Weekend update and more!

So Friday night was karaoke, and Jeremy and I had agreed in advance that we would sing "A Whole New World" from Aladdin together. It was apparently very good, as he had several people come up to him afterwards and tell him it was great. One person told me the same. :) I also had a lot of people tell me that I did "Stupid Girl" by Garbage really well, which is funny, because I signed up for it, and then googled the lyrics because I couldn't remember how it went. (Yeah, they put the lyrics up when you do karaoke, but if I don't have some vague sense of the lyrics before I start singing, I do miserably. Rock Band is proof of this. :) )

Saturday, we watched a couple of horror movies with part of our usual D&D group, in lieu of actually gaming. The first movie was Phantasm, which was pretty laughable to me. I find that I'm just really not that impressed with older horror movies, and they don't tend to scare me much. We followed that with Slither, which I had seen before, but no one else had. I love that movie, mainly because it stars Nathan Fillion. It's also spectacular as a comedy-horror.

From there, we headed to Denny's for the NaNoWriMo kick off, where I proceeded to write 2,200 words in about 75 minutes, a fact which stunned Jeremy and Nate. Apparently, I write fast. :) Of course, I make no claims as to how good it was, and I'm probably scrapping over 2/3 of it when editing time rolls around.

After sleeping like a rock, I had I Heart Rummage on Sunday afternoon, which was a good show for me. I sat next to Susan of This Charming Candy, and ended up trading a pair of arm warmers for two bags of her lollipops. So far, I've tried tangerine-clove and coconut-caramel, and I'm definitely loving the slightly more grown-up flavor combinations. In my bag for today: vanilla cardamom. I don't even know what cardamom tastes like. :)

My current NaNo word count is now up to 5,424, which is about 424 words ahead of where I need to be. Rock on! :) The story is shaping up pretty well, though it keeps going in directions I wasn't quite expecting. I wrote a ridiculously overdramatic scene between a father being sent to fight in the Great War and his thirteen year old daughter last night. Truly over the top. I love it. :)

Now if I can just kick this cold in the next, oh, 48 hours, I'll be set. :) We're off to AmberCon NW on Thursday morning, and I do not want to be sick at the convention!

Lollipops by thischarmingcandy.etsy.com.

Gearing up for NaNo!

Because I sometimes think I am more than a little crazy, I've decided to take a shot at doing NaNoWriMo this year. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, it's National Novel Writing Month, which means I'll be attempting to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

I've avoided doing NaNo in previous years because November is a BIG month for craft shows and sales on Etsy. And it may very well turn out that I get a few days into November and realize that I'm not going to be able to do it. Looking at my calendar for November is daunting. I lose 4 days to ACNW. I lose 4 days to craft shows. I lose 2 days to flying to and from Kansas. I lose 3 or 4 days for our Thanksgiving excursion. All totaled, that adds up to probably 13 days that I will not get to write, leaving me with 17 days that I can write. Most of my weekends are completely shot.

But I've agreed to try, and try I will. This will be Jeremy's fourth year of doing NaNo, so obviously he's my big source of inspiration for it. He, however, has a slight advantage over me, in the form of more days off work, and partially clear weekends. He also often writes during his lunch break, and can write on the bus. I can't write on the bus. :( (At least I can crochet on the bus!) I may try to squeeze in writing before work and during my lunch. But by and large, I've got a couple of hours in the evening on just over half of the nights in the month. Eek!

My novel is a little hard to explain. The working title is "Daughters of the World's Fair." It blends some history with some supernatural elements, primarily fairies. It will probably end up being a young adult novel, since the protagonists are 13 year old girls. It's based around the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, but is set in 1917, with only a few brief scenes in St. Louis. Needless to say, it's a bit complicated. Cuz that's just how I roll. :)

I'm sure I'll be taking time to make blog posts all through November, but don't be surprised if a lot of them are word count posts, reporting on how many words I've written and such. I'll probably be posting most of that elsewhere, though, so if you're really interested in following my progress, let me know. :) I'll try to keep this blog a little less about the details and a little more about life in general. Just not a lot about crafting for a while, since I won't have a whole lot of time to do that. :)

Clockwork journal by redharp.etsy.com

Traveling and cats (but not traveling cats)

Yup, I've been out and about again, on another work trip. It went relatively quickly, until Friday night, when I got home about 2 hours later than originally planned. There was a LOT of panic involved in that, too, with an almost delayed flight to Chicago, and then a seriously delayed flight home. About the time that it started looking really dire for me to get onto a flight home, I realized it was also too late to call my brother if I needed to stay in Chicago, which meant I'd be sleeping at the airport... not my idea of a good time.

But I got home in the wee hours of Saturday morning, exhausted, but happy to see Jeremy and my new kitten, Paint It Black. Andrew and Amanda brought him over on Friday night, and he was already settling in to the apartment by the time I got home. So far, so good. The other cats are not thrilled by the new addition to our household (though I think the fat cats enjoy snacking on Black's kitten kibble when he doesn't finish the entire dish), but they're adjusting. The funniest moment, though, was yesterday when Andrew stopped by during my All Flesh Must Be Eaten one shot. When Jeremy confirmed that it was Andrew he had just buzzed up to the apartment, P-Cat took off like a light for the safety of the bedroom. My comment on P-Cat's thoughts: "Oh crap, he's back! I hope he didn't bring another kitten!" Coincidental, I'm sure, but funny nonetheless.

Black is just pure joy for me. He is cute, affectionate, basically gentle with his claws, and a little bit clumsy, which makes me laugh. He's all legs and a huge head, and sometimes his legs get ahead of him, I think. He doesn't do well on linoleum, which is only really an issue if he gets to playing around in the bathroom. It may just be that he responds to the sound of human voices, but if I call him, he will come out from wherever he's been hiding and look at me. He doesn't do the sort of rough playing that Vlad was a fan of (possibly learned behavior from the way Jerome would play with him). Basically, everything I ever wanted in a kitten. :)

Star Wars in Concert!

So last night we had tickets to go see Star Wars in Concert. Our seats were up in the nosebleed section, because the other tickets were a bit more money than I wanted to spend to see this. I imagine the view from the floor seats was spectacular, but with the big screen projection behind the orchestra, we could see just fine.

The whole premise is that an orchestra plays the music live, while they project excerpts from the movies on a big screen. Essentially, they used that to tell a more chronological story of the two trilogies, putting the newer movies before the older movies. However, that wasn't always the case... there were a lot of times when they mixed older (original trilogy) stuff into the early events, and newer (second trilogy) stuff into the later events. For example, in just about any sequence that involved showing space battles, there was a mixing of old and new. It was pretty obvious, too, because of the differences in CG technology between the late 1970s-early 1980s and the late 1990s-early 2000s. They also used clips from the re-releases of the original trilogy, and I am not a fan of the re-releases.

The highlight for me was that Anthony Daniels, who played C-3P0 in all six movies, was the "narrator." When I went to Dragon*Con in 2006, he emceed the Dawn costume competition, so I knew how much fun it would be to have him narrating the story. I was not at all disappointed in that.

Generally speaking, it was worth going to see. Jeremy and I both had fun with it. There were a lot of fidgety kids around us, though. Cute costumes, not so good at sitting still quietly. Ah well. :)

Back!

Back in the office for the week, and it's kind of like an oven. Maybe that's why I rarely spend time here... :) They turned on the heat on Thursday, and it's had plenty of time to warm up now. I think I may have to switch to water instead of tea before too much longer!

St. Louis was a blast, and I got to spend time with just about everyone I wanted to see. I never did see Uncle Joe, and Thor was too ill to make it up on Sunday, and I got a message from Shawn wanting to hang out AFTER I got back to Seattle, but otherwise, good trip. We got to do Laumeier and the City Museum, as well as the Schlafly Brew Pub and Johnny Brock's Halloween Dungeon. The picture is from the City Museum, taken from the ferris wheel on the 11th floor of the building. Megan, Vanessa, Bryan, and I all rode it, while Jeremy and Cindy took pictures of us crazy people. :)

We proceeded to spend most of yesterday running around, trying to get everything that we would normally do on the weekend done. We also made a couple of extra stops so I could start getting things for my Halloween costumes. I'm going to have 3 or 4 costumes this year. One of them, Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I'm borrowing from Megan (assuming she sends it to me on time), and only needed to buy a new pair of fishnets for it. Another is the Twisted Belle costume, which I am piecing together from a yellow homecoming dress and some other yellow fabric.

I'm still a little up in the air for the last one or two. I want to wear my Ice Princess costume, which I've done in various iterations in the past, but I'm not sure when I will actually want to wear a corset for my Halloween activities. That costume may also get remade into a Tin Woman costume (think Wizard of Oz with a twist), since it's shiny and silver. We also saw a cute "Wednesday Addams all grown up" costume at Johnny Brock's, and I'm pretty sure I can reproduce that mostly with stuff I already own. And my Dark Lily (from Legend) costume from a couple of years ago was super fun (and I still have the dress).

Between SteamCon rapidly approaching, then Halloween, and then AmberCon NW, I'm just full of excuses for costuming. Good thing I like doing it! :)