(f)mann? At least. At least three guys. We all know the wonderful painter guy, spelled with one "f," but there was also running around, around the same time, a Heinrich Hoffmann who wrote disturbing children's stories where the Scissorman comes and cuts off your thumbs when you suck them.

And then a few decades on, a different Heinrich Hoffmann was the personal photographer to Hitler. What a doof. (Have you seen Hitler posing for a camera trying to look cool? Total doofus.)

It's best not to confuse any of these three people.

Also, looking up THE OTHER Heinrich Hoffmanns or Heinrich Hofmanns of the world...!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hoffmann

There was a Heinrich Hofmann who was one of the most famous and successful German composers of his time, and now nobody's heard of him except for you!

Right/Left Hemisphere Hemisphere

I need to look into the left brain/right brain dichotomy thing, with left brained people focusing more on logic and bein' all right handed, and right-brained people focusing all on creativities and bein' all left-handed, because last time I checked, that was complete bunkum, but there are still parts about the theory that make sense, and I need to do a deep dive into it? Also, it being NaNoWriMo, haha, I need to do a deeper dive into a lot of stuff, a lot of the snags in last year's NaNoWriMo being research-based, and plus I want to get more creative with that overall anyway (jokes! with the second draft, I need to somehow add, jokes!, make it funny more consistently.)

But anyway I bring the left brain/right brain thing up because today I discovered a book from 20 years ago, 1998 (also from 20 years ago: And Now This, this one-off puppet show that aired on Nick and was intended to spin-off into its own series but which was quickly and quietly forgotten once it turned out to be nightmare-inducing levels of horrifying, forgotten that is until a brave group of adults who had been scarred by the pilot as children banded together online and scoured the internet dredging up as much information on it as possible. It's real!)

The book is called, like, Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World, specifically about ADD/ADHD kids, and this is from two decades ago remember so the science is probably totally outdated and not just the right brain/left brain thing, but like how they (ADD kids) do poorly in school because teachers think too inflexibly, in words, when ADD kids think in pictures, and hyper act and get distracted because they tend to get overwhelmed by stimulus, and underperform even though they can actually be quite bright the tests just don't work for their way of thinking, and, if I sound like I'm describing autists instead of ADD, ers, that's precisely it, and why I found the idea of the book so fascinating.

The author of the book presented neurotypical and neuroatypical thinking along a spectrum from right brain to left brain: teachers tended to be more left-brained, with extreme left-brainediness represented by schizophrenia and stuff; ADD/ADHD is more on the right hemisphere of the brain, with autism representing the extreme right of the hemisphere, just past ADD. I'd never heard or seen this model before, so it could be just some weird niche thing, but Temple Grandin herself gave a nice blurb on the back of the book, so...

Yeah, going to have to look into it more. If this is true, it explains so much. If it's not, it's going to require a lot of explanation.

Also, the word "phat" has been around a lot longer than I'd thought it had.

Extended Edition Over at A Real Thing, Check It Out

So I don't have much time to write since I spent all my writing time this evening expanding The Funny House for NaNoWriMo, all the things that I thought didn't make much sense about the original story corrected, not really subtracting anything but adding a few scenes. I'm not that bad at action scenes, actually; I can write those this month finally...

The short story mentions SpongeBob though and that didn't come out until '99 and Anachronominion, time travelly as it may be, is still set in '92, so IDK.

Five Star!

It is the funniest ***** thing. Going through the Doc of the first draft, and I'm actually kind of excited for NaNoWriMo because it's reminding me why I loved the story and characters in the first place, but checking all the parts that I need to fill in and shifting them over to a fresh Doc, I noticed something. I'm not sure if it's Docs that's doing it, or a plug-in on this computer, or what, but checking Docs from my laptop, (which is working now!! but in order to do it I had to pry off the keyboard so until I screw it back on (if I screw it back on) I have to borrow an external keyboard from another computer, so there's that) it's fine an' it doesn't do this, so,  that's funny, and it's just in Docs too so it could be a that-Chrome-Docs-specific thing, but anyway I'm rambling now I really don't know what...

But it's censoring out all the naughty words in my first draft of Anachronominion, but it's mostly just catching non-naughty words?

Like, the phrase "cum grano salis," Latin for "with a grain of salt," was replaced by "***** grano salis." Because the Latin word for "with" also means, something else, in English... (Hm, speaking of, I should have a scene in the Funny Home puppet show where they drop gunge down onto people, perhaps when they say the SECRET WORD OF THE DAY; it's just so perfect why don't I have that yet am I allowed to add onto the story past its publication date?!)

It bleeps out the work "jerking," as well, because that word could be naughty if you use it right. So that's hm.

But the funniest one would have to be the mention of, the Mary Poppins actor (Quintupleasterisk) Van (Quintupleasterisk).

Anyway I just want to make Funny House TTDECBA canon now, can I do that?, that way the 4k+ words I wrote for it technically count toward NaNoWriMo.

Art Observations On What I'm Good At Or Not (Inktober and Nanowrimo, but also can be applied generally!)

Writing that took a lot out of me. Urgh. It was, like, two and a half days of wordcount for NaNoWriMo,  completed in one day, completed at the expense of my Instagram post for the day. With the lingering effects of such a stiff writing session at the expense of my NaNoWriMo and my Instagram for today as well. I mean, there's still time left in the day, if I want to write some more and implode. And it also went in a different direction from what I'd anticipated?, for some reason my writing always manages to sneak in weird trivia facts and pop culture references into itself, which (if all goes well) turn out to have some weird symbolic connection to the themes and events of the story. May as well lean into that, I guess. Treat it as a strength of mine, build things around that. I guess I'm in the mood for some, maybe, "Finn Moone explores his feelings for pages and pages;" that wouldn't be that bad.

Also today, not part of Inktober but just drawing, for funsies, it's really good appealing stuff and it's like, why couldn't I pull that out for Inktober? I think it's because, well a) because I'm not very good at linework and inking is LITERALLY 100% LINEWORK that is except for the parts of it that are about value work, which I'm "eh" at, but b) or maybe c) because the value thing was b), I tried too hard, and maybe if I'd just worked in my own style or whatever (a style that doesn't go so hot with inking or something?,) that would have been "more authentic."

But they really were right, my characters do have an appeal to them, and I need to capitalize on that rather than try to draw in whatever style I may be technically proficient in but unimaginative.