52,970 Words

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That was the final tally this morning for An Uncertain Light, my frist stab at a novel-length piece of fiction.  In the font style I use (11pt Cambria or Mangal depending on my mood and monitor, double-spaced) it comes out to about 211 pages.

I have at least another 30,000+ words and tons of revision work before I can even think about calling it finished, but with a little less than 12 hours before the deadline, I've more than satisfied the requirement for "winning" NaNoWriMo this year.  I wrote more this month than the previous 11 months combined, and have experienced that special spark that comes with writing your way out a problem on more than one occasion.  I didn't do much in the way of notes, just had a basic story in my head and let the words takes me in whatever direction they decided to go.

Lots more to do before it's really "showable" - my wife read about 30 pages and said, "it felt like I was reading a book," which was kind of the point.  It's incredible to think about, but I'm inching lcoser and cloder to the ultimate goal of having a full, complete manuscript of a novel that will garner dozens, if not hundreds, of rejection slips...

...which is a huge step up, considering the notion of having a novel actually written seemed like a pipe dream only a year ago.

My friend Bob is, as of last night, less than 2,000 words away from the goal.  Have at it, and congratulations to everyone else who participated!

They're Working On It

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Back in March of this year, I wrote a short little post about the wackiness inherent in the Netflix Recommendation System.

My friend Jason directed me to this article in the New York Times.  It talks about a $1,000,000 contest being held by Netflix to improve its recommendation system by 10%.

The problem?  NAPOLEON DYNAMITE.  Check out this incredibly entertaining article about how a little independent comedy has completely screwed up any sort of reliable predictive accuracy.

We live in a wonderful world, friends.  Wonderful.

Chinese Democracy

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13 years later, it's here.

I'm trying to catch up on NaNoWriMo (need to average 2,950 words a day to make the 50,000 - looking pretty good, actually), but that didn't stop me from jumping into the car after finishing the yard work to pick up a copy at the local Best Buy.

Admit it, even if you stopped listening to Guns N' Roses back after the bloat of Use Your Illusion I and II, you know you're curious as to what all the fuss was about.

If I get ahead of my word count today, I may come back and do a longer review.  The short version:  surprising.  There's a lot I like, there's a lot I that makes me cringe.  LOTS of weirdness on this thing.  One thing's for sure: Buckethead is all over this album, and for that I'm cheering.  I'm also a huge fan of Bumblefoot's solo work, and his contributions are felt throughout as well.

Anyway, in the meantime none other than Chuck Klosterman reviewed the album for the Onion's AV Club.  If you've never read any of Klosterman's books this is a pretty good representation of his style.  If you have read him before, I'm sure you can guess what he thought of the album.

Here's his review.  I gotta get back to work!

An Abrupt Shift

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I am waaay behind on my NaNoWriMo novel.  At this rate I have to average about 3,000 words a day to make 50,000 by month's end.  And of course about 70 in pages my "novel" decided to shift gears entirely and tell the story from a completely different angle, using a completely different voice.

So rather than cry into my coffee or give up altogether, I'm just going to keep writing, starting from this new perspective and new plot point.  Everything's out of sequence now, and although my rough idea for the structure was going to be loose and episodic-based anyway, I'll just figure out the problems next month.

"Just get it down" has become my mantra.  I'm never at a loss for beginnings, it's just the middles and the ends that elude me.

NaNoWriMo profile, with new "hard-boiled  detective" excerpt that admittedly sounds nothing like the previous excerpts posted.