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I don't know how I'm going to face my fiancé's brother today without exploding, ugh. He's such a selfish manchild. Found out today that his mum only went to the hospital on Wednesday after her stroke Tuesday - and he brought someone round while she was suffering the effects; I.e. speech impairment and weakened left side. Oh, and they stayed the night, too. And he came to the fucking pub quiz and made merry while his mum was in hospital. I am so fucking furious at him right now; and I was pissed off at him already for basically being a total sponge, not giving his mum any free time and letting her do everything for him.
This guy is 30 YEARS OLD. And he has his OWN FUCKING HOUSE. And he stays with his mum every day now, despite complaining about having no free time when she had no choice but to live with him, lets her do his washing, cooking, cleaning etc, generates massive fucking piles of dishes for her to do and expects her to get him up for college. Oh, did I mention he expects her to sleep on the small couch while he takes the big one because the small one "makes him ache"? She even admitted that he was stressing her out and I'll bet that he was a massive factor in her stroke.
I am livid. And I plan on having words with him. I'll be diplomatic, but as soon as he pulls any of his defensive I-have-the-right-to-be-here-it's-not-my-fault-I'm-the-victim bullshit, I'm gonna pull out the big guns. And I'm beyond the point now of caring what he thinks of me afterwards. I was worried that saying anything would have him brand me "the bitch my brother is going to marry" but to be honest he's driving me, Jason and his mum crazy, and I've learned all too well that what upsets you must be dealt with. I'm gonna tell him to pack up all his stuff and get out of the house.
Also, my inactivity this past month was due to NaNoWriMo. I managed 66k! Woo! My novel is currently 580 pages long and a grand total of 174000 words approximately. I'm planning to have it first-drafted and typed up by the end of April, and in the other 2013 NaNo events (Camp NaNoWriMo in June and August, and NaNoWriMo itself) I will be finishing 'The Chronicles of Stan' and shifting a hefty chunk of 'You Know You Got (No) Soul'.
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- Location:United Kingdom, England,Borough of St. Helens, Earlestown
I've had a thoroughly uneventful start to the New Year. Apart from the partial eclipse faffery the other day, not a lot has gone on. I've been working away at my voluntary job and I had an interview in St. Helens which gave me an excuse to raid the record shop before going home. I haven't written much, I've drawn a bit. I've listened to music, bathed, slept a lot, had one or two weird dreams - just the usual, really.
I seriously, desperately need to get off my arse and start my novels up again. I miss them terribly.
Another thing I need to do is start saving. The last thing I want is to reach September and find that poof! I have no money, I'm still in England and term starts in three days!
Tomorrow is the very first day of my Prince's Trust adventure. We're gonna be tripping over mountains, gallivanting about and painting things... for the community! And I'm very excited for it, I must admit. Not just for the experiences I'm sure to have, but to see what a positive impact my team will have. According to The Prince's Trust website, the 12-week programme involves...
- Spending a week away at a residential activity centre
- Undertaking a project based in their local community
- Completing a work placement
- Participating in a team challenge, involving caring for others
- Staging a team presentation, during which they recount their experiences
As for the presentation bit - well, we all know what a geek I am for presentations.
I should probably talk a little about my projects. I have a title for the second novel in 'The Chronicles of Stan' - it will be called 'Tea-Time With Vikings'. I find it appropriately silly and irrelevant, and shall have great fun making it a believable part of the story. Zurie and I have also decided to collaborate on something; a graphic novel called 'The Ballad of Haymarket Platform Zero'. This one will be in the works for a while as we've both got a lot going on (being busy writists and all, we spend far too much time being witty), but I assure you all it will be awesome. When it finally arrives, that is.
I've started a sketchbook for 'The Ballad of Haymarket Platform Zero', so as time progresses you'll be seeing many images and scans being uploaded. It depends on how fast I work.
On my crappy old mp3-turned-storage-device, a 53mb folder called 'RECYCLER' that I had no recollection of putting there. I did another scan, it turned out to be a virus. So I eradicated it.
Later, I was telling Nathan about it. As soon as I mentioned 'RECYCLER', he got this look in his face - horror, and recognition. It was on his SD card. And it was on Ashley's iPod, which prompted me to check my own iPod... and it was on there, as well.
Consequently, I've spent a great deal of last night and the early morning scanning the computer drive by drive, removing all traces of infection, then scanning again for good measure. Nathan did his SD card himself - I can only hope he was as thorough as I was, because if even a single trojan is left on a device that then gets plugged into this computer... well, heads will roll.
So, I've just checked Twitter and found that my last tweet, before going to bed, was five hours ago. That's how long I was up, crushing these little bastards. The scans found literally hundreds of them. I just hope that A) this won't be happening again any time soon and B) that the viruses weren't on there long enough to cause any lasting damage. I might leave it a while before using things like my bank card on this computer, just to be safe, and maybe run a few full scans over the coming days.
In non-virus-related news, I've started to type up 'Arcane Mathematics' and 'The Timeshare Presentation of Death'. So far, including title pages and my foreword, I've got 23 pages, on which there are 7852 words. This actual count lines up pretty nicely with my handwritten estimate, which is good.
I'm having a couple of woes regarding formatting, though. Firstly, I start every new paragraph with an indentation, including ones that are only a couple of lines, such as speech (and the way I write, this means I use them a lot). I don't use indentations for paragraphs starting at the very top of a page. I was just wondering if this is an acceptable way to format a book, really. It doesn't look that bad to me, when I scroll through it, so I think I may leave it for now.
Another thing is page numbering. This has been a pain in the arse, as well. Obviously you number your pages, but a lot of books will have blank pages between chapters (if the chapter ends on an odd page number, so the next chapter begins on the following double-spread) and title pages that aren't numbered. I don't know how to include my headers/footers in certain pages, and have them blank on others. It's bugging me. I was thinking of just splitting the book into several documents - numbered pages apart from non-numbered - then printing it off and putting it together in a binder. But since I'm mainly typing this draft up for CreateSpace, that won't work. It's not essential that I fix it now, I suppose, so when I've caught up on my sleep I'll take to Google and see what I find.
If anything, it's probably even best left for when I've actually finished the book, so that all the pages are there.
- Music:Good Love Child - Barclay James Harvest
If ever you run across this book in your local shop, I highly recommend you turn the other way and find the Terry Pratchett section instead.
Credits for the fonts:
Title/Author text: Pointy by Pointy Design
Books One + Four: Love Ya Like a Sister by Kimberly Geswein
Phone on the 's': Phones by Signart
Speech bubble: Talkies by Iconian Fonts
Buildings in the background: Cityscape by The Scriptorium
- Music:Zing Went the Strings of My Heart - The Move
Where have I been, this past week or so? Well, I was stranded in Lowton for the first three days, Due to the Adverse Weather Conditions. The rest of it I've spent working at the shop, watching Bleach, attempting to write... and generally doing anything but writing on here.
So here I am. Back. With a vengeance? No. More like with a slightly sore stomach.
( It's under the cut because I'm a horrible person who likes making your f'list shorter... )
Right, people! Now that I'm done waffling about myself, what can I do for you lot this Christmas? Would you like to see some artwork up here (as it's been literally years since I've done anything worth posting)? Would you like to see more writing being posted, perhaps? Tales of my musical conquests? Anything else? Harass me. You have my permission.
- Music:Hulloder - Soft Machine
I don't know what Syfy are playing at, but this has left a good deal of irked fans, myself included, wondering from whence this decision has come.
Anyway, tomorrow I'll be sleeping over at the lovely Holly's! Bllimey, it's been a long time since anyone's seen her. I'm hoping my Flash Gordon DVD will arrive in time for such tomfoolery because then we have something awesome to watch while we stuff our faces.
Getting there, as you know, will be a problem. Sure, it's as simple as getting a bus then getting off at the right place. My navigational skills are deplorable. It took me two hours once to find a theatre that was only five minutes away from where I was. Literally. I am the kind of girl who could get a bus from the High Street, ask for Lowton, and end up in Zimbabwe and Sweden AT THE SAME TIME.
I feel I must talk about my writing progress. 'The Chronicles of Stan', regrettably, has gone nowhere for the past couple of days. I mustn't give up, however; this is a novel that I am adamant I'll complete, and the same goes for 'The Great Couch Happening of '69'. I suppose it's just that after all the NaNo madness, my brain has gone a bit slack. It's like running a marathon and feeling afterwards like you could spend a month in bed. My brain's a bit dead.
I've decided that I'll write Book Two of the 'Chronicles' some time next year, once I've polished off 'The Great Couch Happening'. Book Three of the 'Chronicles' will be written probably some way into my second year of university, after I've had a good sampling of uni life; enough to write in such a setting. Thankfully each one of the books is fairly short as novels go, so I can easily work them in around larger, non-NaNo projects of the same scale as 'The Great Couch Happening'. And NaNo novels, in fact. One book of the 'Chronicles' takes me about seventeen days to write.
This means I'll have to start planning for Book Two - by planning, I mean come up with a 'what if' question, then a title that's of no relation whatsoever to that question, write a whole load of random crap and then make it relevant as the story goes along. And that, in a nutshell, is how I write stuff.
Now, owing to tomorrow's appointment with the lovely Job Centre people, I must go and get some kip. Thankfully I have enough money for transport and records amounting to £10. And for some reason, I am tempted to attend said appointment with one of those Christmas cracker crown things on top of my sort-of-bowler-hat-that-isn't-a-bowler-hat-but-looks-like-one-anyway. The Twitterverse seems to be agreeing with me...
On a musical note, my recent pillaging from Amazon earned me £2 of credit on the MP3 store. It might not seem much, but when you really dig deep and have a good poke around, you can find some worthy gems; albums at less than two quid. I got my mitts on Terry Riley's 'A Rainbow in Curved Air', a very influential piece from the mid-Sixties. I remember reading about it in Mike Oldfield's autobiography and thinking 'blimey! I really have to listen to that!' - so now I have it. When I've got the dosh, I'll get the CD.
That seems to be the way with my musical journey. I hear artists' names in connection with artists I've already experienced, and check them out. Mike Oldfield put me onto David Bedford and Kevin Ayers, who put me onto a whole army of bands from the Canterbury scene, who put me onto other bands because they worked with people from said bands, and so on and so forth. It seems like the Prog genre is one big family; everybody's worked with everybody. It's bloody marvellous!
- Music:Better By Far - Caravan
ARCANE MATHEMATICS and THE WOES OF DEATH are the two stories that make THE CHRONICLES OF STAN. The novel is handwritten this year because my computer is broke (and has been since about June) and I decided that I wouldn't let technology woes dampen the NaNo experience!
"ARCANE MATHEMATICS" - Stan's life sucks. He's a high school student (circa 1962) at a rubbish comprehensive, his teachers are evil and his best friend (a Spam freak by the name of Brian "Lazuli" Spencer) is trying to shove music down his throat.
When a strange book belonging to his Maths teacher winds up in his sock drawer, things get weird. What is its purpose? What has it got to do with the Order of Benevolent Cleaners; the mop-wielding guardians of the school? And who is the mysterious lookalike who seems intent on earning Stan detentions? Maybe that tin of sweetcorn has the answer...
"THE WOES OF DEATH" - Seven years later. Stan's life still sucks. He has run the gauntlet of Whitbrook High, gone through university, moved to a new, saner town and got a job... as a telemarketer. But if there's one thing that'll never be in Stan's life, it's normality. Closely seconded by a girlfriend.
For, you see, Stan has a "night" job. One that he frequently has to do during the day. He's a Death. And when he runs out of his workplace to reap the wrong person, he quickly finds himself jobless on both fronts. To make things worse, Deaths get paid in time to live. Stan's is now running out...
