Four

I know I said I'd stop numbering them but I really don't have a title today so meh. I haven't really done any proper writing in the last couple of days I've been putting off tidying my room by watching movies which also excludes the possibility of writing and laundry - doh! I do need to tidy my room though, my mother is coming to visit tomorrow and I need to look vaguely respectable it's one thing to have a messy room in the house you live in at home it's quite another for them to spend eight hours or so coming to see you and you *still* have a messy room although it's looking like a possibility.

So I set up another blog today - my respectable blog as it were. Where I don't talk about my writing and stuff because people I know might actually read it and then ask me questions about it. For some reason I have issues with people I know knowing stuff. My book is a project that my best friend and my boyfriend know about, and a few people I know on a forum but seeing as they want to fill it with were-llamas - a favourite topic of ours, their input doesn't really count. So other people that I know knowing about the book would lead to them having expectations of me and asking questions that I'm not ready for and it'd be all ugh and stuff. As such this is my technically secret from people I know blog and that is the blog where I can talk about the good things about work and general reviews of stuff and bitching about Open Office as I have already done today :D Anything interesting will come here too :)

So where is my issue with random people knowing about my book? I don't know, I'm a generally paranoid person, I feel like people judge me and it does matter to me and yet the expectations that anyone reading this might put on me are somehow less binding - maybe 'cos no-one is reading this as yet ;) As I read through this I notice a fair few spelling mistakes - it's atrocious, I used to be excellent at spelling maybe typing has sucked it out of me - spell check is a godsend and a... hellsend? I don't know but it's a pain especially if you don't know how to turn it off, like me, in Open Office or it's in American or it doesn't recognise the word "learnt" um excuse me Linux, "learnt" is a word you stupid opensource piece of... Lol but I've already bitched once. That'll do.

So at work today I actually ran out of things to do, it's unprecedented, normally I run out of things I want to do but today I'd done practically everything. At five minutes to the end of the day I realised I could better a presentation that I was working on but that took ten minutes and then I was done too! *sigh* tomorrow is going to be worse though - I have a grilling code review which means lots of people telling me I suck - not fun and then I have to make a cake and I have no idea what I'm going to make just yet. Which reminds me - I did say I'd write up some recipes. Instead of writing them up maybe I'll post all the links to them, that sounds much more fun - I'll write recommendations under them to show I'm not completely slacking off, honest. I've made a couple of excellent cheesecakes recently but they're definitely better made the day before. I've also noticed that I start too many sentences with "so" this is worrying. Luckily I'm the kind of person who is totally difficult about those kinds of things when reading and hopefully such issues won't turn up in my book. I've even highlighted words in my my chapters that have been used in another chapter recently in a different colour so I know to change them. Yes, I *am* that anal. So (see???) on the subject of the book I've got a few chapters done and a couple typed up - yay for me! I was just reading this blog: http://skimdecafmochawithwhip.blogspot.com/ And she really doesn't give anything away about her book: "there's a guy and a girl and um... no that's all I'm telling you." She's very good at it, as for me I'll probably talk more about it just because I can't help it and seeing as I don't talk to anyone else about it - because of the aforementioned reasons - I have to spill it out here, so uh, no pilfering mmkay? Not that you would but I thought if I sounded mean you might believe me, but I didn't sound mean so whatever. In fact I think I overuse the word "so" generally. This is something that needs to be worked on... Maybe it's only a thing I do when I'm talking and when I'm writing writing (as opposed to talking writing) it won't occur so often *fingers crossed* I've blabbered on about nothing in particularly so before you decide to scratch off your own face because it's more interesting (I actually knew someone who made me want to do that) I'll shut up. Tata!

Third

Don't worry, I will stop numbering them soon it's just that Third has another meaning for me right now - I am reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and though I don't relate to it as much as many people seem to have done it is nevertheless a brilliant book. I'm not normally a "hard-core" sci-fi fan, that is, the one with more futuristic technology than fantasy but this book is quite beautiful it must be said. It's definitely going up on the favourites list. I don't really want to give much away but I'll tell you something about it and why "Third" is important. In this world, which is our future (sort of) there are population limits in a way, families are limited to two children and every child soon after they're born has a "monitor" in the back of their head which allows the people from the "Space Army" (It's not actually called that) to monitor their thoughts and feelings and how other people relate to them. Through this means they can work out who is suitable to become a soldier and perhaps who is suitable to become a commander. The story follows the journey of Ender Wiggin through Battle School and, presumably, beyond; but I haven't gotten that far yet. Anyways it's excellent.

Other things of note: today I saw a seventy year old man walking down the street and he appeared to be attempting to dress similar to the "cool" kids of today. This included the baggy trousers belted around the bottom, unfortunately for this gentlemen he did not belt them tight enough and as such had to walk along pulling his trousers up to stop from exposing copious amounts of thigh! Very funny stuff.

I had planned not to bitch about work on here lest someone track me down and fire me or whatnot for what I write but honestly I'm a bit miffed. I work for a software company and I'm doing some coding on a project, self-written in fact and I had a meeting today with my two supervisors - just a check in really. But they manage to make me feel guilty and nervous when I haven't done anything wrong. Yes ok I don't have a to-do list and no I don't have a time plan and my thought-he-was-a-friend-but-seems-to-be-a-traitorous-spy of a colleague has been been dobbing me in for slacking off. Ok so maybe that's all true but I finished my project: today. About an hour after this meeting. I've been working on it for three and a half weeks and have had four days off. I am an intern this is my first real solo project, it's a rewrite and redesign of a project I wrote in august through september but even then I had help. This I did by myself and despite slacking off it's taken me half the time. They didn't even believe me today when I said that I might soon be done, I knew I'd be done by the end of the day (to hedge my bets) and then, I was. And it just bugs me you know? Not to mention feeling completely f***ing betrayed by my colleague, this isn't the first time, he obviously just slags me off to my supervisor, wanker. So yet again I'm loathing Holland and my job and the majority of my life - yes I'm being melodramatic, no I don't care.

The story is having some downtime because I'm feeling sleepy and lazy and despondent to extremes but even so I'm planning little bits about it, thinking about secondary characters, fleshing out my knowledge as it were. I've realised that you can do a whole bunch of research but next to nothing shows in the book. I just live in "fear" of something Galaxy Quest-esque happening... Well not really but the idea of people quizzing me on background details if I ever did get published has me researching now so I will be able to answer their questions - laughable really but never mind.

I think that's the end of my ramble. Conclusion: yay for almost finishing projects, yay for Orson Scott Card, yay for old men reconnecting with their youth and boo for betrayal, work and Holland.

The second day

So hurrah, I remembered - often the key problem with me - to write my blog post. Nada mucho happened today, I got nagged by my boss, did some good work, registered with a doctor - nothing interesting really. So I shall talk about other things. I am a big reader, I may not be a diverse reader but I do love reading and recently (five months ago) I joined the legion of people obsessed with the Twilight Saga which I thought was awesome. There are bits that could have been done better but hey she's a first time writer, plot lines that I didn't like but that's just my preference but anyway I thoroughly enjoyed them. I read the first three books over two weekends and then had to spend an agonising month waiting for the fourth and final installment. In order to prevent the onset of craziness I somehow or other stumbled across some fanfiction, it's the only fanfiction I've ever read so I don't really know how good it is by comparison, all I know is it kept me sane. She has done the first three books through the eyes of Alice, one "what if?" an alternate final book. All of these are fab, she also did a journal style 1st chapter by the main character but by comparison to the others it wasn't great. I'm posting a link to this in case anyone else is interested, I thought they were fab: http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1544699/Nostalgicmiss The alternate final book is still being written so every morning I desperately check if the new chapter has been uploaded and every morning I remember that I'm nine hours ahead so she probably won't have posted at one am *sigh* anyway she said only a couple of chapters to go - yay!

The first day of the rest of my life

Or a year in posts. I have decided in order to bring some form of fun self-discipline into my life that I will write one blog post every day that I can in the next year. I'm not sure why but it seemed like a good idea when I thought of it last week and seeing as I've only just started self-discipline certainly seems necessary.

I'm not going to back out of the first post by it being solely about the next 365 days. I'm going to say lots of things, hooray for me. So, in my somewhat garbled post last week I mentioned that I'm writing a book and, discipline notwithstanding, it's still true, I'm still writing a book or a three-parter. I'm going for a different angle than many people go for (not 'cos I'm special, 'cos I'm weird) in that I want to have three protagonists. I don't know if it's going to work, it has so far but it might drive me crazy. What?! I hear you cry. How would you do this!? Well I'll tell you, it's going to be in third person perspective, in a way, but instead of following around one character it will follow three. I've only seen this done in literature in Robin Hobb's The Liveship Traders, which was phenomenal. But it's going to be marginally different from that too, she had four maybe even five threads in her expertly woven tapestry but each was a different story. In my book I want to have three view points on the same scenery, I'm not going to go over every scene many times but I plan to swap perspective at different points to give a better idea of what's going on. As I said it's working so far but if this ends up being three stories - as it's telling me it will be - I may implode, who knows? This is my first book so I'm kinda working blind here!

I had a loathesome weekend which finished off a pretty crap end of (working)week. The people below me decided to take advantage of the extra hour at two o'clock by having a party. I don't object to parties, I object to music that rattles my windows till five in the morning but I don't think I'm the only one. But now I'm feeling marginally more human and that's always a good thing. I've been given, by two separate people, for unremembered reasons, the hugest pile of DVDs. If I could get my butt in gear and watch one every day for the rest of the time I'm here (not a bad idea if I want to fill blog posts) I still would have some left over, even after the 250 odd days *sigh* luckily there are a few that I've seen but even then! Eek!

So I went to Paris last weekend (I'm making good on the 'lots of things to say' promise) and it was tremendous fun. I went with my boyfriend for our anniversary, awww. I say went, we met there seeing as I am in the Netherlands and he is in London. I left my love on Ealing Broadway... But yes it was good fun, we did adult tourist things like went to the Moulin Rouge - I've never seen so many breasts in my life! On the non-breast side of things there was a guy who did the most amazing shadow puppets and a pair not-quite-gymnasts where the man balanced the woman on his head... with no hands! I was rather impressed I must say. We went to my aunt and uncle's the next day and I ate the best tiramisu in the world - it actually is and it's the one recipe I will not post! But I had also eaten slightly too rare steak with disagreed with me not a little so I had to make close personal friends with a bin on a metro station platform unfortunately. But again I'm better now so all is well. Hooray!

Story Time

So it would appear that I've started writing a story... it wasn't intentional I promise but it happened and now I'm on the second chapter and it's good fun. It's about dragons which is always good but other than that I'm keeping schtum. I think it could be good but then I'm sure all writers think that of their novels. I already know that it has to be a trilogy or at least in three parts which is a tad scary if only because it means I have to write three books! I'm pretty new at this so I'm going to start spending time trawling the internet to find out how other people do the whole writing malarkey and when's a good time to start looking for publishing, not that it'll be published I'm sure but it'd be nice to try :) I'm going to get a lot of people to read it first if only to set up a fan base!