• On Life and Love

    Your resident nerdy girl

    Saturday night, Dre (Andrea) hosted up a nice sex toy company-sponsored party that I attended. Hilariously enough, I think I was the most knowledgeable there, although it was my first time seeing certain kinds of vibrators in person (ones with rotating beads and swiveling heads). I disapproved of some of the products being sold–muscle relaxants, vaginal tighteners, and desensitizers–but out of safety concerns. The rest of the stuff was pretty cool. Anyway, the party was a blast; Dre seemed worried at the small turnout, but I thought it was great, and her sister was a trip. There was that moment, though… that moment where someone was telling a story or…

  • On Life and Love

    NaNo-ness

    NaNoWriMo is done. I didn’t get 50k words, but I learned a hell of a lot about writing. I’m continuing the story for NaNoFiMo. My biggest problem was not having a plan at all when I started. I dreamt up characters, kept sparse notes, and plugged away… for about 22k words. As I approached the climax of the story (too soon, at that!), I was having to devote too much mental energy to figuring out what would happen when I wanted to be devoting energy to skillfully delivering that climax. Um… that crisis, I mean. Yeah. To make things worse, there isn’t really a good subplot to add complexity and…

  • On Life and Love

    LyX

    I moved my story from MS Word to LyX (after moving from Google Docs to MS Word two nights ago after hours of flaky Internet), and my word count increased by 4%-ish. That’s worrying, because I can’t find what’s making it increase. In fact, it seems to be counting fewer things as words than Word did. LyX is rather hot. The PDF output of my story (in the “book” document class) is hot. It looks like a book. 🙂 Plus, near-plain text is sexy, and there are fewer things for me to distract myself with in LyX. Fewer buttons and animated things. If I need a distraction, though, there are…

  • On Life and Love

    Oh, dear.

    I just realized that I totally screwed myself over when my characters start interacting with my aliens in my story. I’ve made the aliens so different that writing dialogue is going to slow down my story progress to a crawl. Oi. (I just couldn’t resist the idea of aliens with a real sense of time, far beyond humans’ usual linear sense of it. Too bad that fucks up sentence tenses royally.) 4000 more words to go for this evening!

  • On Life and Love

    5000 words since waking

    Oy. If I can keep this up for eight more days, I’ll win NaNoWriMo in time for classes to resume. Lessons learned today: Having two female protagonists in a lot of scenes together results in a problem: you can’t use pronouns as freely as you would otherwise. “She watched her…” just doesn’t work very well. Growl. It’s hard to know when to leave out a scene and how to properly make sure the important information gets known to the reader later. There’s a tendency to want to write out every little scene for word count purposes, but that just slows the plot down to a crawl. Microsoft Word’s Autosummarize feature…