Official final word count? 50,155.

I don't know what else to say... This year was absolute terror. Election month. Wrath of the Lich King month. Left 4 Dead month. New computer month. I had an unbelievable amount of distractions and I learned too late that I absolutely cannot, for the life of me, write science fiction. It hurts my brain. Fantasy ideas come so much faster, even when I'm stuck. I had only a vague idea of what I was going to write about, which is what NaNoWriMo encourages. Go with something small and see what happens... Well, it happened, alright. It turned out not at all the way I expected. I can't write science fiction and I sure as heck can't write SCARY science fiction. As it stands, I see two separate stories here that were combined into one. One was the original horror story I had planned, and the other is some story that grew out of absolute chaos. But this is what rough drafts are for, right? Pound some rough ideas into something coherent and then decide how to proceed later. I don't see this as one huge story that doesn't work, I see it as two stories with great potential!

Now I can rest... At least for a few days. I'm planning on resuming my original fantasy story in December. Not as grueling at NaNoWriMo, but hopefully something written every day. I need to get at least one thing done! One of my goals is to get a book on the shelf with my name on it... I don't care if I'm the only one who guys it, I just want to go somewhere and see it. Even Amazon would count! So that's what I'm going to try to do... The more I write, be it blog or NaNoWriMo, the more I realize that this is what I really love doing. Computers are okay. Writing? I could do that for a living real easy.

So I'm going to take this time to say: "Congratulations to me!" And: "Everyone else, don't stop! I see some of you out there are so close, but nothing's happening... Don't let the feeling that it's 'so close, yet so far' get to you. You're almost done, SO GET CRACKING! You'll hate yourself if you leave a 45,000 word transcript sit there and die, and you'll love yourself for writing that extra 5,000 words and actually reaching a goal. I ask you, what kind of choice is that? It's no choice at all! You need to finish! You can do it!"

Stay tuned to blog posts in coming days covering what I've not had time to talk about during November!

Hi! It's me! Remember me? It's been a while... I'm still here, though, feeling the hope and change washing over this country thanks to the Lord Messiah Barack Obama. But anyway, I just got done watching Stargate Atlantis and I was so ticked off that I had to say something. I still have Fringe and a couple of Simpsons episodes to watch, but I'm going to take time off real quick (or maybe not) to tell you:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? They had everything going for them running into this episode... Atlantis has been pretty poor the last season, but this season started with awesome and just got better and better. I mean, for crying out loud, they had Bill Nye the Science Guy play a prominent part in this episode and what the heck do they use this episode to preach about? Global freaking warming. Absolutely sickening. Come on, does anyone actually pay attention to that anymore? Alaska glaciers are growing, record cold all over the place. There's been insane evidence against global warming all year and even the mainstream media has seemed to put it on the back burner because of it. And then here, when it's below freezing outside, Stargate Atlantis on Sci Fi's green awareness week or whatever the heck they're calling it, gallops to the rescue with what is probably the single worst Stargate episode I have ever seen, period. It screamed "hi, we're late! We know it's the middle of November and lots of states have had record snows, but we just thought we should let you know about this global warming thing!"

What did it do? It took McKay and Keller and threw them in the middle of the desert and gave them some of the dumbest lines ever. They tossed in a dash of real world scientists and gave THEM the dumbest lines ever. (I feel really sorry for Bill Nye.) Add to that a heavy dose of global warming complete with McKay saying at the very end: "It's not like one guy can solve global warming, we all have to do our part" and the really, really awesome Ancient super-ZPM/matter bridge technology that's only been mentioned a few times and what to do you have? A very poorly written show that didn't even have a good plot. Freeze lightning? Really? Were the primary writers stuck in the elevator when this was written? Were they purposely stuck in a broken elevator so someone could take the spotlight? Was this a Sci Fi Channel "we'll bring you on for another year but you have to do a special one for us" gimmick? I'm also left wondering where the special effects artists and the set designers were. I'll bet they were stuck in the east elevator while the backups glued styrofoam to the doors in convenient places.

I don't know. I feel betrayed somehow. Stargate has never really been the series that takes something and preaches about it... Star Trek, eh. Yeah. Lots of other shows like to do that. But Stargate has built the reputation of being a straight up science fiction action story that doesn't really care about showing people the values the writers have. It's always been about exploring other worlds and beating Goa'uld and Wraith butt. (Well, up until SG-1 Season 9 where they brought in the Ori and went from Goa'uld playing ancient Egyptian gods to one giant laughing spree at Christianity's expense.) Ugh... I'm seriously unhappy. I was looking forward to this episode because Bill Nye was going to be a guest, and the entire idea had huge potential, but they had to go and rub some stupid ideal in everyone's faces and the entire episode fell flat on its face... And not even because they screamed "global warming is bad!" It was a bad, bad, bad episode no matter how you look at it. I would have much rather stuck with John and Ronon camping on the mainland  beach for the week. Watching Ronon being forced to fish or something that involved relaxing would have been far more fun to watch than McKay and Keller making out in the back of a private jet after telling us all to do our part to stop global warming.

Great job, guys! Great job.

Oh, we know it's here... It's like, almost flawlessly, Sunday of the second week rolls around and everything comes to a screeching halt. The first excitement has worn off and now you're stuck with a poor excuse for a story and 3 more weeks of stretching what little plot you have into a full 50,000 words. It's painful, almost in the literal sense. It hurts your brain to push out the plot you have buried in there... If you've been watching my profile, (or my progress report) you see two days where I haven't done anything and it wasn't even planned for ahead of time like Election Day was. As of this post, I am behind... To finish, I need 1669 words a day instead of the balanced 1667. As of this post, I have 18,000 words instead of my goal of 22,000 by Day 11. So what am I doing instead? Writing a blog post!

Here are a couple of tips for me as well as any of you folks who are idly reading my site because you're not writing your story, either... First off, never read what you wrote. That's a bad idea. Not only will it waste time, but there's always the chance you'll change (or worse, ERASE) what you've already done and if you start doing that, chances are you'll reduce your word count and that's horrible for morale, especially in Week 2. It's hard to read back over what you've said and cringe in your chair, but that's what you can't do! At least not until after you've finished. It's a rough draft... It's supposed to be ugly! What you do with a rough draft is not use it as a whole, but only harvest little snips and rearrange them into something far more coherent.

Another tip I've come to realize... Never stop when you're blocked. Bad idea. Probably the single worst thing you can do. You write and write and write and hit a snag and decide to take a break. Bad! You will take a break, start doing something fun, and then remember that book you're trying to write. You'll think about starting it up again, but then remember that you're stuck and that you haven't figured out a way to get around it... If that happens, you're in trouble. It takes a massive amount of willpower to overcome something like that. That's why I'm missing two days in my charts. I stopped on a mental block and started doing fun stuff like watching Heroes first season and all sorts of stuff like that... Luckily, I don't have a block at the moment and I'm about ready to dive back in. My goal for today is 22,000, but that's 4,000 more words, so I'm going to settle for 20,000 and then make up for it tomorrow and get back on track. Once you hit 25,000 words, trust me, it gets a lot more fun again.

So that's that... They say it's a good idea to write for 20 minutes or so, then take a 10 minute break, then dive back in for another 20 minutes. "Word sprinting" I guess is what they call it. I would suggest listening to the WriMoRadio episodes they churn out every couple of days. It's a breath of fresh air... It's comforting to know that thousands of other people are having the exact same problems you are. And by exact, I'm not exaggerating, either... They all have EXACTLY the same problems. It ain't just you... It's a fact of novel-writing life that you can't get around. You run into plot problems and character problems and you start thinking it's crappy and you want to quit... For days like that, I try to remember that JRR Tolkien felt the same way about Lord of the Rings. (And I swear I bring this up every NaNoWriMo!) Tolkien hated his story and repeatedly wanted to just give up, but CS Lewis kept pestering him to finish it... And once he managed to get it published, it was a huge hit that nobody has been able to top.

So get to writing!

So now you Democrats have what you want... A Democrat controlled Congress with a Democrat President on the horizon. Hope and change is around the corner! Oh yeah! The stock markets continue to plummet, AIG demands a second, far larger bail out that Congress is allowing, American Express successfully petitions to be classified as a bank so they have easier access to government bail outs, and those responsible for the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are all in charge of taking government money and giving it to people who made horrific business decisions (with encouragement from the Democrat government) so that nobody is able to learn from their mistakes so that they won't repeat the mistakes in their next endeavor. In addition to all that, where does the money for the bail outs come from? Why, where all the money for the government comes from! YOU! And what they can't take from you, they'll borrow from countries that definitely don't have our best interests in mind and forever drive our national debt higher and higher! What a bright, bright future! All hail the messiah! But just watch them... They'll still somehow manage to blame Bush and the Republicans in a year or two, despite the fact that they've been a minority voice since 2006 and that anything that does or does not pass since 2006 could have been changed solely by the Democrats.

And after all this time of preaching about how the government should "listen to the people" when it comes to things they want to push... When the people speak out against something the liberals don't want, suddenly, they need the courts to get involved and repeal the votes of the people. (Please refer to developments surrounding Proposition 8 in California which, if you haven't heard already, banned homosexual marriages.) You bet... When it comes to these types of things and they think there's a good chance that the people will support it, they scream and holler about how the Republicans are shoving off their morals on everyone by ignoring the majority, but when the very same majority essentially destroys everything a liberal minority has been working for? You suddenly hear no shouts to listen to the people. No, you hear shouts for the government and court systems to step in and overrule the people.

Government overruling people? Courts overruling people? Proposition 8 amended the California constitution to ban gay marriage... But the liberals, ever the sore losers, are still trying to get the courts to say the proposition is unconstitutional. They want to call their constitution unconstitutional... Excuse me? Something being "constitutional" isn't some interpretive idea that's floating around in everyone's mind... Something being "constitutional" is simply what ever is written or not written in the Constitution. Period. If gay marriage is banned in the constitution, you cannot claim it's unconstitutional. It's hilariously stupid!

I just want to say, right now, for those of you who'd say "yeah, well, if they constitutionally allowed gay marriage, you'd be outraged, too". Yeah, I probably would... But first, let me say a couple things. First? I expected California to allow gay marriage... I really did. They're probably the most liberal state in the country. I was extraordinarily pleased when I heard it passed. Unexpected! Second? I'm a conservative... You all know this. Because of that, I was rooting for McCain/Palin. They lost... Badly, when you take electoral votes. As you can see, I am not filling my blog with incredibly vulgar expletives pasted 500 times over... I'm not rioting in the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The majority of Americans felt they wanted Obama as their next president... Even if there was every reason for McCain to ask for a recount in the close states, he didn't. He conceded. It's over, and I'm not bitter. Scared out of my mind, but I have always believed that the way this country elects government officials has been the single best way to run a country and I still think the process works brilliantly.

But Obama isn't even a president yet... He's pretty much nothing right now. He's "President-Elect". He has no power at the moment and he can't do anything. He's not Constitutionally allowed to do anything until Inauguration Day. But he hasn't even done anything yet and we already have a glimpse of what the next four years is going to bring us. A complete and total economic failure due to an increasing amount of bail outs, tax hikes and wealth redistribution that encourages nobody to get off their butt and create new wealth in a time of economic recession and threat of depression. A complete and total override of the peoples' voice, which could and should be considered a treasonous disregard for the government limits placed in the Constitution, when the courts declare gay marriage legal in all states. Obama's going to reduce the size and power of our military like Clinton did... In addition that, Obama said himself that no military has maintained its supremacy in an economic downturn. He's going to wreck the economy AND cut funding in a time where Russia and Iran are both building strength.

What a bright, bright future, indeed! I am so glad we have the Democrats to lead us! Where are the conservatives when you need them? Wake up, Republicans! Centrism is a lie! The Democrats work down the party lines and you're the only ones trying to walk down the middle... Who are people going to vote for? A Democrat or someone who's pretending to be a Democrat? Someone who keeps pushing the same ideas or someone who flip flops more times than a fish out of water? Someone you know is going to react a certain way in any decision or someone who's not going to know how to respond until the crisis rears its ugly head? Take a look at the election! Conservatism never lost where it was up for a vote... True conservatism, that is. Things like gay marriage bans... Rejecting global warming intiatives... True conservative governors and representatives and senators! America is lost for the next 4 years if all this is a foreshadow of things to come, and it IS! We need to rebuild the conservative base and roar back onto the scene with a second Ronald Reagan who will have the guts and strength to clean up the socialist liberal economic mess that will be left behind after an Obama administration. It's rallying time!

Getting closer! I figured that since I'm in the middle of having nothing to do but NaNoWriMo (which I did not do yesterday, shame on me), I should look into lapping the CPU heatsink I bought a few weeks ago. I decided to get all the stuff that's not at NewEgg early so I could just place one giant order and be ready to go. Those orders consisted of my Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Computer Speakers that I got off eBay since the retail stores were all out of stock (and as soon as I started using them, they were back in stock... I knew that'd happen) and a really nice (arguably the best) air cooler for the processor: the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme Black. (Oh my gosh, racist!) I decided to go ahead and get the slightly more expensive black version because even though its performance is identical to the older shiny nickel one, it came with a few extra stuff that lets you install two fans on it. Alright... So those, in addition to my new LCD, which I absolutely adore, mark the first steps I've taken to build my new computer.

But I'll bet you're stuck up there on a word you can't find the definition for: Lapping. I have no idea why they call it lapping, and Dictionary.com doesn't seem to define it anywhere remotely close to what it entails, but it's the act of sanding down the base of the heatsink... The part that comes in contact with the CPU (the top of which also gets sanded down). The goal is to take two not-quite flat surfaces, make them flat, and stick them together to increase the amount of heat that is transferred, so the CPU runs cooler (and thus allows you to overclock faster). The idea is to get a sort of vacuum effect so that if you put the lapped surfaces, they stick... Air is a huge heat resistor. To help keep the air out, it's generally accepted that you squeeze a bit of thermal paste between the two surfaces and squish them together (and hope you don't get air bubbles, or you're back where you started). But the best thing to have is as little amount of space between the CPU and the heatsink as possible... Thus the sanding/lapping!

There's my little workspace... After trying the whole sanding bit without wet sandpaper, I ran into a problem with a very uneven and very un-mirror-like surface. So a word of warning to you folks looking into trying your hand at lapping... USE WET SANDPAPER. It seriously works wonders. It cuts down on chattering and tired hands. At first, I did the typical "30 strokes in one direction, rotate 90 degress, 30 strokes in same direction" idea and it worked for chewing through to the copper, but to get the final touches, I read that a figure 8 pattern was a nice method... And I happen to agree. I went from 220 grit to 400, to 800, to 1200 and finished with 2000 (since the shop I got these from didn't go higher, or I would have finished at 3000 for that extra mirror finish) and it was still fuzzy and scratchy. As soon as I did figure 8 on wet 2000-grit paper, it suddenly got a whole lot easier and better looking!

It took about 3 hours, I think... The last two segments of Rush Limbaugh and the first segment of Peter Heck. So yeah! 3 hours! The last 30 minutes was spent on the figure 8 on wet 2000 and I think it's good enough... Had a razor blade to check for flatness and to my professional, highly observant Myst-trained eyes, there was no wobble and no light shining beneath it. In other words: As flat as humanly possible! Check it out:

This is a close up of the not-so-mirror-like-but-good-enough surface that will come in contact with the CPU. I wish I took a picture of the thing before I started and maybe a few while I was going through the stages, but it started out with the black finish even down there... You sand a while and you some to a silvery nickel plating. I thought maybe that was my goal, but I kept on going and the copper started showing through, so make sure you chew on it until the copper starts poking out! But yeah... My first lapping procedure and I'm very pleased with it. Part of me wanted to install it without lapping to see how much cooler it runs afterwards, but I decided to just go ahead and lap it before I put it together, because I'm absolutely positive that once I get the thing together, I won't want to rip it apart for another few hours... I'll want to put it together somewhat to make sure the CPU works before I lap it (and subsequently void the warranty, which I wouldn't ever use unless it was DoA), but that won't be so bad.

Okay, so Peter Heck is done now... Time for NaNoWriMo!

So there was this high school in an area I won't disclose... Every year, each of the clubs would have fundraisers to help them prepare for the coming semester. Everyone did it and it was really no big deal, but there were to clubs, the Drama Club and the Chess Club, who would always raise funds at the same time and decided to race to see who could get the most money in a month. Each club would go out into the community and go door-to-door in an effort to raise their money...

The Chess Club always had somewhat of an advantage, because their members were always a bit more intellectual than the Drama Club. It's members had a high success rate once they left high school and went to college and, on the average, landed nice, secure jobs and they were very well off. The Drama Club, on the other hand, was not, on average, quite so well off, so they were consistently plagued with a slower income rate simply because they didn't have support of adults who used to participate in these fundraisers in the past. So the Drama Club was always calling for a different way of raising money... Instead of going into the community and asking all the adults, they wanted to ask just the other kids for money. They kept this call up for a while and the Chess Club was never really interested, but this year? Both clubs announced, in public, that they would both ask for money only from folks who were 18 years and younger. There would be a limit, too, on how much someone could give all at once, so nobody could go to the rich person's house and get a huge bunch of money all at once.

So! The clubs went out and started their fundraiser with the usual gusto! The Chess Club had won the last few years and they were looking to keep the winning streak going... They still went to the houses they knew were better off, but they only asked for money from the kids and not the parents. One of the fathers actually tried to give money like he did every year, but the Chess Club was quite adamant about keeping their promise. They would only accept money from kids 18 years and younger, and they could only give $30. "Alright," the father said, "But that's now how we did it when I was in the Chess Club. Part of our fundraiser was having the connections to the money... It's how it works in the real life, too." But even when tempted, the Chess Club wasn't going to break their promise. Soon enough, everyone was making a big deal about the agreement the clubs had made and everyone commended them on their efforts to make the race more fair.

Then there was the Drama Club. They didn't have the connections that the Chess Club had, but with the new rules, finding kids who wanted to depart with 20 or 30 bucks was easy to find. It was so much easier for them to stay in the race... They knew they had a chance this time. While they were at someone's house, they learned that the kid's uncle had come into a nice amount of money and was interested in helping the Drama Club out, since he was also a part of the club when he was young and knew what it was like to lose to the Chess Club. He tried to offer them money, but they declined, so he tried giving money to his nephew, but it turns out that he had already given the club 10 dollars. "Okay," the uncle said, "How about I give money to my son and he gives you the money. Would that work?" The Drama Club was against the idea at first, but it didn't take long for the uncle to convince them that they deserved to win after so long. In addition to giving his son the money to give the club, he presented the idea that he would give them a few transactions of 10 dollars... It would take a little longer to get the money, but maybe nobody would notice such small amounts.

So that's what the Drama Club started doing. They started telling the adults that they could give money to their kids, as long as they were under 18 (and some donors were even 2 months old), and they could accept the money. If they wanted to give more, they could, but it had to be over the course of a few days so nobody would notice. All this time, the Chess Club was still out there honoring the agreement both of them had made to the school and they were only visiting each house once and only asked for up to 30 dollars. Soon, though, they started seeing flyers placed around town that announced that the Drama Club was needing money, and the flyer even had an email address to which you could PayPal the donation. That worried some of the Chess Club, because they didn't have nearly enough money to spend on that many fliers and still have a chance of winning, so they simply ramped up their door-to-door visits.

When the race drew to a close and all the funds were counted up, the Chess Club had raised almost $2,000, which was more than they expected, but far less than they usually drummed up. The Drama Club, on the other hand, blew them away with a massive $40,000 account. The Drama Club was heralded as the new race winner, finally knocking the Chess Club off their winning streak. While the high school was praising the Drama Club and beginning to plan the party that night, the Chess Club frantically read the Drama Club's financial records, which were always put on display when the race ended. There they found hundreds of donations that they all agreed not to take. The Drama Club didn't even bother to hide any of it! It was all right there in their financial records... One of the 2 month old babies was even at the school with her mother. The Chess Club members tried to get everyone's attention, pointing out all the bad donations. Some were even over the 30 dollar limit... There were some that even logged $100! "Look!" they cried, trying to get someone's attention. "They broke their promise! Here's one of the donors in a stroller... Someone gave 70 dollars over the limit in one donation!"

But nobody heard them... They didn't even care, either. They were all too overjoyed at the fact that the Drama Club had finally knocked the Chess Club off their high horse and they took it as a sign that the community supported the Drama Club more than the Chess Club. Enrollments started flooding in to the Drama Club and some people even transferred to them from the Chess Club... The war was on. What used to be a fun game had now turned ugly when the Drama Club broke their promises. It ushered in a whole new way of raising money for the race, and the Chess Club wasn't going to let it happen again.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the high school... And if you think there's a political message behind it, then you only know me too well! I wrote it myself, actually, and I tried to make it sound like it was just a random story... I had to catch myself and omit certain terms that would alert people to the fact. But for those of you wondering: The Drama Club is Barack Obama and the Democrat party... The Chess Club is John McCain and the Republican party. It's pretty much clear that Obama bought the White House with his clearly questionable fundraising tactics. He didn't exactly buy votes directly, no, but he accepted donations from people he not only promised not to take money from, but from people who should not be influencing American politics at all, and he used all that money to literally flood the media with commercicals and to inundate people with party-funded programs to get people to vote. Don't believe me? Go read the article for yourself.

Has anyone been watching the stock market since Obama's election? I have...

We conservatives have been noticing a trend in the falling stock market being directly related to the chances of an Obama victory. As the ridiculous polls started to narrow and declare statistical ties and such things, the market would stabilize and cautiously climb. As the Stock Market ran into Election Day (and closed long before the counting began), it had hit an all-time high since the Democrats passed the bail out bill... Why? We pretty much understand that it's because the polls were narrow and tied and nobody knew what was going to happen, so people bought hoping for a McCain (Free Market Advocate) win instead of an Obama (Wealth Redistribution Advocate) win. Take a look at this 30-day look at the stock market:

Look! I'm not lying when I say Election Day was the highest since the bail out passed. There were articles plastered all over the place that insisted that the markets were falling because the House killed the bill the first time... Have you heard anything about the markets falling because they passed the second bill? Hah! Are you kidding? The mainstream media make Democrats look bad? Hah! It'll be interesting to see, in coming months, what the stock market looks like when Obama actually starts passing his redistribution bills. I mean, he hasn't even DONE any of his dumb ideas yet, but can someone explain to me how electing Lord Barry, savior of the United States, is not halting the failing economy? I thought his very presence was going to instill hope in our country and around the world? I understand the market is the definition of volatile right now and this could just be some random drop... But I predict that the market will continue to steadily fall, the Democrat-controlled Congress will pass a plethora of bills in an effort to inflate the economy and it will all go wrong and they won't have anyone to blame but themselves and their new liberal President.

Hope and change, indeed!