end of week one

okay, here's the deal. this is NaNoWriMo, and i'm going to write a novel in a month, because that's what you do.

last year, my first NaNo, i didn't know a damn thing about writing. I had never written anything longer than maybe 5000 words. i hadn't written anything i felt proud of since high school. so when i sat down and ideas started flowing, and i got more and more words, it boosted my confidence immensely. i knew it wasn't perfect. i suspected it wasn't even that good, but i kept going, because the ideas kept coming.

now after writing that, putting it away, going back to it, editing, redrafting, editing again, i realized that as much as i love the story plot-wise, from a structural point of view it's really seriously flawed. my main character is dull (sorry Ruby, but it's true and you know it), my writing is okay, but inconsistent, and the story doesn't really achieve what i was hoping it would.

is this stuff that upsets me? no, not at all. because i'm learning from it. i'm learning from all the reading and writing and talking about writing that i've been doing in the last six months.

here's where i think my problem lies for NaNo this year (did i mention i'm having problems? yeah, hence blogging rather than writing). i keep learning things, these 'rules' about what should and shouldn't happen when you write, about what you need to make compelling characters, about how to keep the story moving so people won't throw it against the wall in frustration. i'm learning these things that help when you actually have a story. i still don't have a story. i have 17k words of lead-up, i just don't know what it's leading up to. (I suspect it might be leading up to action, which is another wrinkle, because i don't know how to write action either.)

i'm doing this to challenge myself, to prove to myself that i still have it in me to finish a draft, and to get enough down on paper that it 'counts' as a novel in some way, shape, or form. i'm starting to suspect that whatever this is, it ain't a novel. i'm going to finish it, because i am, but i may just never look at it again at this rate.

guh.

(have to edit to add- do you see the problems i'm having ^ writing coherently? the fuck?)

mixed success and various ramblings

so NaNo got off to a brilliant start. 11000 words in the first day. No, that's not a typo. No, i don't know how i did it, but don't get too excited. Day two added another 4000, though i was starting to get concerned because it really seemed like i was writing myself into a corner. Day 3, i was firmly sandwiched in that corner. there was a guy fixing the drywall in the apartment, so i left to find a quiet writing spot somewhere else. the public library was a bust, too cold, and the tables were too high to type comfortably, and it was too quiet. i used to think i needed total silence to write effectively, but it turns out i just need the right kind of noise.

That kind of noise can, apparently, be found at starbucks. by the time i got there, i had realized the problem with the writing i had done so far. aside from the plot not doing what i wanted, my writing itself was flagging because i was writing in the 3rd person. i keep trying to convince myself that i can do it, but i've never had much success. the short story i wrote for the anthology coming out later this year was in 3rd, and it was a nightmare for me to get right. i think there's a bit of a stigma against 1st person, that it's less sophisticated, less literary, or some crap. frankly, if i'm going for sophisticated and literary, the POV i choose is going to be the least of my problems.

What this meant was re-starting from the beginning, telling the same story, many of the same exact scenes in fact, only in 1st. i got 4000 words in the three hours at starbucks (before my knitting buddies arrived), added another 3000 after i got home that night, and added another 5000 yesterday, so i feel i am firmly back on track. the story is working better, though there are enormous holes, several areas where i just glossed over details i couldn't be bothered to research at the time, and 12000 words in i'm only just starting to get a handle on my MCs voice, but this is NaNo. If i come out at the end of this month with a decent story, i can work with the details come december. or january. or, you know, may. whenever i can stand to look at it again.

so if i'm doing so well, if i'm such a keener, why am i blogging and not writing? two words: no school.
two more words: kim possible. *twitch*

NaNo Anxiety

NaNo officially starts for me in just over four hours, so naturally i'm freaking out.

the last week and a half has been spent planning, worldbuilding, techbuilding, character building, and so on. no actual outlining, because outlines apparently make my writing suck. but i know who is going to be in the story, i know where it starts, and i have some idea of where i want it to go, and how to get there.

other than that, i'm relying on my mad pantsing skillz to pull me through. we'll see how that goes.

it has veered so far away from the original prompt that inspired it, it's kind of hilarious. besides one character name, and the general idea of computer hackers and the social network, it's entirely unrecognizable. but it's incredible what you can come up with from a few simple sentences.

the tech stuff has been the trickiest, because even though i don't have to fully explain how it works in the story (at least not up front) i need to know in order to be consistent. and it would be helpful if i could come up with names for all these things i'm inventing. i need a name for the implants, and for the terms they use for communicating through the implants, and what they call people with implants vs people without, and the ones with apparently malfunctioning implants (oops, spoiler alert). right now i've just got a bunch of placeholder terms, and i'm just hoping something better will come to me at some point in the next 30 days.

is anyone reading this? doing NaNo? add me as a writing buddy (i'm divy over there).

i'm gonna go hyperventilate for a few hours.

NaNoWriMo 2010

it's almost time! NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a novel in the month of November. last year's nano is what got me started writing for real. it was a fantastic, mind-opening experience.

the novel i completed last year has been going through various betas, revisions, edits, stompings-on, etc. for about 6 months. i'm starting to accept the fact that it might be a trunk novel, or at the best, something i will revisit and re-plot/re-write in a few years when i'm better at this stuff. but the experience was invaluable, so naturally i'm doing it again.

now to me, nano is definitely about challenging oneself, in some way or another. just finishing 50K is a big enough challenge, but this year i've managed to take it even further. sigh.

my writing buddy and i agreed to do a plot-swap; we came up with very basic ideas for each other, a main character with a goal and a general sense of what their major obstacle will be. i was totally into the idea because I tend to get emotionally attached too characters too easily, so that i'm afraid to properly torture them ;) he also fully admitted to me that he wanted to force me to write outside of my comfort zone.

i admit i wasn't inspired by his ideas at first (he gave me a choice, which was part of the problem. i'm terrible at decision-making.) but i persevered and finally something clicked. i've been brainstorming most of last night and today, and i've come up with something i'm really really thrilled with. i can already see a bunch of different ways it can go, sub-plots i can expand upon, major crises for my MC that i can just keep piling up until she begs for mercy.

and apparently it's going to be some sort of cyberpunk/speculative fiction deal. umm, okay? i have never written anything remotely fantasy/sci-fi before. (save about 9K words of weird fantasy drivel that was probably more romance than anything, just with magic and shit.)

but the idea hit, and it won't let go. it's got mind-controlling brain implants and government conspiracies, neuro-hackers, etc. the main character is a teenager, so i'm probably also going to work in some standard edgy YA themes (drugs, disobedience of parents, runaways, etc.)

(i'm going to add here that i'm incapable of synopsising anything to save my life. i go off on tangents and ramble and completely lose the thread of what i was talking about... i know, shocking, isn't it. but once i get a hold on the meat of this thing, i'll post my synopsis here, or link to my nano profile, or something)

on the one hand, i'm totally freaked out because i haven't read much in this genre (or at all) and they (they who? i dunno) always say you should read in the genre you're writing. but then, this is nano, i'm not looking to send it out to publishers on dec. 1st or anything. it's an exercise more than anything.

now because i haven't read anything, not even the major names (i'm totally kicking myself for not picking up my dad's copy of Neuromancer that sat on his bookshelf for my entire life) there's also the possibility that i'll write something totally derivative and unoriginal, without even trying to.

i've been googling 'brain implants' and such (whoo, there's a lot more out there than i thought) and it seems a lot of my ideas aren't unique at all. they also might not be really all that unrealistic. but the underlying premise of the story relies on the fact that the majority of this society has willingly implanted themselves (or their children) with these devices. i'm not sure how i'm going to wangle that.

i am going to need to constantly remind myself that i can write anything i want, and if it's crap, then that's okay, because nano is really really good for writing crap.

september who?

yeah, so i missed a month. bite me. september sucked big fat donkey balls.

plus i had nothing worth blogging about. and frankly, i was reluctant to push the baby picture post down. still feeling bereft of smooshing. but i will be home for christmas, so babysmooshes for the holidays!

knitting is great these days. finished several projects, including Buttercup in hempathy (omg, i love hempathy so much) and my 2 year (!) sweater project in malabrigo sock yarn. yeah, if you care about this stuff, you're already on Rav, so i'm not going to even bother linking. i'm lazy like that.

writing is going... weird. i've decided to write from an outline. i actually wrote an outline. i know what most of the scenes in this story are going to be, and i know how the character arcs will work. i even whipped up a freaking timeline in a spreadsheet. so now i have to write it.

and i like the story. i like the characters. my protagonist is fun to write (he's a very sweary teenage boy, and he's kind of a jerk, and a total player. it's awesome.) and this has the potential to be really good, in my opinion (though i'll grant i'm a little biased).

but right now, all it is is potential. there's no story yet. the words that go on the page to tell the story aren't coming. i'm writing scene after scene, plugging along, but they're all disjointed and wrong, and they're too short, and not enough happens. i mean, stuff happens plot wise, but all i have is the stuff that furthers the plot. the inbetweeny stuff, the deeper characterization, the setting, any description at all, is just gone, and i don't know where the part of my brain that writes that stuff went. (also missing? the part of my brain that writes concise, non-convoluted sentences. sorry about that).

so writing it has just become this frustrating exercise of blah. and blogging about it, while not productive for the story, makes me feel like i'm doing something. (something besides procrastinating? well, no.)

feel free to give me kicks in the ass, i can probably use them.

awesome

this is the best thing going right now-- my new nephew


with the blanket i knit for him (see, i still blog about knitting),



smiling. sigh.


yeah, i'm totally in love. i'm much too far away to snuggle him properly, so i have to gush over pictures instead.

don't mind me, i'm just going to sit over here in the corner until my ovaries stop twitching...

fic happens

sometimes i hate writing. no, that's not really true, i always love actually writing, putting words on (virtual) paper and making them sound, you know, good, and stuff. (get off my back. i'm saving all my prose-writing energy for the real stuff...)

but the part of writing where i know i need to make something specific happen, and i can't do it because the words, or the characters, won't cooperate, that just sucks.

it's like with knitting- knitting back and forth without worrying about what you're making is easy- though usually you end up with not much more than a strip of plain knitting- wheee, scarves. if you want something that actually looks like something (sweater, socks, whatever) you need to make changes, shift, manipulate the stitches differently, add and decrease. and usually you have a pattern that tells you how and when to do this so you end up with something that looks like something you wanted it to look like in the first place. (hello, train of thought? where did you go?)

but writing isn't like knitting. because there isn't a pattern for a good story. there are guidelines, sure, and if you outline obsessively you can sort of shape the final product before you write it. (but i can't outline, and besides, that's another post). so for me, writing is like knitting a giant piece of shapeless nothing and just crossing your fingers that you can turn it into something decent when you're done.

phew. this post is brought to you by poorly crafted, tenuous metaphors.

(it's a good thing i'm pushing this post down later today with something far far more awesome.)

stutter

hey blog, i'm going to rant at you for a bit, okay? because frankly, no one else wants to hear it (the husband has been listening to this rant patiently for a few days, but i just can't subject him to it anymore. also, he's at work.)

i'm writing a piece of short fiction. i actually have a sort of a deadline too. for the first time, i'm writing something because i was asked to, not because i just feel like it, and it's a fantastic feeling to know that anyone besides me is actually interested in my work! i was given a very broad category, a working title as a prompt, and i immediately came up with a perfect idea.

perfect, if you ignore the part where i spent ten minutes alternately typing and sobbing. stupid fucking emotions. writing something that depressing has long-term consequences on my mood, and i just can't afford to be a weepy, grumpy ball of grr right now.

so, i brainstorm, come up with two or three other fairly decent ideas before i settle on the idea. the one that i know will work, that has a beginning, middle, end, conflict, interesting characters, potential to be both touching and humourous (a balance i try to strike most of the time. also, is it just me or are there too many 'u's in humourous?)

so there's no problem, right? oh, until there's a problem. i can't write it. i feel like i'm stuttering, like i keep starting and getting a few sentences out but then the rest of it just stops. ideas shut off, gone. my ability to write readable prose seems to have disappeared as well. my dialogue is stilted. i hate my characters. i don't think the conflict is all that interesting anymore, and i don't know if i can fix it. (i'll grant that my husband read what i have so far and he thinks it's good. i don't think he's lying to spare my feelings, but i also don't think he's a very unbiased source.)

i don't have time to start from scratch with a new idea. besides that, i like this idea, i really do, and i really think it will make a good story if i can just get it the fuck out of my brain!

if you need me, i'll be bashing my head against the keyboard.

this blog post is brought to you by a crippling fear of heights

and if you don't already have one, you probably will once you see the pictures.

(yeah, pictures!)

whenever there are small repairs to be done on an outside wall of one of the apartments, the workers build a little bamboo scaffolding outside the window. they're like makeshift balconies, and the mere idea of stepping out on one gives me the shakes. a friend of ours had work done on their apartment, and apparently the workers warned them not to let the kids out to play on the scaffold after they'd left. they live on the 36th floor. umm, yeah, i'm not thinking that's going to be a problem...

the other day, the same friend called us (they live across the complex) to point out another apartment that was being worked on. they were at the very beginning stages of building the scaffolding, so there were just a few metal beams sticking out of the wall. and a guy straddling the beam, harnessed by a strap around his waist (the harness may have been more secure than it looked, to be fair. i wasn't that close).


pretty crazy, right?

this was also on the 36th floor. here's a pic of the full building, just for perspective. i've circled the guy above in red. if you can't see him, look up, waaaay up...


yeah. i really don't have anything else to say about that. on the plus side, neither of my kids want to do that job when they grow up. one less thing to worry about, i guess.

home again

i mean, i guess i'm home...

right now, i feel like home is a million miles away. i have some fantastic friends out here (one is currently taking my boys swimming, giving me some precious alone time. gotta love that) and once school starts and i get into a routine, i'm sure that things will be okay here. i'm sure of it.

but now, all i can think is how much i miss my mom and my sister making me laugh myself silly and giving me big squishy hugs. i miss talking my dad's ear off about writing, and listening to him talk my ear off about food. i miss playing guitar and singing with my big, grown-up nephew. i miss the tiny baby nephew that is going to be born any day now (i didn't realize you could miss someone you've never even met) and i miss my brother and (as-good-as) sister-in-law, who are doing awesome getting ready for this new little life.

i miss home. there's nothing wrong with hong kong, but dammit, it isn't home.

justified self-doubt, or am i just procrastinating again?

okay then.

i wrote 20K words in 10 days, that was kind of cool. and i do like the ideas that i formed in that time, i even think it might make a decent story... someday. right now, i've managed to talk (think) myself out of working on that particular plot. i lost focus, lost the grasp on what i wanted from my characters and my story, and i started to question whether the idea i had could really be carried on for another 50-60K words. basically, i bailed. just like i told myself i wouldn't. i figured once i had 20K words it would be a lot harder to abandon the idea. apparently not.

but, but, but...

i realized i have 3 months until NaNoWriMo, and I will do that again this year, no question. So i figured, 3 months is more than enough time to bang out a first draft on one of the myriad ideas i've come up with since april. i picked the idea i've had the longest, the one that i felt had the most potential, the one i've already written the beginning to twice (both times i fizzled out after about 5K words). i tried a new approach. i changed POV and tense, i changed my mc name (i hated her original name anyway) and i made it 10K words in... then i started thinking about it again.

several major plot points started unraveling. if character A does this, why doesn't character B just do that? what's the character's motivation for this? why is she behaving this way instead of that? and all my questions were totally valid and entirely unanswerable. seriously, i don't know how i have had this idea bouncing around in my head for so long and not noticed all the problems with it until now.

i had a clear idea of where i wanted this to go, i even had something i would call an outline, and i hate outlines. maybe that was part of the problem. writing into an outline has sapped my will to write.

so i went back to the drawing board, so to speak. i went back to the original ideas that spawned this whole story, and it boils down to the two main characters and the setting. everything that came after that (the characters' families, their romantic pasts, their jobs) is probably going to go out the window.

now i can't decide whether i'm just excusing this pattern of behaviour (which is- write write write, oh wait, that sucks, nevermind...) or if i actually might have a better plot to stick these characters into. i suspect this is just another way for me to justify to myself the fact that i am abandoning yet another wip.

so, in keeping with my pattern, after the 'nevermind' i need to spend at least three days beating myself up for abandoning this before i can get back to writing properly. gah.

this blog post has been brought to you by the little voice in my head that says 'you suck'. i should probably see about getting that removed...

good news, bad news

good news: i have reached my 20K goal, much sooner than planned even. I have the beginnings of a story, really almost a skeleton of a story, with a beginning, middle, and something that could be leading towards an end.

bad news: i have no fucking clue what to do next. i'm trying to expand upon the scenes i have, and i'm stuck. i'm trying to add new scenes, and i'm stuck. i'm trying to write stuff that i know won't be a part of the story, just to get into the character's voice. nope, still stuck.

the whole point of this exercise was to not have my writing end up amounting to nothing more than practice. don't get me wrong, practice is good, but it would be even better to get to the point where i can write a whole fucking story instead of just random bits and pieces.

sigh.

my next goal. keep writing this damn story. finish writing it, even, before i move on to something else.

wish me luck...

accountability

alright. i'm done fucking around.

i need to start writing something. something new. something with more than 5000 words. something with a story that is at the very least interesting to me. (i'll worry about whether it's interesting to anyone else after i'm finished the first draft).

i'm setting a goal. it's a small goal, imo, but i don't want to fail and discourage myself. by the end of July, i will write 20,000 words on something, anything really. but it must be one thing, one story with at least a vaguely cohesive plot. i don't know what that plot will be yet. i'd better get on that.

i'm going to ask a small favour from anyone who actually reads this blog (and again, i know there are maybe three of you). if you happen to see me screwing around on facebook, or if you actually see me or communicate with me in any way at all, pester me about my writing. the more persistent, the better. i'm going to enlist my husband and my dad and anyone else who is going to see me regularly in these next few weeks. if my laptop is on my lap, i should be writing. i might have to disable my wifi, but dammit, it's the only way anything is going to get done.

tales from an 8 hour flight

keeping in mind, 8 hours is cake compared to the 15 hour hauls from HK to TO and back, but this 8 hour flight was in the middle of the day, meaning the kids were awake the whole time. i still have a twitch in my eye.

the first major bummer was realizing that there was nowhere for me to plug in my laptop (i've been spoiled by the higher-end airlines, this one was barebones.) it would have been mildly irritating if i'd been planning on watching a movie or playing games on my computer, but i was actually hoping to write. i actually had the desire and the inspiration to do some real work, and i spent the whole time frantically checking how much battery i had left.

i'm currently re-writing scenes from my ms based on the critiques of several betas (when three separate sources with very different backgrounds--both in their lives and in their writing experience-- point out the same flaws in your work, you should probably listen). i'm now trying to work on the scenes again, but it feels like 1 am and my mojo ran away... feh.

so not being able to write, i defaulted to the next obvious thing- knitting. this led to one of the nicest things about the trip. a woman sitting across the aisle from us started to chat with me about my knitting. she noticed that i knit continental (yarn in the left hand), while most knitters from TO, in her experience, knit english style (yarn in the right hand) (for the record, she's english but she knits continental, so the labels clearly don't count for much)(believe it or not, this was quite an interesting discussion. i know some of you won't believe it. you know who you are. you can shush). in any case, i got to chat about yarn and stuff with a total stranger, and she turned out to be quite lovely. she even engaged my five year old in conversation for the last half-hour or so of the flight, which was a relief to my husband and i, to say the least.

oh, and speaking of the five year old, apparently the novelty of air-travel hasn't worn off for him. he squeals like he's on a roller coaster every time we hit a bit of turbulence, he whoops excitedly when we start to land. add this to the incessant chatter, the fighting with his brother about whose magazine was whose (yeah, the crappy duty free catalogues are apparently very interesting to these children) and the occasional whines tantamount to 'are we there yet?'
this incited some dirty looks from people around us, and while i can't really blame them (hell, i was shooting dirty looks at him too) i couldn't help but think 'you people have to deal with this for 8 hours. this is my life'. i couldn't feel too sympathetic.

this has been an especially rambly and pointless post. i'm blaming the jet lag, yet again. someday i'll spend more than three weeks in the same timezone, and then i'll be unstoppable...

first Canada day not living in Canada

thirty years, and this is the first Canada day that i haven't actually been living in Canada. I'm in the UK at the moment, not in HK, and i'll at least be hanging out with my Canadian family here, but it still feels weird.

being Canadian is a huge part of my identity. more than even the knitting...

it wasn't something i ever realized was so important until i found myself actually living so far from home. it wasn't until i started making Canadian friends in Hong Kong that i realized that i missed Canadians, not just Canada. i think it's a case of not truly appreciating something until it's gone.

i'm too tired and distracted (by british children's television, wugh) to properly express what i love so much about Canada. it might be easier to say what i don't love...

umm... well, it can get a little cold.

Happy Canada Day!

creative blue balls

i'm super jetlaggy (again) and half asleep, and about an hour ago i was snoozing, listening to music (i don't even remember what, but it must have been something very deep and evocative or some shit). and i get ideas... actually, i get the feeling i've got a really really good one, but i'm too sleepy to grab hold of it, and then the song changes, and then my idea is ripped away and i'm left feeling all cranky and unsatisfied. and now that i'm almost, sort of awake, i keep getting these moments where i think i might be remembering, but if i try to grab the idea it disappears. i have this anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach that might be the jet lag, or it might be the kids' fault, but i think it's this missing idea, nagging, gnawing, tapping me on the shoulder and then when i turn around it isn't there.

so close... sigh.

perplexing

for the past 5 years, at least, all my social interactions (that haven't revolved around my kids) have revolved around knitting. i'm used to talking to people about knitting and having them 'get' me. well last night at a social event for writers, i had a shocking realization: non-knitters really do find knitting kind of insane.

last week, when my writing buddy started mocking the knitting, I thought it might just be him- that he was just closed-minded, or more likely that he got a kick out of teasing me (hi Jay!) but i think it's not just him. people think knitting is weird. who knew?

last night a man compared me to his 100 year old grandmother sitting in her rocking chair, waiting for death. naturally, i took offence. this was followed by the classic "why can't you just buy socks" line. to which i pulled out my socks to show him how so-much-cooler they were than storebought socks. (he wasn't impressed. also shocking.)

then he joked that i should write a novel about knitting, and i shouted "done and fucking done!" (we were probably both a little drunk and argumentative... i also told him not to fuck with the lady with the pointy sticks...)

all in all, it was a very fun night.

so for the first time in a long time i was the weirdest person in the room because of my knitting (this doesn't imply i haven't been the weirdest in the room for other reasons...not by a long shot). i'm not sure how i feel about this. i've never laboured under the illusion that i'm normal- hell, who wants to be normal?- but i didn't think sticks and string would be what made me so strange.

i lied

i just deleted a whole blog post- something i said i wouldn't do.

why? because i don't want anyone calling me up or emailing me asking me if i've gone off the deep end. i haven't, for the record.

i am a good writer. i'm actually a very good writer, and if that makes me sound conceited, then so be it.

i have to strike a balance between writing what i want to write, and writing what i need to write. i need to get stuff out of my head, so i write. i want to make an impact on people, so i write. i'm ridiculously anxious about sharing my writing, but when i get positive feedback, it makes me so damn happy. and when i get negative feedback it just pushes me to do better. (and sometimes makes me cry a bit- but mostly it's the 'do better' part).

right now, most of what i write is depressing. i don't know why. maybe it's just the headspace i'm in. but my best stuff, some of my favourite stuff, is the depressing stuff. the happy stuff just doesn't do it for me. my own full manuscript, the one i've been obsessing over since november, is at its best (in my opinion) in the depressing parts. my husband disagrees, of course, but then he doesn't do depressing. i suppose that's a good thing. a balancing thing.

said husband is watching star trek: enterprise at this very moment, a fact that makes him very happy, and me sort of depressed. what does that tell you?

it just occurred to me

i'm leaving town again in ten days. i feel like i just barely got back (wait, i did just barely get back). i'm still jet lagged. if you fly halfway back to where you were when you're still jet lagged, does that negate the jet lag at all?

as a bonus, the next trip includes my husband and kids, which is great because i love them and all, but equally crappy because we'll have two jet lagged parents and a couple of jet lagged kids. joy.

i got a message from a knitting friend who knows i'm a writer about a flash fiction workshop in town this evening. very last minute, but i think i'm going to go. it sounds like fun.

the problem with this last minute stuff is, usually it's in central or thereabouts (basically downtown Hong Kong on the main island) which is easily an hour from where i live. so i really have to have a few hours warning if i want to do this sort of thing. today i think i had just enough warning (the fact that my husband is so awesome that he's willing to come home early to watch the boys helps immensely. i owe this dude hardcore. i'm making a list).

last time i tried to go to a writing event in central, i ended up at a closed bar, completely missing a sign on the door saying that they had moved to the bar next door, and so i spent two hours total on a bus for nothing except a bruised ego and a major case of 'i'm a fucking moron'. any bets on whether i'll make it to this one in one piece, on time, and without embarrassing myself?

don't worry, i wouldn't bet on me either.


ETA: one piece? check. on time? check. without embarrassing myself? eh, jury's still out...

recipe for a perfect friday night

start in the afternoon, with a good 4 hours of knitting, with five fantastic friends. try not to fall asleep on the oh-so-comfy couches. stay hydrated, and mainline something caffeinated.

fizzy pink stuff, calamari, bruschetta (hold the olives, though) and laughing a lot, sitting in a ridiculously comfy booth.

tram ride up to the peak. okay, in all fairness, i could have skipped this out- the buildings and trees were at a 45 degree angle to the car. it felt wrong. distracted by stories of fingernails falling off (thanks again, Anna!) but still, i don't need to travel sideways up a mountain ever again.

dinner on the peak, including much too much wine, fancy cocktails (mine had coconut- yum), delicious food, and boozy hot chocolate for dessert (it actually didn't occur to me at first that hot chocolate with baileys and frangelico was alcoholic, which speaks volumes about my state of mind at that point...)

minibus down the mountain (yeah, i could've skipped that too. fucking psycho minibus drivers. at least i remembered to put on my seatbelt...eventually)

longest taxi ride home ever. how i managed to stay awake i'll never know.

get home, and get a second wind. perfect timing...

blog. because i'm awake already, why not ramble for the masses (or, the three people who actually read this...)

sleep should come next. right?