Trysting Fields

Stuff I Did This Year

• Broke up an eight-year marriage, arguably
• Destroyed Neurocam, according to some (Neurocam continues to function in a lame, shadow-of-its-former-self kind of way)
• Bought my first DVD player
• Visited Sydney
• Took LSD for the first time
• Moved from a cupboard in St Kilda to a house in Fitzroy (the first house I have lived in for five years, fact fans)
• Had a bit of a fucking breakdown
• Collaborated in the creation of a singularly unsuccessful gated community for Neurocam graduates
• Took mescaline for the first time, in the form of San Pedro cactus (and on two subsequent occasions)
• Turned 30, legally speaking
• Took ecstacy for the first time
• Threw my first proper party (and my second)
• Took magic mushrooms (and went to a soccer match) for the first time
• Hosted my first Zenarchist Coffee Ceremony
• Finally gave up and got a MySpace page
• Spent Christmas in Geneva, Switzerland and new year in Manchester, England
• Made my first album
• Started my first business
• Attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to write a 50,000-word novel in a month
• Kept one ongoing blog, and co-created & contributed to another, for a combined output of 20,253 words, 344 photos, 10 videos & 31 audio recordings (comprising 16 songs, 12 audio messages, and 3 miscellaneous)
• Wrote approximately 458,000 words of email to 92 recipients (& received approximately 506,000 words of email from 128 correspondents, not including machines)
• Spent 164 hours at the gym
• Held five ongoing paid jobs, of which I lost two, quit one, and currently retain two
• Amongst other things

If You're Happy And You Know It

Or alternately, if you're miserable and you know it - and it's just no good at all...

CLAP. YOUR. HANDS.

CLAP! CLAP!

If you're happy and you know it,
And you really wanna show it,
If you're happy and you know it... clap your hands!

CLAP! CLAP!

I feel better already.

Despite - he said, by way of explanation - the depressing fact that I have failed.

I am A Failure; one who has failed. That is What I Am.

CLAP! CLAP!

It's the last day of November. And despite my best intentions, I have failed to write a 50,000-word novel.

I gave it a good old Aussie go, though. Really, truly did!

But I didn't write 50,000 words - and I didn't finish it. And it's dead now. It doesn't want to be worked on any more. It has become a stinky moribund dead project that pains me and makes me annoyed at myself. And it's bad when you annoy yourself.

Winces, girds loins, drives a stake through its beloved heart.

It's dead. RIP, first attempt at writing a novel.

The silver lining is, I'm actually well pleased with the 37,566 words I did write. They came out great.

CLAP! CLAP!

Which was really the problem. They were too good. Consequently, somewhere along the line, I forgot to not take myself seriously. Which is the whole big-thing point of NaNoWriMo. You can write a stupid 50,000 word novel in a month. But unless you are a bona fide literary genius, you can't write a good one. Forget about it.

I'm tempted to quote Alanis Morrisette at this juncture. But for everyone's sake, I shall abstain.

The point is: I'm, like, trying to be philosophical and shit. I feel pain now, but I know the venture was far from a dead loss. In the end, I got more out of it than I would have if I hadn't undertaken it. And in any case, I've lost nothing. Just a ride. Etcetera.

CLAP! CLAP!

In other shittiness news, nobody but a handful of stalwarts - it seems - can come to our party.

Again, I don't feel too bad about it. It's getting towards That Time Of Year; everybody has lots of prior engagements. A bunch of people came to the last one - and most if not all appeared to genuinely have a good time. So it's not like this is a sign that all our friends secretly hate our guts, or think our parties suck.

CLAP! CLAP!

Finally, congratulations are in order to Mr Tripto Deluxe, who jumped on board my NaNo bandwagon and then kicked my ass right off the damn thing by actually finishing his book.

Kudos to you, my friend. Kudos to you. No, I wouldn't come to my party either. You have better things to do. Course you do. We're not really going to kill you. That was totally, like, an empty threat. Course it was.

Love your work.

CLAP! CLAP!

Oh, man - that's the shit, right there.

CLAP! CLAP!

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

CLAP! CLAP!

Excuse me, I have to be alone with my hands for a while.

I Got Nothing

Desolee, blog.

The novel is progressing well enough though.

Admittedly at this stage it seems like hitting 50,000 words by the end of the month will take a miracle. But they happen occasionally.

What's actually troubling me more, stupidly enough, is that I still have no idea what to call the damn thing.

In other news, party at Chez Hagakure on December 2nd. Tell your friends. And if you have no friends.. hey, come alone. Maybe you'll meet some.

Here is yet another picture of LJ:

That is all.

So, November Rolls Around Again

And, as previously advertised, I'm going to be spending much of it writing a 50,000 word novel. Wish me a broken leg. Heh.

I'm not sure how this will effect my blogging output; whether it'll go completely dead, or through the roof, or stay basically the same, or grow into a (yet another) poignant and/or disturbing document of my progressive descent into total insanity, or what.

But I 'spect we'll find out!

NaNoWriMo Redux

November is well upon us (how the hell did that happen?) and accordingly I received a reminder mail the other week from NaNoWriMo. I was seriously intending to enter it this year. Alas, as things transpire, I've too much else to accomplish.

Maybe I'll do it solo in a few months. Or I'll enter next November. Perhaps I'll do both. We'll see.

Chris Baty's book arrived from Amazon a little while ago. It looks pretty good.

I'd developed quite an intricate concept for my novel. But then I decided it had become too intricate (and I was too attached) to throw it away on some zany disposable speed-writing project.

So I conceived an alternative premise, which I could take less seriously: a no-holds-barred pornographic work starring Neurocam's poly-talented enquiries and admin wunderkind Ms L. V. "Elvie" Jones.

She says she's looking forward to reading it.

She's my kinda gal.

NaNoWriMo

So yeah, I'm going to do NaNoWriMo this year. I've taken this decision now so I'll have lots of time to prepare, and flagging it here so it'll be harder to back out when November rolls around.

I bought this notebook to put thoughts and ideas in.

Because I'm a sucker, I'm going to acquire & read Chris Baty's NaNoWriMo bible No Plot? No Problem! I like the title.

It's also a good excuse to re-read a few favourite books.

(138 pages of The Magus to go, weary sigh.)

Another preparatory project will be salvaging old writings dating back to the early 90s from my old Mac Classic II (pictured below), currently awaiting carriage to these people, who are going to put its 40MB hard disk onto a CD for me.