A meme thing involving letters

Ack! A meme! From The Leptard! Involving letters!

OK, I'm supposed to come up with ten things starting with the letter I was issued yesterday. My letter? M. [Warning: Many Wikipedia links below.]

Murphy - Both my surname and the title of Samuel Beckett's first published novel. It's also the maiden name of a certain blogger who comments here often. We aren't related. But I am a distant cousin of legendary late jazz musiciain, Bleeding Gums Murphy.

Michael - My first name, which I rarely use. Why my parents decided to give me a name they didn't like is a mystery still unsolved after many, many years. But why they gave my sister a name no one can spell or pronounce is a far more amusing mystery.

Money - Something I need more of. One day I hope to have a job that pays actual money instead of rejected whoopie-cushions and irregular balloons.

Meat - In short, meat is good to eat.

Monkey - Why not? Monkeys throw poop!

Monkees - I'm not the leat bit embarrassed to be a fan of the Monkees. Nope. I am on the other hand more than a little embarrassed to own a Culture Club album, but since it doesn't have anything to do with the letter M it won't be discussed.

Mullet - I had one back in the mid eighties. And quite recently I was almost rockin' the bald guy mullet. Thankfully there was an intervention by a licensed hair care specialist.

Macaroni - Macaroni and cheese isn't quite the Food of the Gods (that's bacon in case you're wondering), but it is quite darn close.

Mercenary - I wanted to be a mercenary when I was about twelve or thirteen. Thankfully I grew out of that nonsense. Now I want to be a porno magician.

Mongolia - Without the great nation of Mongolia this blog would probably only have a third of the traffic it's gotten. So thank you internet freakos of the world for your undying lust for Mongolian Porn. I just wish I had some to sell you; I'd be rich now.

OK, I guess that's ten things that start with the letter M. I suppose to could count the list, but that's taking the easy way out.

I think I'm supposed to give out letters to people who ask for them in the comments. I don't feel like doing that, so I'll just list some letters here: h, s, n, e, f, o, s, z, i, c, d, v, and q. Have fun.

Enough!

The goal of National Novel Writing Month was to write a 50,000 page first draft of a novel in a month and I've done it. I hit 50,007 words before noon and stopped. Enough already!

I had to pad it out to get there. Yesterday morning I was using Find and Replace in Word to get rid of contractions. That added a few hundred words, but it screwed up the syntax in some parts. I haven't edited those out yet, and probably won't any time soon because I'm sick of looking at this thing.

No idea if I'm going to do anymore work on it. I'm sure there's an actual novel hiding in this rambling mess somewhere, but I don't know if I want to bring it out. This novel wasn't what I wanted to write. I was planning on a weird, funny thing filled with strange inventions and bizarre adventures, sort of like Alfred Jarry or Stefan Themerson, but I ended up with something else entirely. Something far duller and gloomier than I wanted to write.

I'm glad it's over. Thanks to everyone for their support and abuse. Big thanks to Sherri for making me do it and big, wet sloppy smooches to Dr.'s Xolo and Sara for giving me the laptop on which I wrote most of it.

And I'll let any of my regular readers who really want to lance this festering boil of a first draft if they really want to. Just ask in the comments.

Problem solved

This is the only solution to the big city pigeon problem. [Link via my sister.]

OK, I'm going back to bed.

Speaking of crap

I have less than 10,000 words to go in my excruciatingly bad novel. I think I can get that in a week. I'm going to try and write as much of that as I can before Monday because who knows how much I'll be able to write what with my job sucking the life out of me.

And I should probably say right now that I have no intention of letting all of you read this novel. Nope. It's vomit. I'll let Sherri read it if she wants to because she let me read her novel last year. And there's one other person who demanded to read it and I'm going to let him/her read the damn thing because said person is er...persistant. And, no, it's not my sister.

Backup time!

OK, kids, it's time to back up yer blogs. I just found out Brendan's blog went and mysteriously disappeared on him and now it's some kinda spam thing. His blog is over four years old; thankfully he backed it up.

So while I ate my Thanksgiving turkey I sat in front of my computer and backed up what I hadn't backed up since September of last year. Now I have a 430-plus page Word document. And it's all crap!

Ancient blog

On this day four long, tedious years ago I started this blog. Most blogs that are actually updated on a semi-regular basis supposedly last about six months. I don't know what it means that mine has lasted eight times longer than the typical blog other than I have no life and get attached to pointless things.

At first I used to approach this blog sort of like a job; for the first year I wrote something, even if it was a single short sentence, almost every day. I think I missed maybe two or three days the first year. Things rapidly went downhill after that with various hiatuses over the years.

I've thought about stopping doing this over and over, but I still keep on doing it. I still think about quitting, but it seems like too much trouble.

So thanks to all three of my regular readers. Of all the people I know who don't suck, you don't suck the least.

D'oh!

Why didn't one of you overeducated geniuses tell me I'd misspelled the word century in the title of my previous post? Don't you people know I can't spell? Work with me, dammit!

21st century boy

I finally joined the rest of the modern world and bought myself a really cheap DVD player to hook up to my TV. My computer has a DVD drive, but watching movies on a computer screen sucks a big donkey dick. Now I can watch Frankenstein's Daughter while stretched out on the couch the way it was intended. What I need now is an endless supply of really old monster/horror movies.

Lurching

Today's writing goal didn't go as smoothly as yesterday's. It ended up taking almost two hours and was a bit excruciating, but I did get 1,970 words, which gives me a total of 3,662. So I'm on schedule at least.

I'm not writing at my main computer because this computer equals internet which equals major time suckage. So I'm not writing in my office. I have an old Dell laptop given to me by Drs. Sara and Xoloitzquintle that I've set up in my bedroom.

I cleared off all the crap piled on my desk, put the laptop on top of an old American literature textbook (hopefully some of it will soak into the harddrive by osmosis), and plugged a spare desktop keyboard in it. Works great. And I'm doing the whole thing in Notepad of all things because I don't really need anything fancy to simply type text.

And before someone implores me to be sure to back up my work, I do back it up. I'm not relying on a seven or eight year old laptop I got free from people who got it free themselves. Nope. I back it up with a USB thumbdrive and then copy it to my main system and then email it to my Yahoo account. Paranoid? Yep. Totally.