frost_spirit (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frost_spirit) wrote2012-06-01 02:00 pm
frost_spirit) wrote2012-06-01 02:00 pm
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Camp NaNoWriMo 2012 feelings
Okay, so. I've participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, organized every November since 1999) for years. NaNoWriMo was the first annual event organized by the Office of Letters and Light, but over the years, they've begun adding new writing events to their roster. Last year, they introduced a summer version of NaNo -- Camp NaNoWriMo. I was kind of curious about it, but I didn't have any real story ideas or enough inspiration to write just then, so I didn't participate. Considering how terrible my November NaNo turned out to be because I still didn't have a good, interesting idea to write about at that time, that's probably for the best! Anyway, I didn't forget about Camp NaNo this year and was wondering after November whether I could tackle writing stories in the summer, whether I'd even have any ideas to write about.
Turns out I have a gazillion ideas just begging to be turned into long NaNo stories, so Camp NaNo, here we come! Last year I kept a sort of diary about how I felt during NaNo (found here) and because I like looking back and remembering how this insane event made me feel, I'm going to devote this post to the Camp NaNos and my thoughts during those. (Yes, I plan to participate in both the June and the August Camps.) In case you're interested, my Camper profile can be found here.
Latest update: June 25, 2012
Friday, May 25, 21:15
A week to go until June Camp starts! I'm nervous. I should, in fact, be cleaning my apartment because I'm going to be spending the summer at my mother's and still need to pack, but I'm exhausted and need a break. At least I already unplugged all my consoles and packed them away so I can't play games now. I'm procrastinating, I know -- I have little more than 12 hours before my sister and mom come pick me up and by that time I need to be ready to leave. But right now, I'm feeling giddy about Camp NaNo and want to write about that. Besides, I need to charge my MP3 player because I need music to keep me focused on cleaning, so another 30 minutes spent in front of the computer isn't going to be the end of the world.
So. About Camp NaNo. I'm nervous for several reasons. First off, it's been years since I did NaNo while I wasn't living by myself. (My first NaNo was in 2005 and I moved out in 2007, so I only NaNoed twice while still living with my mom and stepdad.) At least I have a laptop so I can write NaNo quietly, no matter the hour of the day, and not hog the desktop computer to myself for hours on end.
That said, I do want to be sociable and not spend all my time in my room writing. Well, it shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours of writing per day to reach 50 000 words, but it's never that easy. Which brings me to the second thing that makes me nervous.
For years, I've written very little original fic. My stories tend to get messy and confused anyway, so it works better for me when I already have an established universe to set my stories in. Original fiction doesn't hold my attention the same way fanfic does. I'm not foolish enough to attempt writing original fic for my Camp Nano. It just wouldn't work. (I have written original stories for NaNo -- back in 2005 and 2006. After that, I've always stuck with fanfiction.) Now, the problem is that I'm very used to playing in one specific sandbox, one specific game's universe. Tales of Symphonia's. Symphonia is my baby, and while I still don't understand many things in its world and how it all works, I'm more familiar and comfortable with that universe than any other I've ever written about.
But for the June Camp NaNo, I'm going to be writing fanfiction about a different game. I have probably more than two dozen fandoms and I've attempted to write fic for a handful of them before, but this fandom I'm going to be writing for... I'm not nearly as familiar with its universe as I'd like to be. The fandom/game in question? Mass Effect. What's funny is that I tend to hate writing fic set after the end of a game/series, when the climactic boss battles are over and done with and the smoke clears, because too often the world is depressingly ravaged and I'm no good at writing about depressing settings. It makes me depressed. Besides, I don't have much love for Mass Effect 3 to begin with. ME2 would be a more logical setting for a ME fic when it comes to me and my writing style. But no dice -- a prompt I saw on the ME kinkmeme latched on and blossomed and now I have no choice but to stick along for the ride to see where it all leads. The prompt specifically asked for a post-ME3 fic, so, yeah. Got to set it there. At least, since it's a form of fix-it fic, the setting is going to be less depressing than the game itself. ME3 was nothing but one kick in the gut after another. But it did have something -- or rather, someone -- in it that makes me want to replay it again and again: James Vega. Nice looks, that tattoo that I couldn't stop staring at, the banter between him and Cortez... and the Spanish. ♥ You may not know this, but I absolutely love and adore Spanish. You know, I was facepalming so much when Cortez -- whom I'd assumed to be fluent in Spanish because of his name -- totally mangled the pronunciation of cerveza (beer). Vega, on the other hand... yum. His voice actor is fluent in Spanish (if not even bilingual, I'm not entirely certain), so Vega's Spanish sounds lovely to my ear. In short, the man totally blew me off my feet.
When I started playing ME3, I knew there were going to be same sex romances available, but I hadn't wanted to spoil myself as to who the potential love interests were. So, when I was playing ME3 for the first time with my male Shepard, I was so going after James and Garrus. Aaand it turns out neither of them was available as a love interest for m!Shepard. That made me sad. (Also, the fact that Garrus was supposed to be available for m!Shepard to romance but EA cracked down on BioWare and told them to remove that option pisses me off beyond all belief. From what I hear, gaymers the world over would have loved to romance Garrus. I know I would have. But that's neither here nor there.) So, what can I do to remedy the situation? Write fanfic, of course. I actually ship Vega and Cortez something fierce, and I'd love to see Shepard and Garrus getting together, but the idea that hijacked my brain involves Vega/Shepard. We'll see how the fic turns out.
I feel very insecure about my handle on the ME characters to begin with, and even though I knew it was going to come back to bite me in the ass, I went and played different games after ME. Metal Gear Solid 2, 3, and Peace Walker, to be precise. I was already familiar with MGS 2 and 3, but I'd never seen so much as a screenshot of Peace Walker before I started playing it. So now I'm in the middle of MGS: PW, wanting to finish the game and fangirling one of the characters and getting a million ideas for my Symphonia fics (because in Peace Walker, you have a military base that you need to organize and look after and that's given me ideas for organizing the Renegades). ARGH. It certainly doesn't help that the character I am fangirling so hard, Kazuhira "Kaz" Miller, is voiced by Robin Atkin Downes -- the same guy who voiced Botta in Tales of Symphonia. And what is Kaz's role in the base they're operating? Deputy commander. And the leader of the organisation/base is -- well, not as cantankerous as Yuan, but he seems to be much more interested in carrying out missions in person than spending time organizing things back at the base, which is not that far from how I see Yuan. *headdesk* I'm drawing WAY too many parallels here, and I already had my head full of Symphonia ideas to begin with. Also, Peace Walker has some of the CRAZIEST missions you'll ever come across. Everybody knows Metal Gear Solid is a really, really gay game series. As in, it has tons of same sex pairings, most of which have been confirmed as canon. But despite all this gayness in the series, Peace Walker takes the cake. Not with Strangelove/The Boss, which is plenty sapphic, but with Big Boss/Kaz. Although the date mission with Kaz is apparently not really meant to be canon, it's in the game so it's canon enough for me. If it's anything like the Paz date mission (since I have yet to unlock the Kaz one), it's going to be absolutely hilarious and so over-the-top gay you wouldn't believe. I had some issues with the Paz date because she's 16 while BB is 39, but. Well. Everybody wants to do Big Boss. In a box. (Or a tank box, in my case, since that's what I brought with me on the Paz mission.) I nearly fell off the sofa laughing while trying to figure out how to finish the mission. I didn't get the whole Co-Ops Communication thing at first, so all I could do was go and grab Paz's boobs. Yeah, real smooth, BB. It doesn't help (or rather, it's awesome) that Paz is voiced by Tara Strong -- the woman who's also voiced characters such as Presea in Symphonia and Rikku in Final Fantasy X/X-2. The whole voice cast for Peace Walker is pretty amazing.
Anyway. I think I'm going to have to play the Kaz date while no one else is at home or they'll think I've finally gone off the deep end entirely when I keep laughing. Here, have a look at what his response to one of the lines you can tell him is: the page screenshot says it all. I know there's a video on YouTube of the date, but I want to play it for myself, so if you want to see the video, you'll have to go look for it yourself.
Anyway, I know I got massively sidetracked. But that's kind of the point. Peace Walker took over my brain, it's bleeding over into my Symphonia ideas and interpretations and that shouldn't happen, and I really, really want to finish PW before Camp NaNo begins. But I can't. Even if I set up my Xbox 360 all nice and ready for gaming as soon as I get to my mother's, I really should be playing Mass Effect if I'm to write anything even resembling IC behavior in the story. Dammit. That's the good thing about Symphonia. I'm so familiar with the game that even when I play other games, I can still return to Symphonia with relatively little effort. The new ideas enrich, rather than derail, the characterization of the ToS characters, I think. (Not sure if that holds after Peace Walker because Kaz is definitely influencing my thoughts about Botta, and that's... kind of scary.)
Uh. This turned into a more general journal-type rant/squee party than an actual NaNo related update, but hopefully it also showcases my confusion and dread about the upcoming NaNo. I'm so screwed if I still keep thinking about Peace Walker when writing about Mass Effect! Sigh. Well, my August Camp NaNo is going to be about Symphonia once more, so maybe this will give me time to let my Kaz obsession fizzle out so that it won't entirely ruin my characterization of Botta. At least I dearly hope so.
But now it's high time I got back to packing and cleaning.
About six days to go before it's time to start writing. I'm horrified, screwed, exasperated and amused beyond all belief. We'll see if I still feel like that a week from now!
Friday, June 1, 14:00
Wordcount: 2745
All right, time to write! June is here. I started writing at midnight as usual (and my mother only gave me a long look and told me not to stay up the entire night writing). It actually only took me about 1,5 hours to write almost 3000 words, so I'm doing fine on that front. However, my head is full of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Tales of Symphonia stuff, so writing Mass Effect fic probably isn't the smartest thing to do. Since I've only written a huge expository infodump so far, the "story" is dull and the characters are OOC. I'm still kind of curious about where this will all lead, rather than despairing about the way the story is crashing and burning, but we'll see if that feeling lasts.
It's been so long since I aimed for "only" 50k words in NaNo that I feel like I should still write a lot more today. Granted, there are days this month when I know I will be unable to write, so getting a buffer would be nice. I still wish my brain would stop screaming at me to write more when I already have more than enough written for the day. Bah.
Saturday, June 2, 20:00
Wordcount: 5600
I... just got some news that, while they didn't really shock me per se, really made it difficult to concentrate on writing fanfic.
My father is dead.
We... hadn't been on speaking terms for years and years now. In fact, on Tuesday it'll be exactly eleven years since the day my life was shattered. I talked to my father a handful of times after that day, but I never saw him since. And now I never will.
I'm not all that upset or sad or even shocked, but I am kind of... confused. There are a lot of things to think about. It hasn't quite sunk in yet that he's gone. I'd sort of written him off as dead years ago, in a sense, but knowing that now it's impossible to get in touch with him and get any answers or meaningful conversation out of him makes me thoughtful.
I'm not going to stop writing because of this news, but I am glad I had already reached today's quota before my stepmom called because now my thoughts are all over the place. Back to writing tomorrow, I think.
Monday, June 4, 23:45
Wordcount: 10455
Sigh. Writing hasn't been easy the past few days. I'd like to blame the news about my father's death for that, but that has very little to do with it at all. I've just been lazy and uninspired, that's all. Largely that's because I've managed to horribly mangle the characterization of several canon characters, most prominently Garrus, whom I love to bits, so I am frustrated and sad. ;_; Only Cortez actually worked with me, not against me.
Today, I couldn't manage to cram out anything before well past 10 pm despite having plenty of time. To my surprise, I actually liked writing today's bit -- at least the last 1000 words of it or so because I got to include drell in the fic. I'm so obsessed with drell that it's ridiculous. You know, in a sense I'm glad that Thane is only romanceable by FemShep because otherwise I'd keep romancing him on every damn playthrough of Mass Effect 2. Fff. That doesn't stop me from cramming this fic full of M!Shepard -> Thane angst/love, though. ♥ I'm frighteningly in love with writing about unrequited/unrealized love. Poor Shepard.
Anyway. I hit 10k less than an hour ago. I'm hoping to hit 20k before/on Sunday, because I'll be on a trip from Sunday till Tuesday and can't write much, if at all, during that time, so I want a nice buffer before then! Back to writing... as soon as the clock strikes twelve.
Saturday, June 9, 23:30
Wordcount: 20165
Damn it. I haven't been feeling like writing at all in the past several days. Yesterday ended up being the first day when I wrote absolutely nothing. It annoys me because while I certainly have racked up a buffer, I need it now because I'm leaving on a short trip in about 12 hours and won't get to write more until Tuesday -- which is when I should be hitting 20k anyway. So now my buffer is going to be eaten away entirely, and I don't want to keep thinking about the blasted NaNo while on the trip because there's so much to do at all times. Gah.
Anyway, I've written over 3k today and I still want to go replay Dragon Age II before heading to bed. Right now, I need to go and pack my stuff for tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 12, 16:00
Wordcount: 20165
Home again. The trip was fun and went fine, until this last morning when I felt horribly sick due to I don't even know what, probably something in the food. Ugh. At least the nausea passed on the way home.
However, I don't feel the least bit like writing. I just want to play Dragon Age. Argh. It certainly doesn't help that my brain and the characters in Como un fénix, my NaNo story, seem to want to skip all the build-up and just jump into bed right at this very moment. I couldn't write sex if my life depended on it, so BOO to that. I can't even separate the characters because they're stuck on a ship. Woe.
I'm also annoyed that I do not have a buffer anymore. Blah. Need to write around 2000 words today, at least. Just need to stop procrastinating...
Monday, June 25, 12:00
Wordcount: 46755
Hmmm. It's been almost two weeks since I wrote anything here, and I still kind of don't want to say anything, but I'm going to be wondering why when I've forgotten all about this, so perhaps I need to write something.
I knew I was taking a gamble when I chose to write a story about a fandom that, while familiar to me, is not as deeply ingrained in my brain as my pet fandoms are. The problem was, I wanted to play a very specific Shepard in Mass Effect 2 and 3, but I had never played such a Shepard in Mass Effect 1. So I started a ME playthrough with a Shepard like that, but ME is frustrating and stupid and argh, I couldn't finish the playthrough in time. So, I moved on to other games -- Metal Gear Solid and Dragon Age. That... kind of showed in my writing. It's sad to say, but the story clearly suffered from my focus being elsewhere than on Mass Effect. So, some days ago, I switched stories because Como un fénix was not coming along. It was for the better -- the prose flows so much better now, and I'm kind of curious to see where exactly the story is going, but I'm still disappointed.
I'm also starting to wonder if I should skip August Camp. I WANT to participate, but I'm going to be busy in August and should really focus on my studies and all. Meh. Well, we'll see. Still a couple of days left of June. Hopefully I can crack that 50k today.
Turns out I have a gazillion ideas just begging to be turned into long NaNo stories, so Camp NaNo, here we come! Last year I kept a sort of diary about how I felt during NaNo (found here) and because I like looking back and remembering how this insane event made me feel, I'm going to devote this post to the Camp NaNos and my thoughts during those. (Yes, I plan to participate in both the June and the August Camps.) In case you're interested, my Camper profile can be found here.
Latest update: June 25, 2012
Friday, May 25, 21:15
A week to go until June Camp starts! I'm nervous. I should, in fact, be cleaning my apartment because I'm going to be spending the summer at my mother's and still need to pack, but I'm exhausted and need a break. At least I already unplugged all my consoles and packed them away so I can't play games now. I'm procrastinating, I know -- I have little more than 12 hours before my sister and mom come pick me up and by that time I need to be ready to leave. But right now, I'm feeling giddy about Camp NaNo and want to write about that. Besides, I need to charge my MP3 player because I need music to keep me focused on cleaning, so another 30 minutes spent in front of the computer isn't going to be the end of the world.
So. About Camp NaNo. I'm nervous for several reasons. First off, it's been years since I did NaNo while I wasn't living by myself. (My first NaNo was in 2005 and I moved out in 2007, so I only NaNoed twice while still living with my mom and stepdad.) At least I have a laptop so I can write NaNo quietly, no matter the hour of the day, and not hog the desktop computer to myself for hours on end.
That said, I do want to be sociable and not spend all my time in my room writing. Well, it shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours of writing per day to reach 50 000 words, but it's never that easy. Which brings me to the second thing that makes me nervous.
For years, I've written very little original fic. My stories tend to get messy and confused anyway, so it works better for me when I already have an established universe to set my stories in. Original fiction doesn't hold my attention the same way fanfic does. I'm not foolish enough to attempt writing original fic for my Camp Nano. It just wouldn't work. (I have written original stories for NaNo -- back in 2005 and 2006. After that, I've always stuck with fanfiction.) Now, the problem is that I'm very used to playing in one specific sandbox, one specific game's universe. Tales of Symphonia's. Symphonia is my baby, and while I still don't understand many things in its world and how it all works, I'm more familiar and comfortable with that universe than any other I've ever written about.
But for the June Camp NaNo, I'm going to be writing fanfiction about a different game. I have probably more than two dozen fandoms and I've attempted to write fic for a handful of them before, but this fandom I'm going to be writing for... I'm not nearly as familiar with its universe as I'd like to be. The fandom/game in question? Mass Effect. What's funny is that I tend to hate writing fic set after the end of a game/series, when the climactic boss battles are over and done with and the smoke clears, because too often the world is depressingly ravaged and I'm no good at writing about depressing settings. It makes me depressed. Besides, I don't have much love for Mass Effect 3 to begin with. ME2 would be a more logical setting for a ME fic when it comes to me and my writing style. But no dice -- a prompt I saw on the ME kinkmeme latched on and blossomed and now I have no choice but to stick along for the ride to see where it all leads. The prompt specifically asked for a post-ME3 fic, so, yeah. Got to set it there. At least, since it's a form of fix-it fic, the setting is going to be less depressing than the game itself. ME3 was nothing but one kick in the gut after another. But it did have something -- or rather, someone -- in it that makes me want to replay it again and again: James Vega. Nice looks, that tattoo that I couldn't stop staring at, the banter between him and Cortez... and the Spanish. ♥ You may not know this, but I absolutely love and adore Spanish. You know, I was facepalming so much when Cortez -- whom I'd assumed to be fluent in Spanish because of his name -- totally mangled the pronunciation of cerveza (beer). Vega, on the other hand... yum. His voice actor is fluent in Spanish (if not even bilingual, I'm not entirely certain), so Vega's Spanish sounds lovely to my ear. In short, the man totally blew me off my feet.
When I started playing ME3, I knew there were going to be same sex romances available, but I hadn't wanted to spoil myself as to who the potential love interests were. So, when I was playing ME3 for the first time with my male Shepard, I was so going after James and Garrus. Aaand it turns out neither of them was available as a love interest for m!Shepard. That made me sad. (Also, the fact that Garrus was supposed to be available for m!Shepard to romance but EA cracked down on BioWare and told them to remove that option pisses me off beyond all belief. From what I hear, gaymers the world over would have loved to romance Garrus. I know I would have. But that's neither here nor there.) So, what can I do to remedy the situation? Write fanfic, of course. I actually ship Vega and Cortez something fierce, and I'd love to see Shepard and Garrus getting together, but the idea that hijacked my brain involves Vega/Shepard. We'll see how the fic turns out.
I feel very insecure about my handle on the ME characters to begin with, and even though I knew it was going to come back to bite me in the ass, I went and played different games after ME. Metal Gear Solid 2, 3, and Peace Walker, to be precise. I was already familiar with MGS 2 and 3, but I'd never seen so much as a screenshot of Peace Walker before I started playing it. So now I'm in the middle of MGS: PW, wanting to finish the game and fangirling one of the characters and getting a million ideas for my Symphonia fics (because in Peace Walker, you have a military base that you need to organize and look after and that's given me ideas for organizing the Renegades). ARGH. It certainly doesn't help that the character I am fangirling so hard, Kazuhira "Kaz" Miller, is voiced by Robin Atkin Downes -- the same guy who voiced Botta in Tales of Symphonia. And what is Kaz's role in the base they're operating? Deputy commander. And the leader of the organisation/base is -- well, not as cantankerous as Yuan, but he seems to be much more interested in carrying out missions in person than spending time organizing things back at the base, which is not that far from how I see Yuan. *headdesk* I'm drawing WAY too many parallels here, and I already had my head full of Symphonia ideas to begin with. Also, Peace Walker has some of the CRAZIEST missions you'll ever come across. Everybody knows Metal Gear Solid is a really, really gay game series. As in, it has tons of same sex pairings, most of which have been confirmed as canon. But despite all this gayness in the series, Peace Walker takes the cake. Not with Strangelove/The Boss, which is plenty sapphic, but with Big Boss/Kaz. Although the date mission with Kaz is apparently not really meant to be canon, it's in the game so it's canon enough for me. If it's anything like the Paz date mission (since I have yet to unlock the Kaz one), it's going to be absolutely hilarious and so over-the-top gay you wouldn't believe. I had some issues with the Paz date because she's 16 while BB is 39, but. Well. Everybody wants to do Big Boss. In a box. (Or a tank box, in my case, since that's what I brought with me on the Paz mission.) I nearly fell off the sofa laughing while trying to figure out how to finish the mission. I didn't get the whole Co-Ops Communication thing at first, so all I could do was go and grab Paz's boobs. Yeah, real smooth, BB. It doesn't help (or rather, it's awesome) that Paz is voiced by Tara Strong -- the woman who's also voiced characters such as Presea in Symphonia and Rikku in Final Fantasy X/X-2. The whole voice cast for Peace Walker is pretty amazing.
Anyway. I think I'm going to have to play the Kaz date while no one else is at home or they'll think I've finally gone off the deep end entirely when I keep laughing. Here, have a look at what his response to one of the lines you can tell him is: the page screenshot says it all. I know there's a video on YouTube of the date, but I want to play it for myself, so if you want to see the video, you'll have to go look for it yourself.
Anyway, I know I got massively sidetracked. But that's kind of the point. Peace Walker took over my brain, it's bleeding over into my Symphonia ideas and interpretations and that shouldn't happen, and I really, really want to finish PW before Camp NaNo begins. But I can't. Even if I set up my Xbox 360 all nice and ready for gaming as soon as I get to my mother's, I really should be playing Mass Effect if I'm to write anything even resembling IC behavior in the story. Dammit. That's the good thing about Symphonia. I'm so familiar with the game that even when I play other games, I can still return to Symphonia with relatively little effort. The new ideas enrich, rather than derail, the characterization of the ToS characters, I think. (Not sure if that holds after Peace Walker because Kaz is definitely influencing my thoughts about Botta, and that's... kind of scary.)
Uh. This turned into a more general journal-type rant/squee party than an actual NaNo related update, but hopefully it also showcases my confusion and dread about the upcoming NaNo. I'm so screwed if I still keep thinking about Peace Walker when writing about Mass Effect! Sigh. Well, my August Camp NaNo is going to be about Symphonia once more, so maybe this will give me time to let my Kaz obsession fizzle out so that it won't entirely ruin my characterization of Botta. At least I dearly hope so.
But now it's high time I got back to packing and cleaning.
About six days to go before it's time to start writing. I'm horrified, screwed, exasperated and amused beyond all belief. We'll see if I still feel like that a week from now!
Friday, June 1, 14:00
Wordcount: 2745
All right, time to write! June is here. I started writing at midnight as usual (and my mother only gave me a long look and told me not to stay up the entire night writing). It actually only took me about 1,5 hours to write almost 3000 words, so I'm doing fine on that front. However, my head is full of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Tales of Symphonia stuff, so writing Mass Effect fic probably isn't the smartest thing to do. Since I've only written a huge expository infodump so far, the "story" is dull and the characters are OOC. I'm still kind of curious about where this will all lead, rather than despairing about the way the story is crashing and burning, but we'll see if that feeling lasts.
It's been so long since I aimed for "only" 50k words in NaNo that I feel like I should still write a lot more today. Granted, there are days this month when I know I will be unable to write, so getting a buffer would be nice. I still wish my brain would stop screaming at me to write more when I already have more than enough written for the day. Bah.
Saturday, June 2, 20:00
Wordcount: 5600
I... just got some news that, while they didn't really shock me per se, really made it difficult to concentrate on writing fanfic.
My father is dead.
We... hadn't been on speaking terms for years and years now. In fact, on Tuesday it'll be exactly eleven years since the day my life was shattered. I talked to my father a handful of times after that day, but I never saw him since. And now I never will.
I'm not all that upset or sad or even shocked, but I am kind of... confused. There are a lot of things to think about. It hasn't quite sunk in yet that he's gone. I'd sort of written him off as dead years ago, in a sense, but knowing that now it's impossible to get in touch with him and get any answers or meaningful conversation out of him makes me thoughtful.
I'm not going to stop writing because of this news, but I am glad I had already reached today's quota before my stepmom called because now my thoughts are all over the place. Back to writing tomorrow, I think.
Monday, June 4, 23:45
Wordcount: 10455
Sigh. Writing hasn't been easy the past few days. I'd like to blame the news about my father's death for that, but that has very little to do with it at all. I've just been lazy and uninspired, that's all. Largely that's because I've managed to horribly mangle the characterization of several canon characters, most prominently Garrus, whom I love to bits, so I am frustrated and sad. ;_; Only Cortez actually worked with me, not against me.
Today, I couldn't manage to cram out anything before well past 10 pm despite having plenty of time. To my surprise, I actually liked writing today's bit -- at least the last 1000 words of it or so because I got to include drell in the fic. I'm so obsessed with drell that it's ridiculous. You know, in a sense I'm glad that Thane is only romanceable by FemShep because otherwise I'd keep romancing him on every damn playthrough of Mass Effect 2. Fff. That doesn't stop me from cramming this fic full of M!Shepard -> Thane angst/love, though. ♥ I'm frighteningly in love with writing about unrequited/unrealized love. Poor Shepard.
Anyway. I hit 10k less than an hour ago. I'm hoping to hit 20k before/on Sunday, because I'll be on a trip from Sunday till Tuesday and can't write much, if at all, during that time, so I want a nice buffer before then! Back to writing... as soon as the clock strikes twelve.
Saturday, June 9, 23:30
Wordcount: 20165
Damn it. I haven't been feeling like writing at all in the past several days. Yesterday ended up being the first day when I wrote absolutely nothing. It annoys me because while I certainly have racked up a buffer, I need it now because I'm leaving on a short trip in about 12 hours and won't get to write more until Tuesday -- which is when I should be hitting 20k anyway. So now my buffer is going to be eaten away entirely, and I don't want to keep thinking about the blasted NaNo while on the trip because there's so much to do at all times. Gah.
Anyway, I've written over 3k today and I still want to go replay Dragon Age II before heading to bed. Right now, I need to go and pack my stuff for tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 12, 16:00
Wordcount: 20165
Home again. The trip was fun and went fine, until this last morning when I felt horribly sick due to I don't even know what, probably something in the food. Ugh. At least the nausea passed on the way home.
However, I don't feel the least bit like writing. I just want to play Dragon Age. Argh. It certainly doesn't help that my brain and the characters in Como un fénix, my NaNo story, seem to want to skip all the build-up and just jump into bed right at this very moment. I couldn't write sex if my life depended on it, so BOO to that. I can't even separate the characters because they're stuck on a ship. Woe.
I'm also annoyed that I do not have a buffer anymore. Blah. Need to write around 2000 words today, at least. Just need to stop procrastinating...
Monday, June 25, 12:00
Wordcount: 46755
Hmmm. It's been almost two weeks since I wrote anything here, and I still kind of don't want to say anything, but I'm going to be wondering why when I've forgotten all about this, so perhaps I need to write something.
I knew I was taking a gamble when I chose to write a story about a fandom that, while familiar to me, is not as deeply ingrained in my brain as my pet fandoms are. The problem was, I wanted to play a very specific Shepard in Mass Effect 2 and 3, but I had never played such a Shepard in Mass Effect 1. So I started a ME playthrough with a Shepard like that, but ME is frustrating and stupid and argh, I couldn't finish the playthrough in time. So, I moved on to other games -- Metal Gear Solid and Dragon Age. That... kind of showed in my writing. It's sad to say, but the story clearly suffered from my focus being elsewhere than on Mass Effect. So, some days ago, I switched stories because Como un fénix was not coming along. It was for the better -- the prose flows so much better now, and I'm kind of curious to see where exactly the story is going, but I'm still disappointed.
I'm also starting to wonder if I should skip August Camp. I WANT to participate, but I'm going to be busy in August and should really focus on my studies and all. Meh. Well, we'll see. Still a couple of days left of June. Hopefully I can crack that 50k today.