December Update

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I should be back to regular updates this week! I already missed Monday, however, so we'll see how far that goes.

Regarding NaNoWriMo - I won! Again. This was my fourth year in a row winning, and my final word-count was somewhere around 100,211. In case you're wondering, that's about 139 single-spaced pages on my word processor, which might translate to about 350-400 pages in a paperback. It's very, very rough, with copious misspellings, grammatical errors, and plot points that I only remembered to add in halfway through, and are thus out of context.

I sort of feel like this has been my hardest NaNoWriMo yet, though I'm sure I've felt that every year. Still jobless, I doubled my word goal from 50k to 100k, and managed to work away at it pretty easily for the first week or so. During the second and third weeks, I remembered that a particular video game that I had been waiting for would be coming out before the end of the month, and in order to give me some days off to play it, I averaged about a thousand words extra every day.

By November 21st, the day I finally got my game (you can read my review-of-sorts about it here), I was almost two days ahead of schedule. This was when the month started to get more difficult for me. I took those days off, writing only a few words, and had to force myself to get back to writing every day.

It's a lot like how, having not written a blog post in a long time, I have to force myself to get back to writing these. When you've been doing it for a while, it comes naturally, but after taking a break it's hard to get back into the swing of things.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over with, I should be writing online more regularly. Yes, I am still working on beating this video game, but I know most of you wont find that a very adequate excuse.

I'm kind of exciting that it's now December, the last month of the year. December is my favorite month, because it holds both my birthday and Christmas, and it's the start of the cold season in the desert. I wore a jacket to class on Tuesday for the first time since probably February. I'm a fan of the cold, if you haven't noticed, though I'm sure moving to Antarctica will still be a major shock (When I finally get there).

The McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Just a bit colder than our desert, I think.

A major goal this month is to get back to blogging regularly, a task I think will be easier if I can find my Blog Idea Book (It's probably on the floor in my room somewhere). I've got some interesting things in store for you, including more fiction reviews, embarrassing stories from my past, and a look at corrupt British politicians!

My Tumblog is now running smoothly, though it did provide a major distraction to my NaNo writing. I'm considering making a Facebook page to link with this blog, but as long as most of my readers still know me personally, that seems a bit redundant.

Looking into the next year, there are some exciting things ahead. I posted this on Tumblr already, but looking at the movies coming out in the next twelve months, I can already see eight that I'm excited for - and six of those eight happen to fall in the month of December.

First we have The Hunger Games, coming out March 23. I was a fan of the books, though apparently not as big a fan as most, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they're doing with the movie. Then on May 4th The Avengers is coming out; I may have said it before, but I'm not really that into comic book heroes. That being said, I'm super excited for The Avengers, to see how Marvel ties all their comic book hero movies together. I can't imagine it turning out bad, either, since Joss Whedon is directing and contributing to the screenplay.

December, in no particular order, sees the release of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Thrones Shadows (I keep accidentally saying that, and I hope I'm not the only one. I'm even more excited for this now that I've discovered Stephen Fry is playing the role of Mycroft, a character I admittedly didn't even know existed until just over a month ago), the movie adaptation of Life of Pi and a version of Great Gatsby starring Leonardo Dicaprio as the title character.

We'll also get to see the first half of the movie adaptation of The Hobbit, titled The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Lately Hollywood has been splitting up movies into two (a la the final Harry Potter book), and while I'm not really a fan of that, I think it makes since in The Hobbit's case. There's a lot going on in that book, and two movies is probably the only way to fit it all in comfortably.

World War Z is also coming out that month, and while I’m excited, I’m also more than a little apprehensive. This could be awesome, or it could be terrible, but it wont be like the book, because it’s practically impossible to do that (unless they tried to make it a Mockumentary). I already wrote a review on this amazing book, and no matter what they do with the movie, I'm planning on going to see it.


Also, it turns out they’re making a new Les Miserables movie, with Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean and Anne Hathaway as Fantine (no word on Cosette yet). I have only see Liam Neeson's version of Les Miserables, but it's a great story, and even though I just heard about it, it's already high on my list of must-see-2012. This one will actually be a musical, so to prepare I'm probably going to want to find an older musical version on Netflix.

All this seems like good fodder for reviews next year, and I'm excited. I have more plans for the next twelve months, but first let's get through December 2011, shall we?

And Christmas!