haHA!
I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping up with NaNo for a whole week. I missed a few evenings due to work/play/laziness but made up for it and was back on track last night.
The key is to just not do anything else. Even when I really do not want to write, I sit down and make myself do it. The idea that I'll just have to make the word count up later is a great motivator. I truly wish I'd taken the time to sketch out an outline before I started, because I only have a very vague idea of what my plot actually is. I know I could go ahead and do that now, but then that's writing without any of it counting towards my total words and I can't have that.
My main issue at this point in the main character. Her characterization is all over the place and it's is practically killing me to not go back and edit. I have an idea of what I want her to be in my head: easily annoyed but also quite flighty. And on paper she's just coming off as a snob, not simply disinterested. I want her to be funny, but with an edge and it's totally not working. I'm frustrated and as a result getting more invested in secondary characters... which isn't helpful.
It's not helping that I'm also reading Catching Fire which, while it's not as good as The Hunger Games I still love it. It's making me very anxious about my own writing.
ETA: Forgot to mention my knitting debacle! So, I'm not a knitter. I prefer crocheting (not that I do that much of it), but recently I picked up a pattern for a knit hat. It's a very loose beret and I thought it was adorable. It was marked as "easy" so I thought: SCORE. I'd only attempted knitting once before, but the double needle thing was tricky for me. So, I had to reacquaint myself with casting off and the stitches (thanks youtube!) and was on my way.
The first issue came when my cats got into the yarn. I woke up Saturday morning to the entire ball of yarn unwound and knotted throughout my entire living and dining room area. We're talking around multiple table legs on multiple tables. They couldn't have done this with the cheap yarn I picked up for practice, no, it had to be the fancy stuff. UGH. CATS.
Then I totally failed on stockinette stitch. I read that it was one row of knit and one row of purl. Okay, I thought, simple enough. So I was doing that and... it did not look right. I thought maybe I got my stitches turned around or something, so I kept going, but it didn't look anything like the picture. Then I realized that you're supposed to turn the piece when you do the purl side, only I was working on circular needles, so how the hell was I supposed to do that? Then I searched youtube and realized when you're working in the round you just keep using the knit stitch. You don't have to worry about purl stitching at all. Awesome. I'd just wasted hours and had to rip everything out.
This hat better be AMAZING when I'm done.
ETA THE SECOND: Who out there has an ebook reader? I'm starting to think I'd... really really like one. I've poopoo-ed (NO idea how to spell that) reading on the computer for so long, because I love actually holding a book in my hands. But the idea of carrying around a whole library also really appeals to me. I've browsed around a bit, but I'm wondering if anyone on my flist has a preference. I'm leaning towards the Nook over the Kindle because I'd be able to put library books on the Nook. You have to strip the DRM off of them in order to put them on the Kindle, which sounds like kind of an (illegal) hassle. THOUGHTS, PLEASE.