KJToo

This afternoon, Laura and I attended the NaNoWriMo Cleveland-area kickoff party. Twenty-six people gathered in a meeting room at the Beachwood branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, including a reporter[1] from WCPN and couple of groupies supporters who came out to cheer on their favorite aspiring novelists.

Christine, our municipal liaison (she’s running the show, folks), gave everybody a little pep talk, introductions were made, and then the room was abuzz with chatter about the upcoming adventure in marathon writing. Story ideas were traded, as were tips on maintaining momentum, finding inspiration, and recovering sanity once December rolls around. Punch, cider, cookies, crackers and cheese curls were consumed.

Throughout the month of November, we will gather on Thursdays and Saturdays to socialize, encourage one another, and participate in timed “sprints” to see how many words we can bang out in ten or twenty minutes. We will also make use of the forums at the official NaNoWriMo website to brag about goals met, lament goals missed, and just to blow off steam.[2]

Chris Miller is doing a series of podcasts about NaNoWriMo and the Cleveland-area participants throughout November. The first episode in the series — which features interviews recorded at a gathering earlier this month, a snippet from NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty[3] and an essay from a Virginia NaNite[4] — was published yesterday.

Chris was unable to attend today’s event due to skewed priorities a previous commitment, so I volunteered to be his field correspondent. Foolishly, he accepted[5]. I interviewed[6] a handful of people, some new to NaNo, some who are returning to take another whack at writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Some have their stories outlined and characters created while others have only the seed of an idea that they will nurture into full blossom over the next month[7]. All were upbeat, excited, and anxious to begin.

Tomorrow is the last day to prepare. Once the trick-or-treaters are all at home with their candy hordes, the sounding of the midnight bell will signal the start of National Novel Writing Month, and the mad dash will commence. Sixteen hundred sixty-seven words a day. Eleven thousand six hundred sixty-nine words a week. Fifty thousand words before the bell tolls to signal the start of December and the end of our novels.

Now all I need is an idea.

Posted October 30, 2005 Comments(3)

• Peter “Chewbacca” Mayhew: In
• George “Sulu” Takei: Out
• I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby: In(dicted)
• Harriet “Just Harriet” Miers: Out

Did I miss anything?

Posted October 28, 2005 Comments(2)

Yes, I’ve activated the 3-column theme I created last week. Expect the sidebar on the right to be populated with additional stuff in the coming days.

Feedback is appreciated.

Posted October 27, 2005 Comments(21)

One of the main reasons I enjoy using Mozilla Firefox (and before that Opera and Avant Browser) is the MDI: it keeps my Windows taskbar relatively clutter-free.

At work, Internet Explorer 6 is the only approved browser, so the taskbar can get a little cluttered sometimes. When I glanced up (yes, I dock the taskbar at the top of the screen) just now, I saw this:

Granted, there were about six other applications/instances open at the same time, but these four were at the far right and the next one over on the left wasn’t an IE window, so they caught my eye right away.

Posted October 25, 2005 Comments(6)

Saturday was the Hallowe’en party at Laura’s church. Laura was a jack-o-lantern and I (grabbing my orange t-shirt at the last minute) was the pumpkin prior to carving. I was also a member of the Costume Judging Tribunal, which awarded medals for the top three costumes in four age groups. The pastor attended dressed as the grim reaper, which was certainly interesting.

Afterward, I watched three episodes of Nightstalker and the most recent episode of Threshold. I was totally hoodwinked by the ads for Threshhold, by the way. I was certain that Arthur Ramsey (Peter Dinklage) would be killed off (which would have been a travesty), but the network’s claim that one of the team members would die was a total bait and switch. A good thing, too. If Dinklage had left the show, the only interesting character left would be Nigel Fenway (Brent Spiner); the rest of the Threshold team is pretty damn boring.

Sunday afternoon we had lunch with Laura’s parents at Cici’s, a pizza buffet place. The pizza was decent, though certainly not exciting. Dessert was fairly yummy, though. Laura’s dad looks pretty good for a guy who had his chest cracked open two weeks ago.

After lunch Sam Fisher and I put the hurt on some palace guards and “removed” one Kombayn Nikoladze, a not-nice Georgian fellow who intended to detonate a suitcase nuke in the U.S. That’s right, Splinter Cell is complete. The cats were not at all pleased when I celebrated by listening to the theme song at a high volume (”Listen all you mother-”). Their ears went so far back that they looked like they were running really, really fast.

So what’s a boy to do after finally beating Splinter Cell? Why, get to work on Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, of course. Sam cannot rest, for there’s trouble afoot in East Timor.

I took the day off yesterday because my sinuses weren’t happy. To top it off, I had a sore throat and some sort of weird ear thing that made me dizzy every time I stood up. I’m mostly better now, though.

I took advantage of my down-time to watch Path of Destruction, starring Danika McKellar (formerly of TV’s The Wonder Years). Let me say this: that movie isn’t worth staying home from work to watch.

Posted October 25, 2005 Comments(2)