Scary Trousers Pep Talk

I have written 10,362 words for January! If I put the exclamation mark there, then it helps me look at it more optimistically. And really I think I've come to accept my limitations for the most part. At least it's not (yet) as bad as last semester.

I had a "banging my head against the wall" writing moment. I never like to admit to writer's block but this was either it or just as bad. But my sister talked me through it and managed to convince me that I hadn't just wasted the last twelve years of my life. Yeah. If I don't finish this book or it's no good that will pretty much make all of that wasted time. You might say, of course not, it was valuable practice. Or, everyone's got to start somewhere. But we all know the truth. I need to finish this book (to my satisfaction seeing as simply finishing it before wasn't enough) in order to validate my existence.

But no pressure.

Still I'm lucky to have a loving and supportive sister.

I'm also lucky to exist at the same time as the Rock God of Fantasy, Neil Gaiman. My Mom says he's old enough to be my Dad. I say I don't care. Unfortunately, it does kinda matter that he has a wife and kids... But, oh well. Despite how very good-looking he is I felt funny about putting up a real picture of him. Like, stalker-funny. Which isn't funny at all but exactly the opposite. It's weird because I don't feel the same about pictures of other celebrities. Maybe it's a hot married author thing. Anyway, I have settled for the cartoon of Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman. For back-story on that check out the video below:





Some of you may say a video's the same as a photo but for some reason, to my inner stalker sensor, it is not.

Anyway, I also read Neil Gaiman's blog and his January 28th entry had a link to a pep talk he had written to National Novel Writing Month authors (and found currently useful for using on himself.) I highly recommend the blog entry and the pep talk to anyone who ever has or is ever interested in writing a novel (or who maybe just wants to see what happens to authors around the middle of a book and why so many go crazy).


Friends of the Week: Becky an Dejah (a.k.a anonymous SI friend)

Pandora's Prince

Interesting Book Fact: While going through the collection of Large Print books I maintain I saw the hardcover large print version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and it is both smaller and lighter than the normal print version. Wrap your brain around that.

And now that your brain has exploded I'll say that the book appears to have no margins.

And Pandora...?

I am admittedly suspicious of new things. It took me a long time to start using those new fangled mechanical pencils. So when Tim suggested that I listen to an online radio called Pandora that adjusts to your musical tastes it sounded like too much work. But YouTube, where I keep my music playlist, went down for the upteenth time last night and I didn't want to listen to the classical music radio I normally do so I gave Pandora a shot. And it is awesome. I recommend it to everyone else. The only thing that bothered me and I wasn't sure if it was even supposed to happen was that some of the songs would stop abruptly in the middle and it would switch to the next one. But that wasn't too often and there are no commercials which is a definite plus. I thought it would be too much trouble to put in my info but if you're as lazy as me, you can pretty much just write in one artist or song you like and it plays a whole bunch of different songs like that without you doing anything. If you wanted you could click a little button to say whether you liked the song or not and that tailors them even closer to your taste but you don't have to do that.


So yeah, the title of this blog post is cooller than the actual post but still vaguely related as you see...

Another Review

I've done another review on the Ann Arbor Library website. This one's of the Sabriel audiobook.

Friend of the Week: Tim (I could hang up if I wanted to.)

Mom of the Week: Mom

My Milk Assures me that it's Real

I found this logo on my milk carton. Good to know.

Today I Quit Not Being a Quitter

(completely random pic of Wonder Woman from this site)

I've never dropped a class in my life but today on the first day of class, while the professor was describing the course, I realized it was not for me. The professor also said we could walk out at anytime if we felt we were just wasting our time. One guy took her up on her word 45 minutes after the start of the 3 hour class. I followed him 15 minutes later. I went straight to the student lounge's computers and dropped that course and signed up for another one. There were actually computers in the class I decided not to take but it seemed in poor taste to use these to drop the class. Anyway, the little part of me that was terrified and appalled by quitting the first class of my life was sufficiently quashed by the part that really did not want to take that course. To be entirely fair, I didn't really research it sufficiently. Having been blocked out of two classes and having one of my alternates also not work I was scrambling to take 12 credits. Hopefully the class I signed up to replace it is better. It at least sounds more relevant to what I want to do and comes as highly recommended to the LIS program. This one was pretty random.

Sadly this also means that I will not be able to do the storytimes I committed to at work but I did not have a lot of other options. I hope I will be able to work something out in that respect or do storytimes next semester.

Oh, and if you're interested, I did a review of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman here.

Best of 2007

I thought it would be a nice indulgence to squander my free time on a movie that I had never seen, but sadly I did not end up liking the movie (In Pursuit of Happyness). I did not even hate it enough to take pleasure in tearing it apart in a review. It was simply one of those movies where I get to a certain point and know I'm going to be underwhelmed but I'm the kind of person who has to finish unless I really hate it.

Anyway, that's completely off-topic but it's the reason for this post since I actually do like writing in my blog. I spent the crucial moment of New Years in an airport this year. My New Years are never spectacular but this one takes the cake for depressing. Top that off with the fact that I was returning to grad school from visiting my mom and sister who I'd far rather be with right now.

But this is all about good things that happened in 2007 so here goes...

Best Movie to Come out in Theatres: Stardust. Easiest question ever.











Best Made for TV movie: Northanger Abbey. (J.J. Feild=Squee) Although, I should note here that my 2006 New Year post lists A Good Woman as the best movie of 2006. And it may have been for the theatres (in the US anyway, it came out earlier in a bunch of other countries) but for (British TV) the best movie of 2006 was easily the Hogfather and my sister and I quite enjoyed watching it this Christmas (now that they've finally given Americans a shot at buying it).


Best Book: Well...if I went by books I'd read in 2007 that would be difficult as I have 37 books in my booklog (10 of which are audiobooks and one of which is just me rereading Northanger Abbey.) But if we go by best book published in 2007 then I'd go for Making Money. Yes, I know the last Harry Potter book came out this year and that was pretty awesome, but Making Money is still better written in my opinion. You can read my mini-review on the Ann Arbor library website here: http://www.aadl.org/node/9540

Best Writing: Okay, well, I can't speak for the content, it could be Shakespeare or it could be average fantasy novel. My personal opinion changes depending on my mood. But I can say that the bulk of my final (I really mean it this time) draft (let's face it, it's a draft when you rewrite 90% of it) was written in 2007 which means that I wrote 103,281 words in 2007, and if anyone's curious that is already the length of a healthy novel, and I would have a book by now if I didn't have a disease that prevents me from writing anything remotely short. The total word count is 109,152 words (I didn't write much in 2006 having started in November). But I refuse to make it as long as the last one! I have also changed the title of my story. I like the new title but fear it doesn't fit as well as I would like.

This is more of a major event than a "Best" but I graduated from undergrad in 2007 though it seems like it was so long ago already. I will not post a picture though because I do not look nearly as thrilled as I should have been.

Well, there you have it. I hope you've all had a great 2007!