Productivity

Things are good right now.

Work is relatively calm. School is under control, although I have more to do in the next three weeks than I would like, and I have to figure out what my thesis will look like so that I can graduate in May. I have a few unexpected professional and educational expenses coming up in the next few months, and I would love to figure out a way to get my job to pick up the tab on at least one of them, but so far, no dice. Theoretically, no policy exists against contributing to my graduate tuition, but the reality is that whatever justification I write for the courses I plan to take, someone will reject it as not sufficiently job-related. Also, it's now against policy to spend on anything related to acquiring a professional license. (Can anyone explain that policy? IMHO, training related to my professional license is VERY MUCH JOB-RELATED.)

My social life is still pretty much non-existent, but thanks to an email hacker a couple of weeks ago, I have heard from a number of old, silent friends. There is a silver lining even to having your privacy invaded. :) And I had a good weekend where I met a couple of interesting people. Nothing earth-shattering, but it reminded me that if I actually go outside of my apartment on weekends, there is a possibility of meeting people who I might actually want to spend time with.

NaNoWriMo was amazing. This year, for the first time ever, I actually won. I just passed the 50K mark at 11:25pm on 11/30, but winning is winning. Oh, I told myself that I had won before, back when winning meant "meeting whatever goal you choose to set for yourself", but it wasn't really true winning. This was. I wrote 50,000 words in one month, and the NaNo validator agreed. It is a great feeling. And the best part is that it's not over. I don't hate what I wrote. One of the last pep talk emails said something about how when you really get into writing a story, the characters start to live inside your head, and you enjoy spending time with them, and you should use that enjoyment as your spur to keep writing them and polish them into something beautiful. Well, guess what? It's true! These characters have taken on lives of their own, and they just keep going. Spending a month sleeping, eating, and daydreaming about them has given them this amazing ability to become fully developed. They have done things that I didn't expect, and their backstories have self-adjusted in ways I didn't plan. But the story is getting better, and I'm finding that the simple act of writing helps solve the problems that used to stop me from writing, like being unable to decide what comes next. I've found a technique that seems to be working for me, and I'm loving it. A little bit of thanks goes to MS Word 2010, which has much better navigation features than the older versions, but I think I am also starting to see the appeal of the creative writing software that gives you places to put thoughts and snippets within the project. I would like to have some virtual post-its for my writing. And I'm not forcing myself to keep writing, but I find that every so often in the last few days, something will come into my head, and I'll just have to do something to the current manuscript (did I just say "manuscript"?) to improve it or add to it the brilliant insight I just had. I haven't been churning out words like I did last month, but I also haven't let the thing die. I am so proud of myself, and I am hoping that I can keep the novel alive and growing over the next couple of months.

I am almost at a point where I am going to be looking for beta readers for it, to let me know if I should even consider it publishable, but I'm not quite there. I'm going to need people that I don't really know, so I don't have to feel embarrassed about the way my imagination works; I don't think I could live with my family or friends knowing that I think this way. They know I like and read fantasy, but most of them have no idea what that means and they would totally not enjoy reading what I wrote. I think I may have to find a writers' group for fantasy writers and try that. But I have enough on my plate for the next few months, between school and work, and so my novel will stay out of the public eye until at least the end of May.

It would be so amazing to finish my degree, my license, and my novel all in the same year. Good luck to me for 2012!