Getting Old

I think I'm getting old, folks.  I don't like to be tired anymore.  I used to be able to stay up all night, get two hours of sleep a night for about a week straight, and hate myself every minute of it, but still be able to do it.  Now?  I get less than seven hours and I can't even get out of bed.  A couple of days ago I woke up several hours past when I had expected to, just because my fiance didn't wake me up after I sleep told him that I wasn't planning on getting up anytime soon.  Good for him.  What does this have to do with anything?  Tired right now.  And it's what, not even one?  I like nights, I love nights, but having to get up before, say, ten, is kicking my ass.  Getting a huge number of words this week, but very few of them novel related, I'm afraid.  Lots of papers, of homework assignments, of blog posts, not that many words.  By the end of today I should be back on track for NaNoWriMo, but until then I'm going to settle for being behind.  The nights I close I usually don't start writing until after midnight anyway, and by then according to some website I'm already behind my count for the day. 

Oh well.  So, still chugging along, but I was having some trouble getting past a certain point in my story...  I has figured that the morning that their ship was going to leave them behind to do a full circle of the island and pick them back up on the way back to Sien, their anchor line was going to be cut by some mysterious unseen hand and the ship was going to float away until some of the sailors went out in a rowboat to catch it.  I know, lame, right?  No real story, nothing that pops, nothing that's really particularly scary, so I decided to fix it - by lighting the ship on fire.  So before it was vaguely confusing, their ship floating away for no good reason, and then it was just way too much too fast for no good reason, until the wonderful man to whom I am affianced suggested that the line was cut, and they try to hail the runaway ship, and get nothing, so they set out in a rowboat to catch it and there is no one on board.  No bloodstains or anything like that, way too blunt for what I'm going for, and eventually I would like to bring those missing characters back, either living or dead, I'm not sure.  Exciting, either way.  That's the feeling I was going for.  Fire?  Why the hell did I decide that if I wasn't getting it exactly right that I should set it on fire?  I'm not usually a setting things on fire kind of person.  So then the sailors don't want to bring the ship back to shore because even otherworldly, futuristic sailors are superstitious, and they're stranded just like I wanted them to be.  Bwahahaha. 

Not much else going on.  I was registering for classes the other day (yesterday?  What day is today?) and found a very interesting class called 'revising your novel', something that I would very much like to take.  The only problem is its prerequisites, two other classes called 'planning your novel' and 'writing your novel', neither of which I feel like I need much help with right now.  Maybe later, when I start editing and realize that I've been doing it all wrong from the ground up, but until then, I think I've got both planning and writing pretty much figured out.  Not 100%, sure, but I'm learning enough on my own to say that I've got a decent grasp on it.  Editing, too, will probably be something that isn't too hard to figure out, once I find the time to do it.  I know chapter five just needs to be cut, and that will give me the room to expand just a little bit on every other chapter, give them the sensory details that I'm lacking in almost every scene, I know that the first four chapters need to be expanded to take up a much longer period of time, and that's about as far as I've thought through.  I need to read it again, I think, and make better notes this time.  By which I mean any notes.  Been eyeballing it so far.  See, a class might be nice, if even just to learn the structure, then I can figure out the rest by myself.  But since I don't care to take 'planning your novel' when I've already written two of them, I have to wait until the class starts to beg my way into a potentially full class.  Sigh.  Eh, I'll figure it out.  Even better will be if I learn on my own before then, then I don't have to pay anybody anything for the pleasure of teaching me.

Well, back to writing for reals.  I have to get 18k and change by the end of today, which means I need to write more, sleep more, and write some more.  And I'm going to Tucson tomorrow!  So, even though I have the day off, and planned to have a massive mental health day to dedicate to writing, that's really not the case.  But I get to see family instead, so I think that's an acceptable trade off.  Good night all, I hope things are going great, get plenty of sleep and see you tomorrow!