Cleanliness = Godliness, and gods have something to do with inspiration, right?

It's the fourth day of Camp NaNo, and I'm lagging behind. This is unusual for me -- I typically have a very strong first week with dwindling word counts during the second and third. I'm at 4,109 right now. Since I'm following regular NaNo quota instead of the smaller Camp quota, I'm supposed to be at 6,668 by midnight tonight. Around 2.5k by midnight isn't much at all, really. Writing on my old schedule, that's an hour and fifteen minutes. Writing on my new schedule, I have no idea. I haven't been using my alarm clock system this year. I'm doing okay without it, so I don't see the need to start enforcing miniature word-wars until I start floundering.

My parents are still out of town, which means I have another hour or two to get things cleaned before they come home. I can't stand to clean when they're watching me, but I really do want to tidy up the house. I'm a slob, and it's making me uncomfortable, which means they probably feel like we're living in squalor.

I love the word "squalor." Never get to use that one.

I want to get my room clean tonight. Not just tidy, but clean. I want to have the whole thing looking nice by 7pm to give me some time to focus on writing in my newly cleaned, newly rearranged room.

Goals:

Finish laundry. Looks like it'll be around 5 loads to get everything done. Then half of that is going into storage, because I'm a failure and I never remembered to put away my winter clothes. Assuming I can continue to stick to my diet, I should never need to wear last year's winter clothes again, but I'm not going to donate them just yet. There's still time for me to have a willpower meltdown.

Clean the desk. It's filthy, as usual. I neither need nor want half of the things that are crammed onto those shelves. Ferret ear mite medicine? The ferrets moved in with Dillon and Pat in August. Why did I keep that?

Clean the notebook drawer in the desk. That could be used for useful things. Instead, it's been home to several dozen notebooks from middle school for the past decade. I don't know why. I try not to throw away my notebooks (they have doodles and journal entries in them, because srsly, who actually takes notes during class?), but I don't even remember putting these in here. Also, I have a perfectly good box full of the other notebooks from my school years, and they really ought to be reunited.

Rearrange the bookshelf. This requires me to make a donation box for the several-dozen books that I will never read again. Also, I need to finally unpack that box of books in the basement. I'm pretty sure it has some of my writing books in it. I've been meaning to reread No Plot? No Problem! and Sometimes The Magic Works for Camp.

Get the room clean enough to vacuum. This is so much more difficult than it sounds. It also involves picking nails out of the carpet, because the kit for my bee hive had a lot of extra nails and those somehow got scattered across my floor at some point. Vacuums don't like nails.

Move bed under air conditioning vent. My room is always hotter than the rest of the house by at least five degrees. I want to minimize that as much as possible.

Bring the big-comfy-white-chair from the basement. This chair was made for writing. It would be even better if my laptop keyboard actually worked so I didn't have to hold an external keyboard to type, though.

Remove empty bags of dog food. Yes, the bags are very strong and will carry heavy things. This is no longer justification to keep them.

Move yarn collection into the closet, where the bee hive was. It doesn't need to take up floor space.

Figure out where the exercise bike should live. The answer is not "the middle of the room." Maybe take it down to the living room, so I can bike and watch TV?

Get rid of dresser. I don't care if it's an antique. I don't care that it was mom's when she was a little girl. I don't use it. It's huge, it's heavy and it takes up too much of my room.

That should take me several hours to complete. On the positive side, this gives me an excuse to listen to my music at very loud volumes. Also, my room will be clean, which should make me much more likely to be able to write in here. Writing is easier in clean places.

The Empty People is moving along at a decent speed. I'm not keeping up with NaNo quota right now, but the plot itself isn't lagging. I think making the outline was really useful -- it let me see the big picture before diving in. I still need to fiddle with that. It's not done yet.

My friend Emily is approaching 20k right now. Words do not explain my jealousy. After I get this room cleaned, I'm going to curl up with my laptop and try to get some serious words written. This will, of course, require me to blast italktosnakes's NaNoWriMo Song at ear-splitting volumes. For motivation. I'm sure you understand.

The house is out of kettle corn. Which begs the question: since when do I eat kettle corn?

Answer: last week, apparently. Because that box was full, and now it's empty.

Had to resist the urge to start knitting today. My partially-completed Lizard Ridge blanket was making sad faces at me. Right now, I'm trying to minimize distractions in my life. I'm only able to be emotionally invested in one or two things at a time. Right now, I have my novel and my dogs. That's probably already more than I can handle. Adding in my knitting would break it. Hell, just cleaning the house is threatening to break it, but it needs to get done.

Enough babbling. Cleaning my room, then writing 2.5k+ words on TEP before bed.

Off to a Decent Start

The first season of Camp NaNo officially began yesterday.

And I totally forgot to sleep in my "camp site" in the spare bathroom. Fail.

I did, however, manage to write 1,759 words. This only required 2 phases, which may prove problematic. Those phases were meant to be ~500 words apiece. They're nearly double that. Granted, I'll likely cut out the majority of the conversation with Ineroh in the first scene, but it still leaves me over my projected length. Going to have to fiddle with that at some point.

I officially hate Finn. He has said all of four lines so far, and I can't wait to kill him. (Wait, that wasn't part of the outline? You mean Finn is the only character who gets a relatively happy ending? This is not okay). Fortunately, he's only on-camera for the first quarter of the plot. Unfortunately, I have to write two huge scenes with just him and Yosseval.

What happened to my introspective first person? It DIED, that's what. The journals and character interviews from last month were so deliciously human and real and solid. This, on the other hand, reads like a script treatment or an expanded synopsis -- all tell, no show. Doesn't matter now. I'll beat it into submission during the rewrite.

I need to work on the ages of the characters. It's becoming problematic. I know Yosseval is the youngest of the cousins. I know he's somewhere between 18 and 24. I know Ineroh and Finn are approximately the same age as Yosseval. But that means that unless the second-generation royalty all got knocked up very rapidly in the same 5-year period, most of the cousins ought to be married off and living their own lives by now. I had planned to have them piling up in the capital city, but that doesn't make sense. I know Ineroh is getting old for marriage (for a woman), which means Finn and Yosseval should be approaching the average age. Since all the other cousins are older than F/I/Y, the girls at the very least should all be married. Which contradicts what I said about Palle in the second scene. More to fix later.

In completely unrelated news: BEES.

I'm getting my first hive of bees tonight, courtesy of my friend's father. I know I'm going to name the hive after one of the canon Weyrs ([/nerd]), but I'm not sure which one. It makes the most sense to name it Fort, since Fort Weyr was established first, but the name sounds so boring. "Have to go check the honey storage in Fort." No. That sounds boring. Benden would be my next inclination -- it's the most popular one from the books, and I do like the name. But I hate virtually all of the characters in Benden (except F'nor, but F'nor is the exception to all rules). Part of me wants to name it Telgar (my favorite of the names on an aesthetic level) and part wants me to name it Igen as a nod toward StarStones. I need to decide before this evening.

Less nerdy people don't have this problem.

Since a nuc of bees costs approximately $60-$100 and Chris is giving it to me for free, I wanted to repay him with something. I can't stand it when people give me gifts that I can't repay. So I'm going to bring him four of the baby butterfly koi from the pond. I wonder how difficult it will be to catch them?

Hah. Perspective: I'm going to be driving home with a car full of bees in six hours, and I'm worried about the difficulty of catching fish in a pond.

I should be writing. Instead, I'm fantasizing about bees.

I think there may be something wrong with me.

For Camp, I think I'm going to try to do this the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race way. I've never done that before. I usually write a HUGE chunk on the first day or two, then splutter to a stop, then slam down another 10k, then stop, then 5k, then stop, etc. I'm trying to teach myself moderation, though. So let's see how long I can continue writing 1,667+ words per day. I'm guessing less than a week, knowing myself.