Personal accomplishments.

Yesterday I wrote the most I have ever written in one 24-hour period. I wrote 12,378 words that took probably 5 hours to write, not counting times that I went to dinner and took breaks to stretch my hands. And I don't think that means a lot to anyone, but think of this: It was six chapters. Six chapters! Six really fun chapters, where things actually began happening. And I passed 4 days' worth of my daily goal this year in one day. Not even one day, because I didn't devote my whole day to it, just from 4 PM-11PM. Disregarding the hour I spent at dinner, five out of those six hours were spent frantically typing.

My hands are sore, and my head hurt so badly that I slept two extra hours today, but it was so, so worth it. The sad part is, to me, that no one will really understand how much of an accomplishment it really is. This isn't quite the longest work of fiction I've ever written (last year's novel at 88.5k takes the prize for now), but it will be by the time I'm done; rough estimates at this point put it at 110k at least. And with the pace I'm moving at, I will probably finish sometime during the early 20s, so maybe in as early as ten days. After the novel is done, I have another novel without an outline and I really want to see what I can do with it - usually, no plotting means that I get completely lost, but this idea might hold up on its own. I'd like to squeeze another 50k out of it just so I can say that I wrote two novels in a month, but then again, there's a delicious Firefly fanfic that I want to write by the end of the month. Probably won't clock in at more than 7k, but still, that would take most of a day to do.

Long story short, I've pretty much amended my goal for this month from 100k to... let's say, 115k for the first novel, 50k for the second, 7k for the Firefly fanfic... yeah. Somewhere around 175k. I want to point out at this point that my entire goal for last year's NaNo was 75k. Then again, I drastically overshoot everything I do by a large margin, so this doesn't exactly surprise me.

I'm excited because the Failed Novelists (the writing club I've started attending here) are having a NaNo write-in tonight at an abandoned church. Hopefully my laptop can stand up to not being plugged in, because I'd like to write on it for at least a few hours. I type so much faster than I handwrite, and it's so helpful with fiction because I see what I'm writing like a movie (when I do point of view, I think of it as cameras behind that character's head, if that gives you any indication). When things are going so fast visually, my hands need to be able to keep up. Thus why they hurt so badly today - I think I was going so fast yesterday that I set my fingers on fire!

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I'm kind of offended right now because one of my friends decided to call me 'unwilling to go for glory' in his blag. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but as you see by the above, it's totally not true. I don't know of anyone else here who is trying to write so much in so little time with so much else on her plate. To write that I'm not gutsy and won't go for anything is just libel, and I won't stand for it.

The comment was given in the context of not being in the 'backroom,' being the grunt or mook who just sits there and gets all the work done without getting any of the praise. My friend has decided (and good for him, if he can live with the implications) that he will be the one to lead such grunts and take the 'glory' for their accomplishments. Now, it's true that people who go into 'grunt' fields or do 'grunt' work usually don't get any acknowledgement, but they're usually content with that or they wouldn't have chosen that job in the first place.

What the argument assumes is that there are leader jobs and there are follower jobs. Perhaps this works in a large corporate environment, where there is a definitive tier structure. However, it disregards the fact that there are opportunities to move upwards, and my friend's argument assumes that there is not. For example, one of the fields I researched going into while I was a freshman was the field of book publishing. It's a rather thankless job for the first five to ten years that someone enters the field. It starts out with a series of coffee internships (you know, the internships that don't really mean anything, but have you job shadowing while you make the coffee for your boss) in, preferably, the summer after your sophomore year, then another internship summer after your junior year. By the time you graduate, you've accumulated enough respect at your internship company that they hire you... as the lowest-level grunt. There's really no opportunity to move upward until you put in your time, and meanwhile, the books you're publishing become more famous for their authors. But when you get to the top, you suddenly find yourself in a leadership position. It may take years and years of unacknowledged hard work, but suddenly you're top dog taking credit for what everyone else is doing.

So, not even all tier companies work the way my friend suggests in his argument. In fact, I think it's plausible to argue that most companies intend for younger employees to 'pay their dues' before they have the opportunity to go into leadership; personally, I think it's the best way for companies to divine who really belongs where. But let's introduce a new element: freelancers. I'm talking about people in the field I want to go into at this point, property law and corporate law. These people are usually consultants, on the periphery of any type of tier structure. They interact with the top dogs but do all of their own work. Instead of a tier, they're more self-sufficient, not only doing the work that deserves the praise but getting acknowledged for it.

So, to say that I'm unwilling to 'go for glory,' instead preferring to work in the 'backroom,' is a completely faulty assumption and I won't stand for such slander against my personal character. In corporate law, there is no backroom, and there is no public recognition of one's work (unless you're the representative of some hugely famous name... I remember reading an article in the WSJ at one point about the lawyers of Mac and Windows trying to reach settlements, and their names were mentioned in the article proper). There's just work. A lot of post-graduate education, then a lot of work.

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Also, at this point I feel like I need to go into a defense of why it's not necessarily such a bad thing to be an introvert after all.

I think being an introvert might be necessary to being a writer. With only the plots and characters from my own head, I'm able to create fantasy worlds that I can dwell in for hours. Now tell me that doesn't sound like the stereotypical qualities of an antisocial young child. I'm self-satisfied by my work; I don't need anyone's approval for it to please me. It's nice when people do read it, but that's not necessary for the creative process.

I'm just fine being an introvert. I can deal with having relatively few people in my life that I know very well, I can deal with not being as social as other extroverts might want me to be. I've just never been the type of person to want superficial friendships or to attempt to be friendly with someone I genuinely can't stand or don't want to be closer to. It's just a difference in perspective, really, and I'm slightly tired of being perceived as being a bad person when my priorities are just different. I enjoy keeping my sense of shame, thank you very much, and I don't think anything's likely to change my mind any time soon.

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As some final and mostly unrelated notes, toasters and I really don't get along - I burnt my lunch bagel for the second time today. Kind of depressing, because they were delicious :(

There are so many things here that British people take for granted. One of them is really low tuition fees. I got to watch the shock on my tutorial partner's face when I explained to him that I pay $65,000 a year to go to a university that is only barely in the top 25 in the country. Apparently, when he studied in Germany, he paid a 300-euro fee per term and that was it. People here are lobbying for change when they have to pay more than 7000 pounds a year for university. When I told him that I pay about $300 every semester just for books, I swore his jaw dropped off. Being here really puts some things into perspective... like how awesome libraries are, and how much I'm really overpaying to be here for just a year. Because on top of normal ND tuition, I now have to pay airfare to and from, I had to buy several things to make my life easier over here (like luggage and voltage converters), and I only get one meal a day.

Also, British people take good weather for granted. While I've been here, it's been nice enough that I can usually get away with wearing just two layers outside when it's sunny. When it's rainy, I just pull on my trenchcoat. People were complaining yesterday about rain, and I just wanted to laugh. Rain? Sheesh, you should see three feet of snow. Apparently, when there's so much as a half-inch here, people just don't know what to do. I'd hate to see it if they had an ice storm here; everyone would probably lose their heads. And explaining to them that we once had a day so cold on campus that it was down to -40 degrees (convergence in both Celsius and Fahrenheit!) was loads of fun too.

Also also, British girls my age don't seem to believe in pants. They quite often wear tunics and leggings (or just tunics and tights!) outside. No pants. I feel so American walking around in my trousers sometimes. It doesn't help that I'm definitely not of the build to pull off any of those fashions, so it just makes me feel kind of ridiculous when I walk down the street here.

I'm going to stop here, but I just want to point out that this blog entry is about 1850 words long (so says Microsoft Word), if that gives you any indication of how much I've been writing this month. So, cheers, everyone.

- Jen -