Incidently, if anybody else is interested in picking up a Palm keyboard, the seller from which I bought mine still has a couple more at the same reasonable price ($1.99 + $9.95 shipping for an accessory that once listed upwards of $100). I really, really like mine.
Get yours here, but note that this is for the older-school palms, up to and including the m10x series (I've got a IIIx and I'm more than happy with it, in case that matters).
Well, I have failed. I had good intentions to write my NaNo novel but never got around to making that a reality. I could list off a whole bunch of excuses starting with disenfranchisement from the election and continuing on with the whole lack of an overall plot until the twelfth, but really I never had the motivation in the first place for the sci-fi novel I'd planned about killers from the fourth (spatial) dimension. I chalked up 3446 words before giving up completely, most of that in protracted expository dialogue (and I typed another 1359 words of notes about the book).
Hoping to salvage the month, three days ago I began work on another novel, one nearer and dearer to my actual life. This time around I came up with 14,703 words (no notes, though) of musings on my life as of late, particularly about my dreams. I meant dreams in both common definitions of "nighttime imagination things" and "hopes and aspirations", and I wrote out a lot of personal stuff, briefly and occasionally fictionalized, about those topics. I talked about jobs a lot, and also a bit of my childhood. It was pretty good stuff, and I'll likely post parts of it somewhere here on my website, eventually. There are a lot of misspellings and other errors in there, though, since I typed almost all of it on my Palm with my fancy new keyboard.
I must admit that I really like typing on my Palm. It's just such a neat idea, and the keyboard never ceases to amuse me as an example of really good engineering. If ever I am faced with another typing assignment I'll probably forego the computers altogether and use this instead, I like it that much.
As for the next Nano, I intend to try again and win it. I have another year to prepare, and this time I think I'll make an actual outline, instead of a paragraph for the first section, another for the last, and some ellipsis dots between them. Failing that, I'll hack the contest. The last good idea I had before stopping thinking about Nano altogether was to write a Groundhog's day scenario wherein a good amount of the action is repeated and thus the text could be duplicated. Of course the devil would be in the details, particularly the ones that set apart the iterations, but creativity should help that. I thought I'd have this happen to a small group of people (researchers in deep space or current-day rogue scientists not unlike Michael Crichton's guys in Timeline), one or two of whom would have a sense of deja vu each time but never the same ones. The protagonist(s) would have a tough time getting persistent information in such a scenario and the solution would need to be clever. I could even go about doing this thusly: write a story to the best of my ability and divide its eventual word count into 50,000 and repeat as necessary. So it's sort of cheating -- I'm willing to give it a shot if it pushes me out of short story territory once and for all.
This is not to say that I've had a month of bad writing. I'm slowly catching myself up on the daily updates, and some of them are worth looking back upon, I think. For me, at least. After all, I wrote some five thousand words on this page for the month, so can I count those too? That would just about push me over the half way mark if I combined every word I typed in the month, I think.
Well, there's always next year.
I've never quite known what to do with stuffed animals. I've amassed some ten or twelve of them over the years, and they tend to just sit around here and there. I have a stuffed lion, a home-made Pound Puppy-lookalike, a number of zoo souvenirs, a stuffed bear bearing a sash reading "Pave the whales" and more. They just collect dust.
If I really did anything with stuffed animals, though, I'd want some of these: Ugly dolls by wishingfish.
Don't ask me why, I don't know.
I was sifting through my CDs tonight and a little tidbit about me popped back into my mind. Before I was attempting to write things down I did a lot of things that remain mostly forgotten until a moment like this, where something just pops back into my head.
Anyway, my freshman year in college was a big one for me, at least when you look at my CD collection. That year I'm pretty sure I continued the yearly doubling of my CD collection.
I'm serious. I went from having about fifteen at the end of my freshman year of high school, to about thirty the next year, to just over sixty, to just over 120 at the end of high school. Those last two numbers come to mind readily as that year I somehow won two matching 60 CD towers and filled them quickly. Midway through the freshman college year I bought another one the same height but unfortunately not the same design. After that I gave up on individual slots and picked up some plastic units that held 200 each (50 to a shelf, four shelves) that could be taken apart and rebuilt easily for moving.
In two years I'd outgrown them as well. I've long since stopped the annual doubling, and I haven't done an official count since 2001 (when last it was around 615 or so) but now I don't have them on anything at all but instead they are in three large boxes (and spread around the house also, one here and two there) in my living room (I'm working on shelves for them, really. Just not right now).
Anyway, tonight we watched United states of Leland, and a lot of the music in it sounded pretty familiar. Sticking with it to the end credits, I discovered that one of the tracks was "Undone" by Imperial teen. I'm pretty sure I own one of their albums, but I didn't know if the one I had was the one from which this song was taken, so I tried to find it. I couldn't in my couple minutes of quick scanning, but two hundred CD spines is a lot to look at, upside down no less, and it wasn't that important for me to find the disc. I can always look it up later.
While putting them back, though, I glanced past my small collection of Lightning seeds discs and recalled briefly my detective work on the song "You showed me".
You see, before I was a connoisseur of cover and remake songs I hadn't known about the Turtles' original of the song "You showed me", but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I was listening to internet radio, via some service that has long since folded no doubt, when a couple seconds of a song triggered a memory of another one. The song I heard was "Turtle soup" by DJ Food. Every so often there was this orchestral bit that sounded just like a riff in a song used on the MTV show Daria. In the episode about (ironically named) Alternapalooza, the song "You showed me" was played long enough for me to evidently remember hearing it at least half a year later.
For that matter, I'm pretty amazed to be remembering all of this now, having all but forgotten it until tonight.
Even then I had the internet at my beck and call, and it wasn't long before I tracked down the Lightning seeds track. Moments later I had downloaded it (these were the days before Napster, so I likely found it with oth.net on an FTP site) and within a week or two I'd ordered or bought a used copy of the CD. It was another month or so before I went back online to figure out the meaning of the title of "Turtle soup", and then it was a matter of time before I cashed in on some coupon or other to get The Turtles present the battle of the bands from Music Boulevard or CDNow.
And that's my story. I hope you weren't expecting this to have a point. I just like to reminisce, even if it is over something so trivial as why I own a CD.
And in unrelated news, now I've done it. I beat X-com: UFO defense for something like the fifth time, and now that I've got that particular monkey off my back I can get back to the stuff that matters. Like the novel that I'm, oh, 48,000 words or so behind on writing.
We've had the cat now for a week, though we're still working on the pronouns issue. Half of the time I refer to her as a "she" and the other half as an "it" but neither is entirely correct. I fear that I am in fact still allergic to cats as occasionally I find myself sneezing violently for no other apparent reason, but Jessica's too attached to her already for me to send her packing (the cat, that is). Most of the time Yantar (Jessica calls her Ginny and I never really call her at all) sleeps somewhere nearby us, such as tonight when we were watching Ben Stiller's expose into the male fashion model world, Zoolander.
I didn't get it for me, despite being in the fashion business and knowing a couple male models, but for her. Jessica's a big Will Ferrell fan, and she responds better to modern nutty comedy than I do. For that matter, she like Ben's Meet the parents while I found it to be cringeworthy if not painful at times to watch the extent to which they will "embarrass" someone ostensibly for my entertainment. There are a few genuine laughs in the film, but I came away from it wanting to know two things: What was the song Owen Wilson kept cueing up instead of "Relax" at the end, and is Ben Stiller capable anymore of making a movie that doesn't have a whatever-off in it at some point? I don't look fondly upon the Starsky & Hutch movie (some would call it a travesty), and in particular the dance-off strikes me as something they're probably enjoying on screen and slapping each other on the back for thereafter while we just gape agog at it and hope it ends.
Kinda like the whole movie, you know? Boy, I just can't wait to watch Dodgeball. I bet that one's a real winner.
