puffy_wuffy

I'm kind of exhausted, but I'm not out of ideas.  I think this is fantastic, me not being out of ideas, because I didn't realize I had so many stories in my mind that I could weave together for a month.  I'm not even sure I can finish all of the things I want to write for this topic (idea?  novel?) in fiftty thousand words.  Now that I'm past the halfway point, twenty five thousand words over a blank page, my document takes over half a minute to load on a computer.  Instead of feeling irritated with the load time, I feel ridiculously proud.  Something I didn't expect:  my wife feels proud, too.

I've had to make numerous sacrifices over the past two weeks:  notably, I've spent less time eating junk food, watching television and/or reading genre romances.  Unfortunately, I've spent less time on grooming and sleeping.  Those were all things I expected.  What is unexpected is that despite all the things that have come up, visits to Urgent Care and frightening news about crime in my area, I haven't used anything as an excuse for not writing every single day.  I plot and I re-plot, work and I re-work ideas every single day.  NaNoWriMo has become my own RPG and I can feel myself levelling up every single time I complete what could be a chapter every other day or every day.

I'm enjoying writing in long form, and I think of this as another form of journalling.  If I can commit myself to this, I can save the world!  Okay, maybe not, but I think I can finish this novel, at least sometime in January.  I will have to finish it or it will never let me sleep again.  Seriously, sometimes I wake up at 3 am with things I have to write down.  I'm finishing this thing even if it takes a little bit longer.

In related writing news, I recently read this article.  Ostensibly, its written by an academic mercenary who asserts that he writes papers for other people:  high school, master's level and PhD eligible students who don't want to do their own work and don't care if someone else does it so long as it gets done so that they can reap the benefits.  What I love about the article is not only that it exposes credentialing in the educational system, but also how ridiculous writing has become in education.  Best quote:  "I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph,"  which reads as if the author is saying, "I am a word ninja, a word rambo, a word BAMF."

I know that this kind of stuff happens, I've never done it myself.  I did know of people in my high school who were not above it.  I think MIT was a little too difficult for people to cheat, then again, I wouldn't have noticed since I was too busy working my ass off the entire time I was there. Really, that's why I'm miffed that people like Ed Dante exist:  I'm out there doing my own work and suffering when I suck at it, this is why I dropped out of my PhD program, I couldn't hack it.  The saddest section of the article is this:  "thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now."