But as mentioned in my previous NaNo post, I am still working on the novel and in a way I think it will be easier and the writing may be better without the pressure of the daily word count of NaNoWriMo hovering over everything I put down.
It is, then, both a time of regret–50,000 words would have been nice–but also a time of some hope, in that the writing will continue.
I’ll report back in a month to see how the current 22,222 word count has changed. (I make no predictions.)
The bad news is my weight went up again. I am getting really bad at this weight loss thing.
The good news is it only went up 0.2 pounds for the month, so it was more a case of not really moving up or down, though body fat crept up a bit more.
I am up three pounds on the year. :sadface: But I have remained donut-free, so yay for that.
But I have not remained oat fudge bar-free. Boo for that.
I have been getting better at post-dinner snacking, though. Yay again.
December is not exactly a month known for great weight loss, but who knows? Maybe if I start running/walking again and stick to the no-snacks-after-dinner thing it may just happen.
The fat figures:
November 1: 165.1 pounds November 30: 165.3 pounds (up 0.2 pounds)
Year to date: From 162.3 to 165.3 pounds (up 3 pounds)
And the body fat:
January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
November 30: 18.8% (31pounds of fat) (up 0.8 pounds)
For a few days I had quite a head of steam and I felt I would actually hit 50,000 by month’s end. Now, with four days to go, I am at 22,222 words (yes, kind of weird), which is not quite half. While it is theoretically possible I could write enough in the next four days to pass the virtual finish line–at a pace of 6,944 words per day–it is rather unlikely.
But that’s okay. Why? A list!
Unlike so many other times, I have an outline. If I get stuck on a particular scene, I still know where the story is going
I’m invested in the story and will see it through, regardless of the arbitrary November 30th deadline
Without the deadline I may actually produce a higher quality first draft, as I’ll put a smidgen more thought and care into the writing instead of just trying to blaze through as quickly as possible
On the downside, I missed a day or two due to other issues coming up (I won’t make excuses–I still could have written something on those days) and it did exactly what I feared, derailing my momentum.
On the upside, I have started writing again, though not quite at the same feverish pace as before. I’ve also done my first real writing through voice dictation. My setup is as follows:
Dictation software: Dragon Professional Individual v. 15
Writing software: iA Write (Windows version). I chose this because it’s very lightweight.
Microphone: Blue Yeti, which I have previously described as big and heavy enough to murder an elephant with
The dictation was surprisingly accurate and as they say, no typos, though it sometimes get things wrong. For example, I wanted it to write:
William’s lane
But instead it wrote:
Williams Lane
It’s a natural assumption on the program’s part, and easy to catch and fix when editing. I’m wondering now if some of the weirder errors I’ve seen in some books are due to voice dictation best-guesses getting missed.
The most difficult thing I’ve found so far is not remembering to speak punctuation out loud. I got used to that pretty quickly. Instead, it’s actually speaking your writing aloud. When I’m typing I’m moving slowly enough that my fingers never get ahead of my brain. With dictation I find it’s so easy to speak out sentence after sentence that I sometimes find myself pausing to figure out where to go next.
I’m going to try more transcribing from voice dictation from the phone again soon, too. I like the idea of being untethered, as I often think out loud and almost always do it while walking around, whether it’s pacing back and forth around the condo or just strolling down a path where I don’t have to be concerned that the crows might think I’m a lunatic babbling to himself.
I’m at a pivotal and exciting point in the story, but I’m unsure how to proceed, as there are a few options. I should just skip ahead and write later scenes, but I have a strong preference for writing the story in chronological order when possible. I don’t know if I’m concerned I’ll confuse myself, have too much of a mess to stitch together or what, but I should probably get over it.
In the meantime, here’s to 7,000 words per day! (Ho ho.)
Today I received an email from Logitech (one of approximately 300 million emails reminding me it’s Cyber Monday) and I decided to click the link to check out their mad deals. They had them conveniently grouped by price. Well, mostly:
Really, I just wanted an excuse to use the thinking face emoji. I love that guy, especially the Apple version shown above. He really seems engaged in some serious thinkin’.
A man goes to a seedy hotel to conduct a business meeting and gets there early. He decides to go on a short hike before the meeting and follows a nearby path into the surrounding woods. Then things get terrifying and weird and weirder still.
The Hike is probably better without knowing too many details before going in–even the illustrations on its cover (well, the busier version of the cover) are a series of mini-spoilers. Without going in too deeply, The Hike finds the protagonist Ben on a path that he is warned to stay on, under penalty of death. From there, he begins a long journey that tests his sanity, mental and physical strength, and resolve to keep pushing forward in the hope of seeing his wife and three children again.
The overall tone is light and at times quite amusing, despite the horrors sometimes visited upon Ben, and while you might be able to poke holes in the logic of this strange universe if you look closely enough, doing so is going entirely against the spirit of the book.
The Hike is silly and weird and I was entertained throughout. If you’re looking for a surreal take on the hero’s journey that never takes itself too seriously, The Hike is an easy recommendation.
Early Clarke novels are like comfort food to me. They check off a lot of boxes:
– big, galaxy-spanning ideas set over vast gulfs of time
– smart, confident characters driving the plot forward instead of being manipulated by it
– short!
I don’t mind long novels, but I mind when most novels are long, which is a lot more prevalent now than it was some decades ago when I first started reading by the light filtering into my family’s cave. Early Clarke novels are wonderfully compact and Against the Fall of Night is a fittingly slim volume. Its scenes move quickly, the dialogue is snappy and to the point, there is no interminable world-building that goes on for pages or chapters. Clark sketches out his world in handfuls of sentences, letting the reader fill in the details.
In this novel a young boy living in the last city on Earth millions of years in the future, starts to get a little too curious about what really happened to the planet and begins a quest that will change civilization forever. He also meets another boy who has a giant tame bug as a pet.
Along the way, there are mysteries to be unraveled, authorities to be thwarted, robots to be commanded and technology to be marveled over, but never understood, thanks to the knowledge being lost millennia ago.
As the novel was originally published in 1953, some of the science is a bit wacky, notably a super computer that can take decades to produce an answer–then after printing it out for you, it immediately erases the information as it doesn’t have enough memory to hold everything. While Clarke envisioned a lot, he did not foresee Google.
Today this book might be considered a Young Adult novel, given its youthful protagonist, and it is very much an accessible read. I ate it up like a bag of popcorn, enjoying the sweep of its ideas and the smaller human dramas that played out in the foreground. Recommended for anyone who enjoys early science fiction and is looking for a lighter exploration of big ideas concerning the possible future of humans.
