The Marci Rating System

It is currently very rainy and windy out -- not too inspiring for having a joyful and movement-filled day off from work. But! Still lots of things to look forward to today!

*mmm good lunch and dinner options that I prepped* yesterday, and just overall having plenty of food available (*hahaha by 'prepped' I mean 'I microwaved one thing and split it into two dishes, and then I cooked a frozen pizza and cut it up into slices, and now everything is in the fridge ready to eat')

*mmm coffee

*the storm started as snow, but it looks like the rain is going to take care of any need to shovel or clear cars, yay!

*mmm coffee

*games! (wordle)

My plans for the day:

*Thanksgiving morning 5K -- it's not currently raining or below zero (both things which have been true in other years!), which automatically bumps this year's 5K out of the running for 'worst choice ever.' Thanks, nature!

*Sit with the cat -- Not a big Thanksgiving celebrator, she feels Quite Put Out anytime I shirk my 'sit in the desk chair and work on the computer' time (aka take time off from work). Looking forward to some quiet patting time mid-day instead.

*Family dinner -- aww yeah, family time AND maple roasted sweet potatoes! NICE.

*Writing????? -- I know, it seems unlikely to me too, and I have absolutely given myself permission to do no writing at all today. Which means everything I do write is a nice bonus!

*Be thankful -- so many things to be grateful for and about! It's the seasonally appropriate thing to do!

*I had to check the date to see what day it is, and then double-checked, because really? 20 days? It feels simultaneously like nanowrimo just started, and also like it's been going on forever, which is pretty much how time is these days.

*I can usually gauge my level of nanowrimo struggle by how many words I consider a set. (I like task switching, so I often use the 'do one thing, write some words, do one thing, write some words' strategy.) At the start of the month it was 200 words, then 100, and now I'm down to 50. Some years I've gotten as low as 10 words, so 50 is pretty good for day 20!

*I used to write in a straight line (finish one chapter / scene / section before going on to the next), and then one year I started writing the beginning of the next chapter while I was still finishing the end of the previous one and it was great. Right now I'm working on four different chapters at once and that is also great.

*This morning I woke up and thought 'day 8, I must be about 25% of the way through!' And then my brain got hilariously jumbled up because 12,000 words x 4 is Too Small to be 50,000, but 8 days x 4 is Too Big to be a month, which is why I should not try to do math at 5:00 in the morning.

*I finally finished the prologue yesterday! (The prologue is not 12,000 words long.) I like to work on multiple sections of the story at once, especially during nanowrimo, because I'm a big fan of the 'write whatever you feel like writing' approach.

*I write in gdocs, which as a program tends to get a little squirrelly once files get over a certain word count. I like stopping around the 10,000 word point and starting a new file (so that the 50,000 words gets divided over five somewhat even files; I don't know, I like them to match). It's great because once I start the second file, I never have to open the first one again, and it keeps me from stressing about whatever that mess was.

*It also leads to me forgetting things that happened in earlier files, but that's a different problem.

*In this story I've already been extremely inconsistent about what things I capitalize and what I don't. I am largely unconcerned with this.

*You know what I am concerned with? Characters who were given titles but not names. Come on, show! Don't make me have to go check the online wiki!

Okay, this isn't about work, but that's fine, it's still Wednesday-related. SO! I get the NYT morning email, or whatever it's called, which started as a way to get a quick news summary and not have to actually visit a news site during the darkest days of 2020, but which I've continued to receive through a combination of laziness and a true enjoyment of the Spelling Bee puzzle.

(It's like anagrams, except you can use letters more than once? Which, I can say from experience, makes it significantly harder to cheat by asking the internet for help.)

ANYWAY. The puzzles generally seem to get harder as the week goes on, so I was Quite Miffed by the enormous struggle I was having with yesterday's. And then I woke up at some point last night and was all, 'it's EXACTABLE, I've cracked it, well done me!' Except then when I woke up for real this morning I was like, 'exactable isn't even a word, come on!'

But apparently IT IS! Per the NYT this morning: "The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was exactable."

(The internet remains vague about the meaning or usage of such a word. I mostly found a lot of 'it's an adjective,' and 'see: exact.')

Writing has been an excellent mental sidestep from ::gestures wildly:: everything else happening this month. My official-unofficial campnowrimo update:

*100 words per day: check!

So far I'm up to episode 22 (out of 40), so I've almost kept up with one episode per day. The great thing about the show is that the plot is relatively slow,* but a lot happens in each episode, so there's plenty of wiggle room to write things that MIGHT have happened in between scenes.

(*The plot also doesn't really make sense? Nothing ever really gets explained, and the timeline is exceptionally vague. Which is fine! Very helpful, actually, when you want to write the happiest possible interpretation of events.)

The days just keep coming, huh? Twenty days down, ten days to go.

My notes for this section include the following:

*someone gets mad about a trivia answer being wrong

*fighting monsters from a volcano

*coaching youth basketball

My first instinct was to say 'what even is that,' but you know what? Actually, that's pretty much exactly my style: many words spent on plotless bickering; random action; domestic fluff -- that's a marcicat nanowrimo novel, right there.

*I have now inched over the 10,000 word mark, which feels like a victory. Now I just need to do that ::checks official rules:: four more times! ::nervous laughter::

*My notes for each section get less coherent (and less numerous) as they progress, but this one at least included something that made me laugh: 'it's a comb that's a knife - these kids would love switchblades'

(*I stand by that note! #TRUTH)

*I've been using chapter titles to indulge in my enjoyment of writing down whatever random string of words pops into my head. (I never actually read chapter titles, so this seems fine to me. Do other people read chapter titles and expect them to make sense?)

(*Sort of like my novel notes, the bullet points have gotten less coherent as they've progressed. But I needed five, for five sets of ten thousand!)

Me: I'm *definitely* going to work on writing during my downtime at work this week!

Also Me: ::downloads 500,000 words of fanfic to email to myself::

Me: What could possibly go wrong or distract me???

Procrastinated all day about posting my December writing, only to realize I'd *already* posted it to dreamwidth; it was just in private entries. Way to go, past me!

I was inspired by starandrea's yuletide letter, even though I couldn't quite make the leap to figuring out Actual Yuletide. But it's like -- two cakes, right?

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starting from zero, got nothing to lose (Power Rangers in Space)

(Missing scene from ‘Countdown to Destruction,’ during the team’s time on KO-35. As they learn more about the effects of Zordon’s final gift, Karone and Cassie make new plans to find old friends.)

on dreamwidth
on AO3

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For I have loved the stars too fondly (Guardian)

(Planning an anniversary requires careful forethought and a dash of luck. Or possibly just very helpful friends.)

on dreamwidth
on AO3