In my experience, New Year’s Resolutions aren’t meant to be kept, so that when you make them, you end up feeling sad and confused, not to mention disappointed in your own shortcomings, being completely unable to keep to those simple goals you set yourself some twelve months earlier.

So I didn’t bother.

I was also infected with a nasty flu virus over Christmas (so bad that I spent Christmas day alone (if you don’t include the cats, who are blinded by what I don’t quite think is love because cats are incapable of love, but at the very least appreciation for the hand that feeds them), because I couldn’t get out to see any family and they all live too far away to come to me (and i didn’t want them there, in any case, what with me being a raised flu zombie), in bed, watching horrible Christmas television on ITV, because the remote was broken and I seriously did not have enough energy to get up and change the channel by hand.

Oh, and just as a by-the-by: Polar Express? Massive pile of shit film.

But anyway.  Since I wasn’t much better by New Year’s, I was in no state to be making dream-filled plans for the following 365 fun-filled days.  And since I’ve very slowly spent the majority of my time since then getting better while re-integrating into work life, I never got around to making any.

Looking back, I kind of wished I had forced myself to, as now we’re over a month into another year, and I am stuck doing my usual floundering about the amount of things I want to do, but either out of sheer laziness or just life in general elbowing its way into my time, I have done very little.  At least if I had made some kind of goals, I would’ve had something to mock myself for having not done, something for my inner life-coach (Don’t you have one of those?  Mine’s called Cybil) to yell at me to do.

In any case, it’s done (or — in this case — not done) now, so now I bring you my very belated New Year’s Resolutions:

• I will save a good portion of my wage from now on to put towards the San Diego Comic Con trip in July.  This isn’t so much a resolution as much as something I have no choice but to do.  If I don’t have enough money, I’m not going to be able to go.  And since we have tickets (hell yeah!), we have to go.
• I will either finish the first draft of Divided They Fall or I will finish the umpteenth draft of The Vampire’s Son.  This is an either-or; I am not giving myself the added pressure of finishing them both (though it would of course be very nice!)  If I am still working on one of these by November, I will make my NaNoWriMo 2011 project on their respective completion.  Failing to complete either of these by the end of November, I will release “Jeremy” to the general public, which is around 99% finished.  I am not allowing myself to bring work on The Servant or Blood of Ages (the fourth and fifth book, respectively), until any of the above criteria are filled.
• I normally put in a resolution about eating more healthily or doing more exercise (More?  I mean any.), but now it’s getting to the stage that I really have to start looking at this as a serious subject.  I might go into this in more detail one day, when I want to put you off your lunch, but essentially my body is a mess — almost entirely self-inflicted — and at twenty seven, if I don’t do something to fix it now, there might come a time when I’m not able to at all.

Wow, that’s a bit of a downer to end on, isn’t it?

Here’s some Jazz Tenticles to lighten the mood.

There we go. Feel much better now.

Ha! Tricked you!

Anyway.

So, yes, it’s been pretty quiet in the world of Kat the last two weeks. Since NaNoWriMo ended, I have been wandering the proverbial streets, wondering where and when inspiration will return, open-armed, telling me it didn’t mean to leave but that life just took us down different paths. Or something.

I still have an incomplete third draft of Divided They Fall.  It lingers in shadows, watching me.  Judging me.

Why haven’t you finished me yet? it demands.  More important things to do, have we?  Have World of Warcraft Cataclysm to play, do we?

In any case, I am still working on it, albeit much more slowly now that there is less pressure imposed upon me from the world at large to write that damn novel. It’s harder to keep driving along when you are the only one telling yourself to finish it.

But I am still on it.  Honest.

As a bonus, here’s a picture of my new worgen druid, Penrefe, and a double feature with my worgen warrior, Glencoco (you go, Glen Coco!), both of which I am loving alongside my now level 83 worgen hunter (I race-changed her; I’m not that quick), Catirina.

Being addicted to World of Warcraft Cataclysm is like being addicted to crack: You know it’s going to destroy you, but you can’t resist the buzz you get for doing it.

If you play World of Warcraft and would like to join me and our awesome guild of awesome, come join us! We currently play ‘For the Alliance’ on Mazrigos EU server. Join us at TheNuGen.co.uk

I was hoping to save this epic song for the day I finally finished my entire first series, but considering the amount of time it’s taken me just to get this far, by the time the day comes I finally send the first series out to pasture, music itself (along with the Internet, fast food, and possibly mankind in general) will have become obsolete, and we’ll all be living in suspended animation, stored in pods on the moon.

So, yes, this is it, the end of another NaNoWriMo; hope you had a creative November, because that’s it for another year!

My spelling has suffered significantly throughout the course of this ordeal, which is of course excusable, with the advent of Spell Checkers, no doubt when I’m finished I can just sweep it under the rug in one fell swoop. What the Spellcheck doesn’t check for is sheer moronic stupidity, of course, where you put completely inappropriate and yet correctly-spelled words into the fray. See my previous example of the man who was sticky. I’m starting to think that the person who designed the layout of the modern computer keyboard was a bit of a sadist.

It doesn’t help that the T is so close to the Y, and it’s so easy to write Slaters instead of Slayers, leaving the impression running around in my mind that there’s an army of Saved by the Bell’s AC Slater clones running around killing vampires willy nilly. That did cut off my creative flow whenever I spelled it wrong, after I’d stopped pissing my pants with laughter, of course. It’s the little things that keep you going, after all.

Overall, I’ve had a similar experience this year to what I had the year previous. I managed with only occasional, mild discomfort to throw out the daily word count, but as with last year’s attempt, the novel itself is not finished.

But let’s talk about that later. First, let’s see how I did!

So yeah, there we go. Fifty thousand words in thirty days.  Whether or not you see this as overly impressive will greatly depend on your own writing ability. My family right now think I’m about as brilliant as a really brilliant thing, just for trying to do this, let alone for actually finishing.

And there we go, 50k, written slowly and consistency (more or less) for 30 days (give or take, considering I have actually finished early, although in fairness to me, up until literally last Wednesday, I did think it ended today, so…). Not really much more to say on all that except…woo.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m not exactly jumping 15ft in the air in ecstasy at the prospect of having done all this writing, and you’d be right, and earn yourself a shiny make-believe medal for your intuitiveness.

I’m very glad I did it, of course.  It’s been very quiet for a good ten or more months prior to this exercise, where I did almost nothing writing-related, which — varying degrees of excuses aside — just wasn’t on. So I am grateful for the timing of this opportunity to jump back into it, and again this year the online writing communities have made it easier to gel back into the creative process.

But I’m now in a position of ‘What Do I Do Now?’. I haven’t finished the novel itself yet, not by quite a way, if the outline can be adhered to.  If I am to finish it ever, I will need to continue writing after others have stopped.  I suspect the story will end around 80 – 90k, so essentially, I need another month of putting out the same numbers.

Anyway, that’s enough complaining.  I still did it, and I’m giving myself a fat slap on the back for the effort.  The important thing is I’m back into the swing of the whole writing thing right now, and that’s a big…no, massive…no, gargantuan improvement, and one that I can’t be thankful enough for.

Bring it on, December! I’m ready to go another round!

How are all you Wrimos getting on with your words?  Have you reached your goal, and have you told all the story you wanted to in the word count?  Best of luck in these last remaining days!

So, this time next week, we’ll be in December, the festive month of Christmas (or Winterval, if we’re being abhorrently PC about the names of Britain’s festivities — I call it Christmas, and I don’t even like Christmas all that much), I will (hopefully) have a 50,000+ word Scrivener document, albeit with a hefty chunk of remaining scenes to write, although on the upside, I do have those scenes outlined, so I know what I’m doing, it’s going to be a case of maintaining the drive to continue drilling out a couple of hundred words a day until it’s finished.

Which I might not do, but anyway, moving on!

So it occured to me that thus far I haven’t come across anything hilariously bad in re-reading. That may well be that I haven’t actually done any re-reading of it yet, but that’s not the reason I bring it up.  The reason I bring it up is because I did find this wonderful little typo, which I couldn’t resist sharing.

The line should’ve been:

The man was blonde, tall and stocky, with broad shoulders…

The line actually read:

The man was blonde, tall and sticky…

It’s best to remember that all this writing lark — regardless of whether or not you do it ‘just for fun’ or with a serious and driven long-term goal to venture into the world of publication — it’s still about having fun, about enjoying yourself, and — of course — about telling the story you’ve always wanted to to tell.

Good luck in these closing days!

WordCount-o-Rama. Note how the progress bar has now gone to a not entirely pleasant greeny/yellowy/vomity hue. Yum.