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So there's this thing called "National Novel Writing Month" or, comfortably, NaNoWriMo. I'm dead fucking serious. That's the acronym they've chosen. Rolls right off the tongue.
This is a clearly misguided practice for a number of reasons not the least of which we'll highlight in today's blog.
Also: today's writer's block.

How would you describe the last decade in one sentence?

A lot of people didn't follow the directions carefully and chose to answer in one word instead of one sentence but I guess they can't be blamed for working smart. Or maybe they're just idiots. Anyway my summary: "it was pretty mediocre."

Computers and the Internet have changed the way we live and do business.

As opposed to the 90s where we had no internet.
A lot of people also whined that the decade ends on a 9 (errrr) to which I have to say:
THERE WAS NO YEAR 0 YOU FUCKING MORONS A DECADE ENDS ON A 1.

This month we read Eragon by Christopher Paolini, who was only fifteen when he wrote the book.

I'm sorry.
What, have you read every other book ever written?

Eragon is a fairly straightforward fantasy adventure novel with a few original twists. Given the young age of the author, this is fairly impressive.

"Fairly straightforward" now translates to "fairly impressive" I guess.
I guess it is fairly impressive considering the 15 year olds I work with can barely work a pencil, let alone write a coherent thought.

I'm sitting here on the last day of being 36, looking outside at threatening gray skies. I'm supposed to be coming up with plans for my extended birthday weekend, but forecasts of freezing rain make me want to hide in my apartment instead.

36 years old reading Eragon. Isn't there a point where you develop taste? I guess not.
Isn't there a point where you decide fanfiction really is kind of daft and juvenile?

I finished reading Eragon for my book club today, but I'm not completely sure what to say about it. I've got a paperback copy of it released around the time of the execrable movie, and the book has eight color pages of "exciting" stills from said misbegotten production.

And I know Eragon isn't technically fanfiction (it is though. Lord of the Rings fanfiction set in an alternate reality) but I'm pretty sure anyone who would seriously write a book club review of Eragon probably thinks fanfiction is interesting and fun to read.

I wonder how the raven-haired elven beauty with pointed ears became a blonde girl with perfectly-rounded ears,

Those Elven girls though. All hipster bitches.
High fantasy hipster bitches, but hipster bitches nonetheless.
One of my retainers in FFXIV is an Elf (or no, my mistake: ELEZEN. THANKS SE) and she somehow manages to be haughty and pretentious despite the fact I own her.
I OWN YOU HOW CAN YOU BE THIS ABOVE IT ALL?
Oh yeah, FFXIV: the game where you're a noble, erstwhile adventurer and yet you can own two people.
I know they're technically "retainers" (which were historically soldiers and not shopkeeps but what the fuck ever, SE) but I have yet to pay their wages and the fees I incur on any sales they make are explicitly "taxes" and not "wages" so the impression I get is they're unpaid retainers who must listen to my orders.
Also there is kind of a slavery ring to retainer despite being paid but they were part of a larger system entitled "bastard feudalism" that describes the political and social structures in the late Medieval period. I don't know about you but when I think "bastard feudalism" the word "freedom" doesn't immediately spring to mind.

I just got through dealing with a very obscure question for my favorite problem patron, which I had to answer with a lot of fruitless searching, one "a-ha" moment, and a bit of reasonable conjecture. He seemed to like the answer, so hopefully it's the right one ^_^;;

Let's not even bother explaining what we're talking about.
Let's go back to the story I just told. Notice how I begin "in FFXIV" so it sets the context so people can know what the fuck I was talking about?
Imagine if I set it up like this bint. "Just got told telling my Elven slave to sell some goddamn cloth."
I'D LOOK FUCKING CRAZY.
Well I probably already do but whatever. Crazier.
And here she's declared "NaNoWriMo" winner because she wrote an entire book that is 51,000 words.
Doesn't matter how good the words are or if they even form a coherent narrative, sheer word count is what makes you a winner.
Dante and Homer would be proud of this fine literary tradition, I'm sure.
"Yeah you know all that technique and shit you guys worked so hard to maintain? Doesn't matter. Just muscle through 50k words and you win."
Also the concept of "winning at writing" is pretty perplexing to me. I know of a lot of people who got published and yet fell into complete obscurity within their own lifetime. Are they winners?
History doesn't really pick the winners based on any real criteria you can determine within your own life. For every writer who stands the test of time like Dante or Homer there are thousands upon thousands of Elizabeth Stoddards (although my own point falls apart under any scrutiny because Dante and Homer wrote awesome shit and Elizabeth Stoddard wrote some fuck) but you get my point.

According to the NaNoWriMo website, OpenOffice's word count algorithm may be inflating word counts. This means that my 50,421-word total may actually be less than 50,000.

OH WELL EXCUSE ME! IF I ONLY HAVE 45,000 WORDS I AM NOT A WINNER, NO MATTER HOW GOOD THEY MAY BE.
Hey J.D. Salinger? Sorry bro, Catcher in the Rye only weighs in at about 47,000 words. Get that fuck out of here you hack.
George Orwell? 1984 is only about 49,000 words. Sorry man. You can't be a good writer.
Oh and don't even get me started about Farenheit 451. Ray Bradbury you fucking hack. 41,000 words is all you could do? That's, what, only 82% as good as 50,000 words.

Apparently it has something to do with how it interprets "smart quotes" and other punctuation separated by spaces.

Wow I must be a shitty writer. I've been at this for years and I don't even know what the fuck a smart quote is. Is that when Open Office goes fucking apeshit and adds a ton of unnecessary spaces to my dialog?
Also I don't know what "other punctuation" means because I only use periods and commas, pretty much. Also dashes. Big fan o' dashes.

As I've been doing ellipses in the preferred method (space-dot-space-dot-space-dot-space), this could have added a considerable number of words to my total.

I just went through three stories I wrote (not 50,000 words so they're garbage but that's not my point) and the ellipsis never even appears. I am a bad writer.
I guess by this logic Leo Tolstoy is about the greatest writer ever because War and Peace is an epic spanning several thousand pages.
But it tells the story of several characters with no real connection between them except they might be related to other characters and they all kind of lived at the same time-- I'm not sure you can even count it as one story. It's kind of like the Bible. It's a lot of stories with a recurring motif or connection.
Does that count as one book?
I'm not sure.

Then again, my 2008 novel was typed in OpenOffice and the final word count wound up being higher than OpenOffice estimated......

I'll find out at midnight when the NaNo word count validator goes live......

EDIT: I found an independent word count page here which informed me that my total was a rather less-stunning 46,647 words, or about an 8% overcount.

INDEPENDENT WORD COUNTER.
I just wanna get done, really. I don't care about the quality of what I write.

As of tonight, my 2010 NaNoWriMo novel Flame of Justice: Elemental War is finished!

Flame of Justice: Elemental War.
You might as well call it "flame of cliche: cliche cliche".
Seriously what the fuck am I even looking at? Can I read this masterpiece of 46,647 words?

It weighs in at 50,421 words, and flows a lot better than my 2008 effort to which it is a sequel.

Lost a couple thousand in a day. Guess that was some strict editing.

(That book is currently undergoing heavy revision, so for those of you who've read it it's going to be much improved!) My villain has been almost-irrevocably eliminated, but he does have a "Get Out of Limbo Free" card should I choose to bring him back.

"Eliminated", meaning you cut an entire character just like that?
I mean it does happen all the time but wow. Usually that happens when you rewrite, not when you edit.

As of right now, I'm at just under 47,300 words on this year's NaNoWriMo effort, and have just finished the Climactic Final Battle with Yamigumo, my antagonist.

Yamigumo.
Onigumo sounds more sinister to me.
Or if you weren't an illiterate fuck and you were doing some kind of animu pastiche the most obvious name for you villain would be "Oniwakamaru" because that was a popular name for a menacing, demonic figure in Ukiyo-e works.
You know, based on the historical figure Saito Benkei?
Died standing?
Fuck.

That leaves me 2700 words or so for escaping his Evil Lair and wrapping things up satisfactorily.

The obvious question in my mind would be "what if you need more than that?" I hope it just ends mid-sentence.
Also maybe I don't understand how this whole writing thing works but I'm pretty sure when your heroes face off against the villain "Yamigumo" in some sort of JRPG-esque final battle at the end (hopefully with Dancing Mad or some other Final Fantasy classic playing) only to escape his crumbling layer you've fucked up in ways I can't even begin to imagine.
I don't know I just have books I've read and stories I've written to go off of but going off my last three things I've written the villains have been, in order:
nothing
a political entity
nothing
You can get conflict from things other than super villains, you know.

Given that somewhere in there I have a conversation or two, I think I should make my word count even without the eerily-foreshadowing epilogue ^_-

And in one of my stories the protagonist isn't even named. Maybe this kind of shit and fanfiction is good and I'm just wrong.

What can be done to promote tolerance and stop bullying in schools?

You cannot stop bullying. It has always, ALWAYS been around.

Stop treating kids like they're going to break if you even touch them, and bring back corporal punishment.

Smart. Hit the maladjusted kid.

The greatest impediment to writing a novel is being distracted by reading someone else's.

Is being a fucking hack more obsessed with word count than quality.

While I should have been preparing for NaNoWriMo, I instead spent some time the past couple of weeks completing a set of character sprites in the style of the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Final Fantasy IV/Final Fantasy II

See what I mean when I say you just told Final Fantasy in book form and fucked it up?

It's obviously not a standard MMO, given its all-ages rating and its emphasis on building and problem-solving rather than killing enemies.

PROBLEM SOLVING INSTEAD OF KILLING?
I'M OUT.

My new computer is doing very well, for the most part, and now that I have a new monitor capable of taking advantage of its capabilities I'm quite happy with it. Except for one small problem.

It has a habit of unexpectedly bluescreening when I try doing something graphically intensive.

Gee I wonder if your graphic card/chip/whatever is overheating.
Fuck.
Anyway I'm bored of this.
Leves reset in 3 hours and I BETTER GET SOME MORE BUFFALO HIDE AND GIGANTOAD SKIN THIS TIME.

Oh good, another year

I hear it's 2010, not that you fuckwits would ever let me forget.
OH BOY 2009 WAS A GOOD YEAR I BET 2010 WILL BE EVEN BETTER~
Yeah, was it? If this exercise in douchebaggery has taught me anything, it's that you people were cunts in 2008, 2009 and will probably continue into 2010.
Meanwhile in my world I'm trying to breed some perfect IV pokemans. My current goal is Mismagius because ghost Pokemon are the master race of Pokemon.
Unfortunately I only have 2 Misdreavuses (Misdreavii?) to breed, so you know what that means: controlled inbreeding.
Speaking of inbred, our blog for today.
Hey, no champion pedigree was ever founded without it.
Of course, if my IV spreads are any indication I think I can do it in two moves without the need of inbreeding but that's not nearly as fun.

It began the Tuesday before the big day. I was sitting in my car, eating lunch in the parking lot at work, like I do often, while reading my Twitter list. There in amongst the mundane hourly updates and LOL cat links, there was a tweet from my favorite podcast, TBTL.

>the word "mundane" comes up
>I didn't think to edit this
>implying anyone edits on the internet

An idea was born.

Holy shit if this were my old high school newspaper this line would have been crossed out in so many different color pens you couldn't even read it anymore.
Of course I never would have written a line such as this (and given it its own paragraph, no less, usually something reserved for interesting sentences written in non-passive voice, both traits absent from this sentence) but my point stands.
You're boring, I get it. The least you can do for your poor readers (reader, more like, that one being me) is make your sentences halfway interesting.
Let's compare to the only not-shit blog, my own. My opening post was about a subject very few people over the age of 10 care about: Pokemon.
How'd I keep it interesting? Jokes, mostly. I compared a boring topic to something people understood (champion pedigrees) and then brought up inbreeding. I showed my reader, I didn't tell them.

Tuesday slowly ticked into Wednesday and the hours of Wednesday trickled till at last the podcast was ready to be downloaded.

was ready to be downloaded?
Let's revise this exact same (boring) sentence with active voice:

Tuesday slowly ticked into Wednesday and the hours of Wednesday trickled until, at last, I downloaded the podcast.

See there you go-- hey wait it still sucks.
Hmm.
Wow this is-- this is particularly awful. Let's just move on.

Today I'm having a crisis of relevance, as in how am I relevant in the grand scheme of the universe. I wonder sometimes what mark my life has made and if I have made a difference.

Oh look, it's this shit again.

Deep thoughts for a Tuesday afternoon. I blame the emo music I listen to. The alt-pop music defense that doesn't hold up in court. (it is right up there with my editor made me do it)

So what's your defense for being such a goddamn dork?
Now here's a post called "Exercising the Muscle" which sounds like some kind of euphemism for masturbation.

Between the stress of the new schedule and the physical nature of my new assignment, I've been a puddle of pain. Swollen hands make typing a bitch.

I'LL SAY, WOOOOO--

When I last visited my characters, they were discussing a porn their dead friend starred in close to the end of her marriage. I've sure there is a poorly written flashback involved. My brain was unraveling close to the end of the retreat. The proof is in the pirates and zombies I added to a woman's fiction novel.

*headdesk*

Wait, wait I can muster up something witty to say, I can do it--
nope can't give a shit.

The fact this depressing novel filled with drug addiction, suicide, and rape was written while listening to Fall Out Boy amuses me. My novel is more depressing than it's soundtrack. :P

>it's soundtrack
>it is soundtrack
I'm sure this novel is just gr8.

Yes, I'm still obsessed. I am convinced there isn't a situation that Fall Out Boy doesn't have a song for.

Oh, oh I have one: getting laid.
If you're listening to Fallout Boy, uhh, I have some news.

I am a proponent of "the glass half-full", chosing to see the world through rose-colored glasses instead of dirty dishwater. This unbridled optimism has often led me down paths I'd rather not have traveled. But I think it is better to be hopeful and hurt instead of pessimistic and unscathed.

Oh hey look, proof of my mantra that "hope is the first step on the road to disappointment" in action.
Let's take a hypothetical situation for further proof:
2010 ends. It sucks.
If you're an optimist: OH NO IT SUCKED
If you're a pessimist: as expected
2010 ends. It was good
If you're an optimist: as expected
If you're a pessimist: OH HEY WHAT A PLEASANT SURPRISE
So as you can see, pessimism is the preferred option. Always.

Motherhood seems to be something I excel in. I have a tendency to adopt and mother all I come in contact with.

This raises an interesting question of "can one excel in motherhood if one is not a mother?" That's like saying I excel as a mathematician despite not being one.
That was just an example, of course, because like her and motherhood I suck at math.
Now she's on about how she's an author or some shit, but I came across this line:

I can climb into a prolific novel and wallow, never tiring of the prose.

Prolific novel? What does that even mean?
One that can reproduce fruitfully? One that can make a lot of money? One that was published many times?
Which is funny, because one sentence prior she spits out this gem:

I revel in the feeling of certain words rolling off my tongue.

Reveling in the feeling of certain words rolling off the tongue maybe, but certainly not reveling in using SAID WORDS FUCKING CORRECTLY.
Oh apparently she is a mother. Funny, for someone who is so awesome and loves doing it so much she sure hasn't mentioned her own children very much. Or at all.

Are you looking for an informative yet entertaining podcast to add to your collection?

No.
Now she's challenging all people who don't like Fallout Boy (all sane people) to listen to "Dance Dance" and not "chair boogie". Well a true knight never balks at a challenge, so you're on.
Waiting for a song, here.
Christ, this is awful.

And lastly, Pete Wentz reminds me of my son, Ryn.

Ryn.
Ryn: your name is missing a letter, son. Ryan it is.

I've been trying to listen to a multitude of different ones and then report back which ones are good and which aren't worth the space used on the media player. This quest is failing because I can't get past my obsession with TBTL. (Too Beautiful To Live) If you haven't listened to it, go find it on iTunes and check it out. I will bet you will become as smitten as I have.

I won't be doing that, but please continue.
Oh-- that's the end of your blog.
Well, Mrs. Wordsmith, I must say I am thoroughly unimpressed. I expect better from a virtuoso writer like yourself. Someone who claims to live and breathe the written word certainly wouldn't have such a poor grasp of story structure, sentence structure, grammar and word choice that you do.