So this seems a good year to do NaNoWriMo, what with the currently unemployed, particularly since NaNo is a good way to get myself writing when I'm not writing enough, which I'm not. Only thing is, I've been fairly busy recently, and it's four days until November and I don't know what I want tow write for NaNo. vorindi suggests that I work on the Ridiculous project we've been neglecting, but that doesn't feel sufficiently flexible or frivolous to suit my current mood. I have a couple of half-started scribbles, but for various reasons don't feel like working on any of them.

So I'm asking you, if you're still there: what should I write this November? I'll take suggestions of plot, genre, conflict, setting, character(s), general idea, situations, that weird dream you had about the rescue nuns, striking images (I've never worked from images, but I'm told that people do), whatever you've got. I think I'm feeling more silly than serious, though I'll take serious suggestions, too, and I won't write anything I have to research too heavily, because research and nano-style are kind of antithetical.

Even if you don't have ideas, you could just wander in and say hi, so that I know that there are people still reading here, and that I'm not just tossing words into the wind when I post here.

I have a very important question:

Suppose you're a teenage-equivalent alien stuck on Earth because your parents work here, and you're upset that you're stuck on a dirtpit of a planet with bad reception, no social life to speak of, and a bunch of confused ape-descendants who haven't even figured out the basics of interplanetary travel. If you were looking to American popular culture for What Aliens Do, what conclusions would you reach? (Bonus points for things within your budget and available technology level.)

So far we have: make crop circles, disrupt utility networks, and cause general low-level mayhem.

I'm done with NaNo. I could hypothetically have been done with NaNo two days ago, but then I wrote ridiculous and delivered soup and worked co-oping hours and dragged home the carcass of a large fish and cooked it, and made steak for supper (First time I'd ever cooked steak. At least, cooked steak as steak, and not chopped up in little pieces in something else. And it was pretty good. Better than I usually like steak. Awesome mushroom gravy maybe helped.), and what with one thing and another did not get around two writing those last 2004 words until today.

Hurrah.

On to Story Five!

And this problem is that my library hours have gotten too popular.

My library hours are Order of the Phoenix - writing club. I've always intended them to be a quiet space for people to do writing or academic work. For the past two weeks there have been lots of people and lots of noise and I've gotten very little work done. I don't work particularly well when there's lots of stuff going on, and I don't think that most of the other people present are getting much work done, either.

I don't want to be a tyrant and enforce silence in my library hours, or say that everyone has to be writing, but the fact is that my library hours have gotten so exuberant that they don't really accomplish their original purpose any more. I don't have so many hours in my week that I can spend two of them feeling frustrated because I didn't accomplish the things that I wanted to get done.

Probably the long-term solution is to not have evening library hours, but this is literally the only time I reliably have free this semester, so I can't exactly change them.

Suggestions?

4 3/4 pages in 2 1/4 hours; not bad. And I got my laundry done.

Now I just need to do my math homework and my PRAXIS application and send more ConBust e-mails, and write that research paper that I've been procrastinating on - and then I'll be properly on top of things. (Not that I'm badly not on top of things - this paper isn't due until Friday - but PRAXIS and that other paper are the sort of long-term deadlines that creep steadily closer . . .)

However, I think that this was a good evening's work, and that it is time for sleep now.

So, La virgen de los sicarios (aka death-crumpets movie, and the English title is apparently Our Lady of the Assasins) was just as depressing and DISTURBING as expected, if not more so (the dream sequence was MUCH freakier in the movie, and I'm not sure if this is because it was freakier in the movie, or if I just missed how freaky it was in the book). It may well have been more so, particularly if you consider that the first of the teenage boy hitmen bore a strong resemblence to my brother, and certainly wasn't any older (in fact, he reminded me not of my brother now, but of my brother a few years ago when I was more familiar with his appearance, so he may well have been younger).
I did notice, though, that I didn't feel like the protagonist was being nearly as CREEPY-child-stalker as the guy in the other book/movie, even though this one was older and it was quite obviously a sexual relationship. (Possibly because the terms of the relationship were much clearer, somehow. But probably just because there were no children in this book. There were cynical old men in the bodies of boys who never lived to see twenty.)

And that paper that I've been putting off for the past four days and has been an annoying feature on my List of Things To Do? That paper?
I wrote it in half an hour this morning. I still need to proofread it and write a few sentences to conclude it, but that won't take more than 15 minutes. There is something to be said for writing before breakfast.

Speaking of writing, have a wordcount:

41,872 / 50,000 (83.7%)

Today has been a cut thrice sort of day. Luckily I was working with small pieces of cloth and paper in bookbinding, so I didn't ruin any giant sheets. But after I miscut my fifth piece this morning, I decided that it might be a good idea to leave this project until next class . . .
But in good news, I may have finished my first book. I'm not sure, sure, but it looks like a book to me. Mind you, it's the quick-and-easy kind of binding that I don't like so much, but I think that I'll be finishing the three that have been properly sewed pretty soon, too.

Last night I had an interesting discussion with Pepi. There was a movie about an Amish woman on tv, and so we started talking about the Amish. Over the course of the conversation, we covered:
-Amish as related to Mennonites
-Amish as closed religious community (living simply/worldliness, rumsprika and shunning, Pennsylvania Dutch, genetic problems and exchanges for young people)
-Mennonites \neq Amish
-My opinions on Amish life
-The greater Mennonite Church and GMC
-religious rules and norms in GMC, Lancaster County, and the wider Mennonite/Brethren in Christ community.
-free love (I think that we also touched upon the fact that Pepi does not consider sex to be The Original Sin, but the conversation was galloping rapidly and I we never got back to that point to clarify it)
-sex outside of marriage, my opinions thereon
-single parents
-my love life to date
-divorce
-the nature of homosexuality and homosexuals in the church
-gay marriage
-lesbian couples in Lancaster County, general lack thereof
-homosexual couples adopting and/or having babies, or adopting children of adolescents.
-the nature of family

We were managing pretty well until the last two. At that point, I think we encountered a fundamental rift in our understanding of what constitutes family. Pepi was worried about children being confused about parental roles, and I think that for her, a family is a mom, a dad, and some kids. Or possibly a single parent and some kids, if it's necessary. And I didn't know what to say to that.

Since I've already discussed differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, politics, war, abortion, bullfighting, and religious freedom in schools with Ana and/or Pepi, if I cover why I am a pacifist, LGBTQ people in church leadership, and transgenderness (what do you mean that's not a word? It should be), then I'll have covered something close to all of the Big Questions.


And completely unrelated, I have a wordcount!

11,701 / 50,000 (23.4%)

Also, there's now a commercial with the tagline, "llega el invierno" - winter is coming. It amuses me.

You know the kind - the ones where you choose k characters and then look at the questions. In this case, k=10.

vorindi wrote the questions.

( characters and questions behind cut )

If you ask nicely and tell me how many characters you want it for, I might write you a list of questions.