Survivor Series picks

Just over an hour to go before the WWE's fall classic. So here goes with my picks for Survivor Series:

• Undertaker vs. Big Show: I find Undertaker's impressive display this last Friday worrisome, since that is usually the prerogative of the PPV loser. I really can't imagine Big Show coming out on top. Then again, Undertaker has been working on nagging injuries and casket matches are usually how he gets dispatched into semi-retirement/injury leave. My heart is still with the deadman, though.
  

• Hardy vs. HHH vs. Kozlov: Hardy came out on top on Friday, and rumor has it the whole "found unconscious in a stairwell" is a work (maybe to bring back Edge?), so either way, now is not yet his time. I can't imagine Kozlov as champ, so HHH pulls it out.
  

• Team Batista vs. team Orton: These are tough to call. There are so many possible combinations. It would be neat to see a one-on-one final between Batista and Orton, but unlikely. It would be nice to see CM Punk outlast everybody. There could be massive infighting within the Orton team. It could be a one way massacre. Bottom line, though, this may serve to begin building momentum for Orton.

• Team HBK vs. team JBL: I hate JBL. HBK has been his old funny DX self, which is always enjoyable, but Jericho was the stronger member of their feud, in my eyes. Khali is useless. Cryme Tyme? *yawn*. I'm quite fond of the rest of the heel team, however. They could pull off the upset.

• Diva team Raw vs. team Smackdown: Let's line them up. Beth is tops, bar none. Each side has two solid wrestlers - Beth and Mickie on one side, Natalya and Victoria on the other. Which leaves Maryse, Maria and McCool vs. Jillian, Kelly Kelly and Candice. Maria is most useless, Maryse may be most improved with Kelly Kelly, so call that a wash, Candice and McCool are both overrated. I'll go with team Raw, just for the sake of better unity.

• Jericho vs. Cena: Back in the good old days, the triumphant return of the former champion would have guaranteed a victory in a cakewalk. Here's to hoping Vince is keeping up with the times, and Cena's road back won't be quite so simple. Then again, would they really have invested all that money in make-your-mother-cry promos just to have Jericho retain? Sadly, I think not. Cena wins.
  

Vista voice recognition

I have just bought a headset and I have been fiddling around with the voice recognition software that comes packaged with Vista. The results are , well , mixed at best . Just look at what it does To punctuation for example , like in the previous sentence . Or that capital T . For what it's worth, it doesn't care one way or the other whether I pronounce it nanoWRImo or nanoREEmo (although everyone knows it should be the former.) But it does yield some choice bits: when I first realized just how slow going this learning curve was going to be, I will admit that I had a few words for my shiny new microphone. The following is what appeared on screen:

Why is it that the machine understands what I’m saying except when I'm trying to write more words and my mother fought king novel.

That interrupted me in mid-rant. Funny as hell but not quite accurate. The bottom line is i need to put this away at least until December because my novel Seven new peace a sheet Is certainly not going to get written within the next century With this thing. Notice that others swear word In the previous sentence?

PS: Please don't judge me by the above disaster. It was dictated to my machine. Random capitalization, spacing and so on are not really my fault. I will take responsibility for swearing at inanimate objects, however.

day 18

And the last week has felt like the second month of a gym membership. That initial oomph has, shall we say, left the building? But I'm plodding on; after the major skid of 0 words over four days last weekend, I've pulled back onto the road and readjusted my targets to complete 50K by the 23, i.e. before Survivor Series starts.

To continue with my gym analogy, I used to use those programmable bikes that had a screen with a computerized "opponent" for you to race. No matter how high I would set it, I would always fight with everything I had to ensure I totally ANNIHILATED its results. Not just keep up with him, not beat him by a nose - no, I had to humiliate the snot out of that pixellated racer. Competitive, moi?

So now I'm out to "beat" NaNo by a whole week. That some people are up to 250K is irrelevant: the target is 30 days, and I need to reach the finish line with plenty of room to spare.

Enough about me. I just wanted to announce that my main character has finally gotten his first GIRLFRIEND. Oooh, kissy, kissy all around...

Next chapter, just over the horizon: her overprotective big brother's gonna find out ;D

day 9

Woot! Weekend target reached...just over 25K, and my main character has finally run away from home. And there I was thinking he'd have left by, oh, chapter 3!

So his childhood took a far greater place on my novel's stage, and here I am, halfway through NaNo, and he's all of 14. But I have a few side plots that got nicely developed, so future plot twists will hopefully make some kind of sense.

So, for the next week, I'm aiming for between 5-10K, depending on the amount of work waiting for me at the office. We'll see how it goes.

day 8-9

Technically, it's day 9, but my word count was updated on day 8. So there.

40% to "winning" NaNoWriMo. I'm gonna try my darnedest to knock another 5K out tonight and tomorrow, so I'll be halfway there by the time the week starts. Yay me!

The next issue raising its ugly head on the horizon is that I sincerely doubt I'll be anywhere near done with my story. Will I stick with it, once the looming threat of NaNo failure has passed? Will I manage to complete my novel? Or will I move on to those other stories that plot bunnies have been whispering to me ever since I started on this crazy adventure. No, seriously - I have a zombie superhero story, an anthropomorphic animal pirate story and a supernatural thriller all floating around my mind. (Yes, I have scribbled down my main ideas so they don't fly back off into the ether...)

Time will tell, but I really am looking forward to seeing my progress bar turn green on the NaNo site. (The one on the right doesn't change colour, I don't think, but the site says it should go from saying "participant" to "winner." Yay!)

day five

I am 37 words away from being 25% done. Wow.

It had improved very, very slightly, but most of it is still utter tripe. And that's OK. Maybe that's why this strange character came along and insisted I write this piece of historical fiction when I had never attempted anything remotely close: to make me hear my own voice. Because that's mainly what's wrong with my novel - it sounds like me, a contemporary woman, rather than the narrator of a piece of historical fiction about a young boy coming of age. Besides, I'm not overly fond of kids, so inventing his childhood has been, well, inconclusive. It would be painful to reread, but that is for another time. If NaNoWriMo teaches me that I can beat the monster that is procrastination into submission, even temporarily, and that I should write what I know, then it will have been a success, even should I choose to delete the file once December 1st comes around. I doubt that I'll do it, but it would be fitting to represent how NaNo is about the experience.

I wrote very little last night, because I was watching So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and constantly flicking to the election coverage on ABC (least nauseating and obviously biased - hell-o, Fox). Two things: if I hadn't posted it before, I've been telling my boyfriend that Nico will take it all. (I was right about the final three on the last season of SYTYCD, right down to the order. Yay Joshua and Twitch!) As for Obama, godspeed, my man, the road ahead is long. But somehow, your presence made my world feel a little safer today.

two days in

...and it's going well. Over 8,000 words in two days, albeit two weekend days after I'd been basically asleep for 48 hours. Nonetheless, I am 16% done with NaNo.

I find that highly worrisome, since starting things is generally not a problem for me. It's what comes next. It's like swimming laps; past the first dive or push off from the wall, I tend to flounder. I wane, I fluster, procrastination seeps in and things fall by the wayside. I have to keep my focus; that, probably much more than any number of words, is my personal challenge in accomplishing NaNoWriMo. (BTW, I even considered adding procrastination as a label for my posts, but that would be giving it too much power; the raging beast will remain anonymous, and I will continue to fight it, sight unseen. Right now, for some odd reason, I've become enthralled with Spider Solitaire. Yeah, I know. Actually, it would probably be Minesweeper but I don't have enough control with the touchpad on my laptop. So Spider Solitaire it is. Nuff said.)

To top it off, I had three puny but nonetheless actual freelance assignments this weekend. Add to that NaNo forums posts and blog entries, and my output has been really significant. Here's to hoping I keep it up.

Still, I'm surprised that it has gotten going with such vigour; I mean, I'm at 8,000 words, and my main character is all of nine years old. Tomorrow's text should cover the event that defines his young life, the turning point for the entire novel's plot. (I knew that plotting out my novel would help propel me forward!) Wish me luck.

migraine dreams

I have just come out of the second-worst migraine of my life. It comes in second only because the first one lasted longer; they came pretty close in intensity (although this one involved more lunch-losing, not that you needed to know.)

I wound up missing two whole days of work, a first for me in my entire career. Never mind focusing on translation, I could barely keep my eyes open; the glare of the monitor was too mych to handle. So on Friday, All Hallows Eve, I slept from 9:00 am to 11:05pm, with only one, um, emergency bathroom break (see above for TMI.) Of course, this was after a more or less regular night's sleep, so at some point I was finding it harder and harder to fall back asleep when I woke up. And at some points I began dreaming, half-awake. Was it because it was Halloween that my dreams were so permeated with the presence of my parents, both of whom are deceased? They say that's the moment when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and judging from my dreams, I would tend to believe that is so.

My mom makes regular appearances, my father much less so, yet he was the one who was prominently featured yesterday. Again, I see flashes and bits and pieces, far more than entire stories, but his presence was clearly distinguishable. Here are the three stories that I remember most:

I remember having our printer at work missing a font. Oddly, printers in that part of the universe had an open top like old-fashioned typewriters, and fonts were something to be installed by hand. Following the careful safety instructions of the engineering department, I inserted a screwdriver into the top of said printer to remove the part that would allow me to add the missing font. I heard a loud zap, and felt everything go white before I was stunned back awake.

I remember walking along some road in Pointe-Claire with my father, on a bright sunny day. At some point, he sat down on the sidewalk, unable to continue. I thought it might be heatstroke, having had it myself before. I asked him whether he preferred I go get the truck (what truck? who knows?), the car, or call an ambulance. He told me to do what I thought was best. So I went off to get the car, which was parked completely on the other side of town, and pretty much getting lost along the way, thus ensuring I'd have the darnedest time finding dad again - in hindsight, picking exactly the least useful of the three options.

I remember standing in the middle of my small town's only (and pitiful) shopping mall, the way it was set up in my teen aged years. Around me, two of my high school nemeses. I began to rant and rave, proclaiming to all who would listen that I had been unfairly treated throughout high school by said two girls, and throwing out all the examples I could remember. They stood in silence, staring at me, somewhere between bemusement and embarassment. (For what it's worth, let me provide a true example: they declared I was unfit to hang out with them, or actually even live, since at the tender age of eleven, I still did not know who Ralph Lauren was. Um, Catholic girls' school in the mid-eighties, anyone? To this day, I think they deserve a bitch-slap for that.)

The mind is such a strange thing. I think the day we figure ourselves out may just be the day we reach god, i.e. not likely to happen, given our stewardship of this earth.

life during NaNoWriMo

First off, I'm going to bid adieu to the Word Count listing I have in the right hand column. Its existence was to spur me on to write 50,000 words ASAP, which wound up taking me well over six months, culminating only one week short of the start of NaNoWriMo. So it has accomplished its mission, but you will no longer see any numbers in brackets at the end of my posts. That much has been accomplished.

So far, I'm off to a fairly strong start, although that is to be expected of myself. My problem will usually appear sometime mid-week of week 2, around the 20,000 mark, when it gets to be a real drag to write nearly 2,000 words on a weeknight - probably on Mondays, when Raw is on. I'll try to build up a solid lead so that I can maneuver around, say, impromptu freelance assignments, but I have a feeling things won't go as smoothly as they are right now. Yeah, I know, it's the first friggin' day and I should calm down. But trust me, I know there a wall out there, a wall of my own building, and I'm gonna hit it head on, most likely sooner than later.

After NaNo, I promise myself to read a good book, perhaps to wash away all the crap I've been producing over the last month (and judging by the first 5,000 words, it will be crap. Believe you me.) And maybe lay off the historical fiction for a good long while, and return to my usual bitching...um, I mean editorializing, of my little corner of the universe. On the other hand, I will be sure to blog out my Survivor Series predictions and reactions. Certain things are unavoidable.

addendum to my last post

It also dawned on me that there are some merchants who donate their walls so that youth empowerment organizations can help youths take pride in their communities and give back by painting murals. We hear about them every summer. I gather they're probably done in graffiti style too. I wonder if those are "mediocre" too, according to Ms. Siebrand.

That's what I hated about attending university in a fine arts program. Beauty is so very much in the eye of the beholder, and yet here we are, debating which kind is better. Can we just agree that the world needs more art? The best will out, not by who proclaims it so, but simply by those who remember it.