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End of Day Sixteen: 30,027
Today's goal: 34,000 (tad optimistic)
Today's goal: 32,000 (fingers crossed)
It's not actually clear to me when I'll physically have the chance to write (or even just type) 2K words of novel today. I'll be on airplanes or airport vans or driving most of the day, starting in a couple of hours. Can't do it now, because novel writing (even nanowrimo, at least at the moment) is enough more demanding than weblog typing (no offense) that I wouldn't be able to follow along with this talk and write novelwords at the same time.
UC Davis has a nice November campus, flat and open and green, with cool fog in the morning and perty blue skies during the day, and exquisite young people walking and cycling and pedalling all over the place on their way to adulthood. We had dinner last night on the Delta King, a restored steamboat more or less permanently tethered to the dockside in Old Sacramento, the hopeful tourist-trap area of Sacramento. The place seemed run-down and sad last night, probably because it was late enough that most of the stores were closed, and there's lots of off-season construction going on. Most of the street and dock lighting seems to be industrial yellow mercury-vapor (or whatever that is), that makes whatever it shines on look like a candidate for demolition somehow. Picturesque in a noir way, but not I suspect what the City Fathers are really aiming for.
I'll be getting home late tonight, sometime after midnight, and I have early meetings tomorrow. I'll take a wild guess and suggest that I may not be doing much weblogging for the next couple of days... *8)
End of Day Fourteen: 23,050
End of Day Fifteen: 27,028
Tomorrow's goal: 32,000 (ideally)
Tomorrow's goal: 29,000 (I do hope)
So it turns out that there's not room to even open a laptop in the center seat of a United 757 from New York to Denver (three and a half hours), or of another one from Denver to Sacramento (two more hours). But on the other hand a hotel room where you're trying to stay up sort of late to get halfway onto Pacific time is a pretty decent place to write, as is a conference room where someone is slowly giving a talk whose content (if one does say so one's self) one grokked in the first five minutes from a quick skim of the proceedings and the "Outline" slide.
(People would, I think, pay alot more attention at conferences if there wasn't wireless in the room, and the proceedings weren't given out beforehand. On the other hand since I'm one of the few people who actually ask questions during the question periods, I don't feel like I'm freeloading by intercutting Systems Management liberally with novel writing.)
But anyway! I'm back on quota again (in the "averaging 1800 a day" sense), and pointwise this was a Really Good Day (in the "wrote nearly four thousand words, sheesh have I miscounted or something!" sense). The story is getting interesting, although perhaps only to me. I think I know where the Austin plot is going, more or less, and the other plot is something that's always fascinated me: if something like the Vingian singularity occurs, what's it like for the people around at the time? I have no idea at all, and it'd be impossibly challenging to try to write accurately and movingly about; but the WriMo gives me the chance and excuse to just fiddle with any and all ideas, and see what happens. Which is kinda neat.
So now I need to go off to bed (nearly nine Pacific time, nearly midnight Real Time, which seems a plausible compromise). Tomorrow morning maybe I'll stop by the Student Union or whatever for breakfast, and pretend I'm an innocent youth again...
Had bagels and cartoons and lying about on the big bed as usual this Sunday morning, but then unusually an hour of driving, and now I'm sitting in the passenger waiting area at Gate C14 in terminal something something at LaGuardia Airport. In an hour or so I'll be "on an airplane", intending to be somewhere on the West Coast by tonight.
It's been busy.
End of Day Eleven: 20,830 (barely made quota)
End of Day Twelve: 20,830 (didn't write a blinkin' word)
End of Day Thirteen: 20,830 (yesterday, either)
Today's goal: 28,000 (in my dreams)
Today's goal: 25,200 (more realistically)
Today's goal: 23,000 (or bust!)
Like I say, it's been busy. I have this fantasy that this business trip / conference will involve significant idle time (airplane flights, evenings with no kids to play with, etc), and that maybe I'll get lots of novelling done, and get all caught up. Fingers crossed.
Gate C14 isn't advertising any wireless connections, at least not to us plebs (pleebs?), so I'm offline and I don't know just when I'll be posting this. From the hotel tonight, most likely. So stuff that I link to is from my "stuff to link to" file, and may not have been verified.
Here's the "sorry everybody" tag on flickr; photographs taken from and/or inspired by Sorry Everybody dot com, which strikes me as a cute idea.
The Minimizer is a site where the author, and apparently a friendly gaggle of fans and forum members of all genders, dream about (and write stories about, and draw pictures of) women (stereotypically hourglass-shaped women) who shrink for one reason or another down to, say, six inches tall, and then have various (more or less soft-core) adventures and tribulations. Very, very odd in some sense, and not overtly misogynist at all; although of course it's difficult to see the subtext as especially benign, given the Weight of History.
Spammers send some poetry (a haiku?):
Subject: on, the horse-handlers trotting
Subject: And again the door
Subject: Re: road, Levi got control
and some prose poetry:
The wind was too strong to wind the sail. There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row. The wind was too strong to wind the sail. Also included are a number of unusual statement made by candidates during I think I'm going to throw-up. It doesn't matter if you are greatly outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts. Candidate explained that her long-term goals was to replace the interviewer. Candidate brought large dog to interview. You can type sixty words per minute with your feet. You help your dog chase its tail. The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
and a bit of SF:
We are glad to greet you on our site, we've opened recently, but we can offer you stolen data about credit cards of Europe and USA inhabitants and also of Asian countries. Here and just here you'll be able to find out all about your boss, how much does he earn, his SSN and a lot of other info. We accept orders for DDOS-attacks of any servers and also we offer spam-services. Visit us today and probably tomorrow you'll be a real hacker and will receive a respect of your contemporaries.
Probably tomorrow I'll be a real hacker, and will receive a respect of my contemporaries! Except that the site had already been taken down by the time I opened the mail and went (carefully) to the URL. Shucks, another opportunity missed!
That's really all I have today. And of course there's this novel I ought to be writing... *8)
(Ooh, look, the plane's here! Big tail.)
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