you won't make yourself a name if you follow the rules

have an icon:

2652 / 50000 words. 5% done!

have an icon!

1238 / 50000 words. 2% done!

here is an icon:

1108 / 50000 words. 2% done!

where the firelight fades:

35240 / 45000 words. 78% done!

butterfly dreams:

0 / 50000 words. 0% done!

NaNoWriMo:

0 / 50000 words. 0% done!

(for my own future reference: fire engine red #ce2029, bright lavender #bf94e4, bright cerulean #1dacd6)

Today: 890, and it's taken all damn day

Total: 14502

Par for the end of day 11: 18333

But hey! I finally finished drafting chapter 3!

Today: 1311

Total: 8931

...I'm managing like a hundred words an hour and it's driving me up the wall. And I still need 350+ to meet daily quota and 1070+ to meet 11/6 goal!

Also, nobody appreciates my wordplay. *eyes housemates chat suspiciously*

...

Soliciting one- to three-word prompts, please.

Or NaNo-style dares. I got 454 words out of this dare yesterday:

Dare: A number of your characters sit down for a meal. This can either be at home or in a cafe, restaurant, coffee shop, etc.
"What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn't he?"
Don't worry, you can use whatever meal you think is appropriate for the time of day. No one will blame you if you write about Second Breakfast!

BP: Describe what on the menu and being served, both food and drinks.
DBP: If your characters have a discussion about what they are wanting to have.
TBP: If your characters have a food-related debate!
QuadBP: If someone asks for dessert. (This can either be literally asking for dessert or asking for the dessert menu / what's for dessert.)
QuinBP: Holy crap, you really did write about Second Breakfast!

Scored every single bonus, too.

Update: Between silveradept's advice to skip to the next bit where I know what's happening (and my brain's inexplicable decision to listen) and my then realizing I wrote myself into a corner (and counting as words the email I wrote another friend explaining the corner I wrote myself into), I made it to 10073 before midnight!

A conundrum, o writerly friends!

Suppose scenes taking place at the same time, both in a social media setting. One character is flipping between channels or tabs or apps or whatever in order to participate in both scenes. How does one track what's going on from that character's perspective, in chronological order, without cluttering the story with mentions of changing tabs?

I'm kind of thinking for AO3 purposes I might left-align one convo and right-align the other, but frankly that'll be ugly...

—say. Does AO3 do columns?

Today: 2064

Total: 4079

First line: so I think the next thing in this scene is Catherine tries a different love language on Marinette?

silveradept is an excellent rubber duck. the problem however with rubber ducking using aloud words is they're not typed words so I can't count them!

Also I took one of the chunks of describing-a-scene from yesterday (287 words) and turned it into a whole scene (743 words). I suppose I'm technically double counting some words, but I typed them fresh so it's like they're whole new words, right? :D (mldrafts)

First sentence of the day: Catherine deftly dodged Parisian pedestrians, nose glued to her new phone.

Today's words so far: 11

Running total: 11

My eyes keep crossing so more writing in morning

ETA:

Today: 2015

Total: 2015

Soooo who's seen any Sailor Moon Classic recently and can recommend to me an episode in which there's a particularly high level of successful flirtatious? Or any anime, really, as long as it's likely Adrien Agreste, anime junkie, has seen it, and the relevant episode(s) are available for me to see. Bonus points for f/f!

Also, over 1K of today's words look like this:

Adrien checks the time, winces, says something about needing to be home for dinner. Marinette retorts, dinner at my place, you're invited. Adrien tries to duck out of it. Marinette gets up in his face and says, you're invited. Adrien relents. Alya asks what just happened. Adrien says something like, "I have learned that when she uses that tone of voice, even if she is saying two times two makes five, I am better off going along with it."

"Two times two is five," say Marinette and Catherine in unison, and Catherine continues, "Can't you count?"

That's planning, not writing, you know? But I'm counting it!

Words are posted for mldrafts and exchangefic access filters to see

(Noting so I don't forget bc silveradept said this aloud: Utena. Check out Utena. Probably on Crunchyroll?)

This Facebook post by Heather Flores came to my attention via the PDX NaNo Facebook group. The course mentioned herein on the Heroine's Journey comes in mini and maxi; the mini version is like four days long and, while the suggested donation is $27, one can (I did) sign up for free. (I'm afraid to ask how much money the maxi is...)

I just finished day one, and I can already tell this is going to have intriguing consequences on my NaNo project. Because Flores is right: a feminist story doesn't reenact kyriarchal models.

( I'm not arguing there's anything objectionable enough to bar everyone from doing the thing about writing stories that *do* partially reenact kyriarchal models. )

...So my NaNovel? Miraculous Ladybug fanfiction. I hesitate to say ML is a magical girl anime, but I can't picture ML existing substantially in its present form if Sailor Moon hadn't, either. Cartoon violence is pretty much part of the package.

But, you know, let's think about this. My outline's kind of light on the fourth quarter action plot anyway; I know how things play out emotionally, more or less, but in terms of character actions and dialogue, I'm a lot less sure. So I might could change my outline so that one of the fourth quarter realizations is that canon-typical violence won't solve this problem. So that the happy ending needs the characters to resolve things through cooperation and communication. So that the protagonists' motivations aren't what they want to obtain or to defeat, but what they want to know or to change.

*eyes canon* ...yeah, this is gonna be amusing.

But I think I can do it.


( footnotes )