Done NaNoWriMo

I have finished my novel. It came in at just over 50,000 words. I thought it would be longer, but it ran out of steam at the end. But it’s done, and I have won NaNoWriMo. Final winning doesn’t happen till November 25th. I’ll check back then and make sure they mark me as done. I’ve attempted this for so long, and now finally I have done it.
I’m pretty happy about it.

I did learn a lot from this attempt. I’m going to wait a few days and then revise it. It needs a lot of attention before I’ll let Anne read it. There are scenes missing, and my naming convention sucks. Most characters didn’t get names. I have to go back and name them all. Some characters changed as the book went along, so their introductions have to be rewritten. Some of the premises changed along the way, so some early chapters need complete rewrites. I’ll do it. It will be worthwhile.

I’ve resurrected all my previous attempts from previous years of NaNoWriMo. Two of them are worthless. Three of them are worth pursuing. The ideas were good, but the execution was crap. I’m going to rework them and finish them. And I have lots of ideas for other novels that came out of this one. This one could even stand to have a sequel. Some things were not resolved. I couldn’t resolve them because I couldn’t think of a sensible way to resolve them, so I left them as mysteries. Yes, a sequel could resolve the mysteries if I can think of something realistic enough.

I am relieved.

My writing style

I was intrigued by that web site I Write Like, so I did it again, and this time I used paragraphs with no dialogue. I got a different result. This is the guy who wrote the book Fight Club. So my dialogue reads like Gertrude Stein, and my end-of-book wind-up descriptions read like Chuck Palahniuk.

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

I am curious about the algorithms used, and how many different writers’ styles are stored.

I tried some other sections of my novel. The dialog continues to read like Gertrude Stein. The non-dialogue reads like Chuck Palahniuk. I would like to point out that I have read nothing of Gertrude Stein, and I have read nothing of Chuck Palahniuk, although I have watched and really enjoyed the film Fight Club.

Nearing the end of NaNoWriMo

Today is the 18th of November. By the end of today, I should have written exactly 30,000 words. Instead, I am at 42,184. I will probably reach 50,000 words tomorrow and win NaNoWriMo. I will not be finished my novel. I have reached a point where the main characters have reached the mystery and it’s time for them to solve it. But I have no idea what the answer will be. I have some heavy thinking to do overnight.

I haven’t written consistently. I have had a few days off here and there as you can see from this NaNoWriMo widget:

but I have written well. I am happy with my novel so far. I am learning some great lessons from the practice. When it’s done, I’ll shelve it for a week or two, then I must revise. More landscape descriptions are needed. My characters need names, and I need a consistent naming scheme. I have it in my head, I just need to apply it. The first introduction of two characters is no longer correct. They changed character as the book developed, so I must go back and rewrite their entrances. I’ve enjoyed this. I’ve gained a lot from it. The story is not worth anything, but it’s a fun first novel. I’ll produce an epub of it so Anne can read it. She will critique it, I will be humiliated and cry and rant a while, then I will throw it away and start the next novel.

Tonight, I came across a website that matches your writing style to famous authors. I entered some of my paragraphs, and it told me I write like Gertrude Stein. All I know of Gertrude Stein is the character from the recent film Midnight In Paris. She was played as a solid woman with a muscular way of speaking, and I admired it. I’m glad I admired it, as it appears I write like her. When NaNoWriMo is over, I will go and read some of her works and see why they say I write like her.

I write like
Gertrude Stein

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Movies in bulk

We’re heading out for a large showing of Skyfall. I really like the new Daniel Craig James Bond. I stopped watching Bond films when Roger Moore was doing them. They turned stupid. Then Daniel Craig came along and revitalised Bond films. He is the best Bond.

Earlier this year, I started posting my movie reviews here, then I gave up. There was a thing on Reddit, about watching 100 films in 365 days. I started to track my movie watching. I started on 23rd July 2012, and today I am at 82 films. That means I watch about 24 movies a month. More if you count the ones I watch but can’t count because I’ve seen them before. That’s a lot of films per month.

But take into consideration that I watch no TV. No news, no sitcoms, no current affairs, no series. No wait, I do watch some TV series, but not at the time they are broadcast and the ones I watch contain no ads. The BitTorrent offerings are really good. So you might watch a lot of TV, but I watch a lot of movies instead. It averages out.

Venetian liver

Yesterday, in between operas, we stopped at Barnes and Noble for coffee. I was shown a cookbook called The Silver Spoon, and it’s a translated Italian cookbook. The thousands of recipes looked good, and they also covered areas that modern cookbooks often don’t cover. I bought it. Tonight I made my first dish from it – Venetian liver. It’s basically regular old liver and onions, with the addition of a cup of wine. I stayed mostly to the recipe, but added bacon to the frying onion in the first phase. The rest was per the recipe. Spectacular. I loved it. Such a simple addition to my basic recipe, plus a fancy name, and it produces a wonderful meal.

Anne would have loved it too, but she got a phone call as she started to eat, and spent the next hour talking on the phone and eating without tasting.

Mondays

I haven’t taken much vacation this year. Hasn’t been anything that came up that I wanted to do. So I get to the start of October and I’ve got 190 hours of vacation. This is apparently a bad position for the company I work for, and I’m not the only person in IT who has a lot of accrued vacation time. It’s something to do with accruing vacation time at one rate and taking it at a higher rate and it’s a liability on the books. We have new rules starting this year. If you have more than 200 hours vacation time at the end of the year, you get truncated to 200 hours. And we can’t sell our vacation time back for cash either. We used to do that in earlier years, but can’t get the cash boost any more. so I decided to burn my vacation time by not working Mondays for the rest of the year. It’s been great. Every weekend is a three-day weekend. I thought how much I could achieve with three days off every weekend. In practice, I achieve nothing. But I love it.

Die Fledermaus

After dinner, we went round to Harrison Opera House for our second opera of the day Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. This was sung in English, and the translation was quite good, with lots of rhyming. It had been treated a little like Gilbert and Sullivan and there was some topicality and modernising introduced. The signers were all good, it was lively, it was funny. I’ve seen four Fledermaus before, and this is my favourite. It had a traditional setting. I was glad it was traditional. I’ve seen a few set in the Roaring Twenties, and they didn’t quite work for me. It seemed to be the longest version I have seen. There were extended comedy sections, notably the jailer’s slapstick action at the start of Act III in the prison. The party in Act II dragged a little with lots of forced gaiety. But over all, it was a lot of fun, and it was a good all-round production.

I find that my tolerance for comedic operas is diminishing. I prefer to wallow in the heavy emotions of the dramas. I need to watch more comedies to get balance back.

Opera intermission

We saw The Tempest with our opera friends, and we were going to Virginia Opera later that night with them too. We had three hours to kill between operas, and the best way to spend that time is to have dinner. We went to Byrd and Baldwin, a favourite of hours. I’ll never forget one memorable meal we had there years ago, when they supplied more crab than was warranted, every dish had crab, and it was marvelous. Tonight was not as good as that long-ago fabulous meal, but it was still a good meal. We had plenty of time to enjoy it, and time to catch up on the news with our opera friends. We toasted the happy result of the recent elections, caught up on other news. We only see each other occasionally, when we meet for opera, so there’s always lots of news.

The Tempest

Big day for us operatically, with an opera in the afternoon with the Met simulcasts, and then an opera in the evening with Virginia Opera.

The Met was showing Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. This is a very modern opera, it premiered in 2004. That’s fresh. Thomas Adès conducted the Met orchestra for this performance. It started with a dialogue between Prospero and his daughter Miranda. It’s sung in English, and the first few words sounded awkward. English doesn’t sound quite right for opera. But as we went further into the opera, my ears adapted to the language. Prospero was sung by Simon Keenlyside. I still vividly remember him from Hamlet a few years ago, and the amazing job he did as Hamlet. He was most striking in that, standing on the table covered in blood and accusing his mother. He was very visually striking in The Tempest, bare chested and painted with symbols. As he sang, you couldn’t help but notice the movement of his diaphragm, working as bellows. They told the backstory in Act 1, with Prospero reciting the events while the action played out in a mirror behind them. This was a very effective way of livening up what could have been just a boring dialogue. Ariel was played by Audrey Luna, and she looked like a tiny Bruce Spence, and she sang only in very high notes. She was pumping out words and notes so high, so fast, I was glad we had surtitles. The opera was intense, and it gripped my attention for the whole three acts. No inclination to nap during this performance.

Great relief

The US election is over. I got really sick of all the robocalls, and the calls asking for money, and the calls asking me to be sure to vote. In the beginning, I would say “I’m not a citizen, I can’t vote, there’s no need to waste time on me.” Towards the end after two or more calls a day, every day, I would say “Not interested” and hang up on them. I rationalised it by thinking I was off the phone quickly so they could move on to persuade someone who would count in the election.

I’m glad it’s over. Now we can back to sanity. I’m also glad that Obama won. A win for Romney/Ryan would have encouraged the crazies.

Yesterday, I saw a whole bunch of people on Twitter making really stupid statements like “If Obama wins, I’m moving to Australia”. Shows how ignorant they are. Australia is far further down Obama’s vision of the future. This was the best response I saw. Anyway, if Australia’s immigration laws are anything like the USA’s immigration laws, they aren’t going to make it in the door.

It’s done, so now we can get on with life for four more years.