Spending too much time on forums!

I've been spending way too much time on forums lately (specifically, the forums for NaNoWriMo and TVTropes). While fun and enlightening, it's now reached the point where I need to do actual work, so Something's Gotta Give.

For those of you who don't know, TVTropes is a wiki for obvious cliches in any type of media, though they specialize, strangely, in anime/manga examples for their tropes. It makes for an entertaining read, and also a culture immersion for someone like me who actually has to learn how to avoid or adapt these cliches for their own work.

And for anyone who doesn't know what NaNoWriMo is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November. A good explanation of what I'll be doing is here, but instead of the basic requirement, I believe that the novel I'm plotting will require 100,000 (that's one hundred thousand, folks) words at least. My novel synopsis and author info can be found here, if you'd like to read it.

And before anyone says "OH THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE," I would like you to revisit my author profile and note that I have winning stamps from the last two years, and to view my signature on forum posts which states that 2007's novel was 61k words and that last year's novel was 88k words. The last two winning years have been won while I was a) in college (with sometimes ridiculous amounts of coursework), b) preparing to go abroad (which required additional writing samples, applications, and interviews), and c) never lowering my academic expectations for myself (ie. I still earned top marks while completing this side project).

So far this academic year, I've seen myself have much more free time than I normally do, though this may be a side effect of They Are Just Freshers (can you tell I've been on TVTropes much too much?). In the past, I've often found that squeezing this one extra thing into my schedule has made a positive difference in the way that I schedule my life, in that I think more creatively when I am not actually writing creatively (which helps when writing papers), I schedule my time more effectively, and I just generally am a happier person when I have more things to do than less.

I am still working on regular coursework (in fact, I have my first lecture and my first tutorial both tomorrow, so we'll see what happens). I've just made word requirement on both of my page-long essays for this week, one of which is due tomorrow at noon, so the rest of the night will probably be spent... on the Internet, as per usual, while patching up the rest. I'm also working on plotting my novel and adding characters (which is necessary; I have a terrible habit of working with a character base of about 4 people during NaNo, which needs to stop).

So, wish me luck tomorrow and I think I can handle the rest. Good luck to all of my friends back home who are dealing with midterms week.

- Jen -