Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NaNo Warm-up #1: Halloween

Did you buy Machine of Death yesterday?  I did - and by the way, it reached #1 on the bestseller list!  Good job everyone!

So this is something I handwrote on Monday, October 25th as a practice session for NaNoWrimo.  I'm going to do a few of them this week, though I may not get to posting all of them until next week.  I'm TRYING not to overload anyone who follows the blog (read: the two people who actually subscribe).  In this first excersize, I was trying to determine an average word/page.

"Halloween"

What a topical way to start off my writing practice.  Halloween (or as some prefer, Hallowe'en) is coming this Sunday.  I think the optimal trick-or-treat action will start at around 7:30, though there's no reason you can't start celebrating right at midnight.  Celebrate in your dreams, if you insist on sleeping.

One of the best ways to celebrate All Hallow's Eve is to don a scary costume.  This practice of course dates back many years - a lot further than I wish to look into.  Suffice it to say, the idea of the costume has grown from simply "scary" to "creative".  Unfortuantely this is an area where I lack the necessary expertise.

I'm always terrible when it comes to brainstorming costume ideas.  Either I can't come up with an idea at all, or I lack the skills to pull off a decent version of my vision.  When I was younger - elementary school young - I had the luxury of my mother's help when it came to costumes.

During my childhood I've been the following: a ghost, a vampire (complete with glow-in-the-dark teeth and a cape that was far too long), a ghostbuster, a Crayola crayon, and a Ninja Turtle.  I think the Ninja Turtle was my mom's best work, although the felt Ghostbusters patch was pretty good.

I'm enver oen to spend a lot of money on elaborate costumes - a lot of the time, I wing it using what's available.  With Vanessa's help last year, I became a Western bad guy - completed with an older toy gun from my youth.  It turned otu fairly well, and I'm just glad nobody thought I had a real gun at the bar.

This year is slightly problematic: up until last week, we weren't planning on doing anything for halloween.  Then we were invited to a party, where dressing up would be expected.  Now, I've had flashes of trying to figure out hwo to make a Battlestar Galactica uniform (I've been watching that a lot lately), but I don't have the time.  Or the skills.

I could try to be Ron Burgundy (Anchorman), but that hinges on finding the perfect red blazer from Value Village.  And that's not happening at all.  However, I recently remembered a costume I can put together, for which I have all the materials.

Of course I can't reveal the costume now - that will have to wait until after Halloween!

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I counted 402 words, 8 paragraphs.  It was actually one and a half pages, so I made my calculations based on how much I wrote in one page.  My average words/paragraph was 50.25, and there were 5 paragraphs on the first page - which gave me an average of 251 words/page.

My daily goal is 2000 words, so that means approximately 8 pages.  I've since done another exercise (which will be posted later) that gave me similar results, so I've determined I need to write 8-10 pages depending on how big I write.

More on my exercise results later!

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